Cybertron Crumplezone

Much like Ransack/Gasket, Crumplezone/Landbullet was a toy I decided I didn't want or need - on import, at least - until I experienced the figure as pre-Beast Wars Optimus Primal in the Dawn of Future's Past boxed set from BotCon 2006. As its own figure, This toy looked ugly and poorly-proportioned, with a hideous pairing of muted, military green and eye-searingly bright acidic green, and the vehicle mode wasn't particularly exciting.

However, DoFP Optimus Primal worked really well, and showed me what a fun toy he was, so I ended up buying the Hasbro version on the cheap. Being one of the larger Cybertron/Galaxy Force figures, he features some electronics, but is that enough to redeem such a terrible colourscheme on so ugly a toy?

Vehicle Mode:
...So he's a sort of super-powered tricycle-bordering-on-aircraft? Something like a dragster crossed with a tank - designed to drive straight at a target, with its single front wheel flanked by a pair of blades mounted just above ground level, all propelled by humungously powerful turbine engines. This is one of those completely over-the-top vehicle modes that I just didn't appreciate at the time, given the more grounded approach to much of the rest of the line. Even compared to a futuristic concept/Batmobile-style vehicle like Nitro Convoy/Override, this vehicle seems more alien and overpowered, a much better fit for a planet dedicated to speed and racing, but with a 'rules be damned' attitude to its design and construction. I think the Japanese name, 'Landbullet', suits the mold far better than Crumplezone, because it looks like a fast and heavy attack vehicle. To make this vehicle mode work for me, it needed to be coupled with the right character and the right colourscheme, and BotCon's Optimus Primal was it. With a wholly new character, created for the final chapter of the Unicron Trilogy, it was an awkward-looking and quite forgettable toy, much like his diminutive partner Gasket/Ransack... But it's certainly not without character.

The central fuselage features the intricately sculpted detail of his raised key slot at the rear, flanked by sets of three raised, circular details on either side of its base. These details are then echoed by the larger set of very similar details on either side of the cockpit, though the gold paint applied to this second set highlights them better. Just behind the cockpit, and in front of the slots cut in the plastic for the toy's speaker, is a set of five circular vent-like details, recessed in a curved, hexagonal panel on the roof of the vehicle. The nose of the vehicle is cut short in a sort of duck-bill shape, to accommodate the front wheel, and the surrounding parts - quite obviously the robot's legs and feet - aren't really sculpted to resemble anything particularly vehicular... They're actually surprisingly and incongruously plain and boxy. The turbine engines each feature a pair of sculpted exhaust pipe details, picked out with a brassy paint, as well as vent-like details in a raised trapezoid frame on the fronts, but are otherwise quite featureless till deployed in their alternate, key-activated configuration. The rear end of the vehicle is a bit of a disaster, since it shows off the robot's hands quite obviously and features a vast open space in the middle due to transformation.

His colourscheme - mostly a mixture of dark olive and two lighter, almost fluorescent greens, one plastic, the other painted - really doesn't do it justice, particularly when coupled with pale grey and translucent blue plastics, and the brass and gold paint applications. I think something like this needed to be either all light or all dark, or at least to be something other than predominantly green. It's almost a shame, as the dark green plastic has that metallic flake component that never seems to be used anymore and, in and of itself, it looks great. Overall, though, the colourscheme is not punchy enough because it only has any real punch in certain places. There's almost too much contrast because of the use of lighter, brighter greens and super-pale grey against the darker, subtly sparkling green. Weirdly, the remold of this character, imaginatively named 'Dark Crumplezone', was just this - predominantly a dark, desaturated blue, with burgundy, gold and translucent orange played against it. If it weren't such an ugly job of remolding - looking as much like a space fighter as a land-based vehicle - I might have bought that one instead.

As with the majority of the Galaxy Force/Cybertron line, Crumplezone's weapons - such as they are - are integrated into his vehicle mode. They present something of a callback to the Armada Seekers, too, in that plugging in Crumplezone's key causes his enormous turbine engines to flip over and become missile launchers. The two mini-spoilers also flip out to become dinky, upturned wings, and the end result is very much like something out of a videogame: a dragster with what now appear to be jet engine intakes, but which also acts as weapons for shooting his opponents out of the way. Given this toy is now sixteen years old, one tends to expect the springs to have weakened, but the gimmick works pretty well. Where it falls down is that, when folded back, the engines/launchers don't sit down flush with the back of the vehicle - they spring back up by most of a centimetre, meaning the spoilers are similarly lifted. Annoyingly, the catches are internal, so I'd have to open the figure up completely to figure out if it's possible to fix or improve their 'resting' position. The spoilers only softly clip into place thanks to thin plastic tabs pushing up against a squared-off section within the hinge and, while a firmer clip might actually hold the engines down, it might also prevent their deploying when the key gimmick is activated.

Way back in 2005, electronics were pretty much a staple in Voyager class toys, let alone anything larger. I believe the only real exception to this was Galaxy Force Starscream, whose molds included an obvious battery compartment, though the electronic features only appeared in the colossal Cybertron version of the toy. Where most of the other Voyagers had both lights and sounds, Crumplezone has to make do with just a single sound, activated via the key gimmick. When the enormous rear-facing turbines flip forward, this movement is accompanied by a somewhat scratchy 'power-up' sound effect. Given that the turbines themselves are molded in translucent plastic, it's a little disappointing that they're not also lit, but there may be practical reason for that, involving the built-in spring-loaded missile gimmick. On that subject, the missiles cannot be fired in Crumplezone's vehicle mode as the triggers are on the undersides and completely enclosed within the bulky rear end of the vehicle. Once the key gimmick is triggered, however, the launchers are free to fire. Disappointingly, as well as the launchers lacking any light-up features, there are no additional sound effects triggered by launching the missiles. On the upside, having the launchers deployed reveals all their additional paintwork - a dark, desaturated green closely matching the plastic colour, and some spots of gold on the raised vent-like details, all of which really helps these otherwise incongruously large chunks of pale grey plastic to blend in with the rest of the vehicle in what should be a ridiculous configuration.

Robot Mode:
There's no getting around that Crumplezone makes for a really ugly, brutish robot... That said, there are similarities to characters like Bulkhead from TF Animated and TF Prime, not least in the basic build, colourscheme and, rather more specifically, the head sculpt... But more on that later.

Something about the design of this figure puts me in mind of a mismatched Energon Autobot gestalt - a Deluxe class robot turned into the legs, plugged into a Voyager (or possibly Leader) in its upper body configuration. The arms reach down to his kneecaps, but they're about 75% forearm, and the upper arm basically combines the bicep and elbow into about 2cm of plastic. The proportions are absolutely bonkers, not to say downright ugly... and, much as I appreciated that for its use as a pre-Beast Wars Optimus Primal for the 2006 BotCon set, Dawn of Futures Past, on a wholly new character created for the Cybertron/Galaxy Force portion of the Unicron Trilogy... it just doesn't seem to work as well. He look more clumsy and awkward than powerful.

Due to a simplistic transformation, not only is there virtually no new detail revealed in his robot mode, and a good portion of the more elaborate details of vehicle mode end up on his back. Most if his chest is taken up with the relatively smooth nose of the vehicle, with a few pipe-like details where the sides of his torso taper inward to his waist. Similarly, there's precious little unique paintwork revealed in this mode - just a couple of touches of the brighter green on his shoulders.

Crumplezone comes with no weapons other than the integrated spring-loaded launchers. As is to be expected, the key-activated gimmick functions exactly the same way in robot mode as it does in vehicle mode, except that the range of motion is increased by about 90°, such that the turbine launchers end up swinging over his shoulders (likely being a big part of the reason this mold was chosen to represent Optimus Primal). Exactly the same sound effect is used which, coupled with the absence of any lighting effects on this figure, ends up being rather disappointing.

There's a strange sense of familiarity to Crumplezone's head sculpt on two fronts. One the one hand, the colourscheme and approximate shape tend toward the Autobot Bulkhead from both TF Animated and TF Prime. All the main characteristics are there, particularly in terms of colour, but everything is a bit more harsh and angular. In particular, the enormous protruding lower jaw, common to both Bulkheads, but here serrated, quite like Trap Jaw from Masters of the Universe. The shape of the head is more elaborate than a typical Bulkhead, however, which is where the other familiar aspect comes in: the upper part of the head resembles the top of the Decepticon insignia, even down to the sculpted panel lines on each side. Its central crest is painted the lighter green on the front, and the 'wing'-like details on the brow sweep up into 'horns' on either side of the head. The gold-painted face - what little of it can be seen behind that massive jaw, at any rate - looks almost movie-style in its detailing, but perhaps the biggest incongruity here is that Crumplezone's light-piped eyes are blue due to the choice of colour for his wheels and cockpit canopy. I don't dislike this head, but the fact that it' so small, sits so low between his shoulders, and the jaw only really moves up (covering the face) rather than down (which, admittedly, wouldn't reveal much inside his 'mouth') due to the way the head is mounted on a hinged plate, really doesn't help the look of this figure.


Transformation is pretty easy - something similar could easily be done on a smaller figure - but it's economical rather than simplistic, and so quite satisfying in ways that a lot of newer figures are not. It's fairly obvious in vehicle mode that the front of the vehicle becomes the robot's legs and the back end of the vehicle splits into his arms and upper body, but what's not immediately obvious is that the legs flip from the front of the vehicle to the back, allowing the nose to fold down afterward to complete the chest. This aspect is quite impressive, because the robot's head is concealed within the back of the nose section, and the vehicle's front wheel gets folded in behind the cockpit canopy, then sits in the central void through which the legs are swung. My only complaints about the transformation are that the plate that the head is mounted on just has to rest on top of the concealed front wheel, leading to it looking rather sunken, and that the spoilers are left just flapping around on the robot's giant forearms, clashing with his legs and backpack.

Something that impressed me, almost consistently across all the size classes, in Cybertron/Galaxy Force was the level of articulation in the figures. It was substantially improved over both Armada and Energon, and the majority of figures had a similar range of joints to the Classics figures that emerged shortly after. What's most surprising, retrospectively, is how many of the joints are ratcheted. The ankles (forward/backward tilt only), knees and hips all feature ratchet joints, though the latter only for forward/backward swing - while the hip joints themselves have teeth, indicating the intention for ratcheted outward movement, their outward movement and the knee-level rotation joints are friction only. The shoulders are ratcheted for both rotation (full 360°, backpack allowing) and outward swing via the transformation joint, while the supplementary shoulder joint (within the shoulder bulk) offers a few extra degrees via a friction joint, so the arm in total can raise to near enough 90° out to the sides. The elbow joints and rotation joints at the top of the bicep and just below the elbow are friction only, with the first offering a hair under 90° bend due to the sheer bulk of the bicep, while the latter two offer free 360° rotation. The wrists bend inward for transformation, while the head is pinned for rotation and offers a small range of motion for his jaw. One surprise here is that, while it's not needed for transformation, Crumplezone does feature a full 360° waist rotation.

While the majority of the figures in my collection are from Takara's Galaxy Force line, I didn't bother importing Landbullet because I didn't like the look of the mold, and it really was my experience of BotCon 2006's Optimus Primal that led me to seek this out retrospectively. Thankfully, back then, toys from previous lines tended to be cheaper than the current stock, rather than vastly more expensive, so it was reasonably easy and economical to buy the Cybertron version. That option was agreeable to me because I still wasn't so invested in the mold that I wanted to ensure I owned Takara's version with its enhanced paint job. In retrospect, I feel like perhaps I should have gone for that after all. While there's only a relatively small difference in the paint job, it does look more 'finished' compared to this Hasbro version. On the other hand, while this mold was great as BotCon Optimus Primal, as its own figure, and an original character from the final part of the Unicron Trilogy... I'm still not convinced.