Studio Series #64 Cliffjumper

When this figure was first revealed, I was quite keen to pick him up, despite his tragically brief role in the Bumblebee movie (something of a running theme for the character in recent years), because Cliffjumper was the first TransFormers toy I ever bought, and I still have fond memories of him. I liked (what little we saw of) the design from the movie, particularly the Bayformer-yet-G1 head, and the toy seemed to have a nice, sleek vehicle mode, somewhat reminiscent of Jazz/Sideswipe from the War for Cybertron/Fall of Cybertron videogames.

 

Once I watched some video reviews and saw the figure in a bit more detail, I was put off - transformation was a clumsy adaptation of Offroad Bumblebee, leaving him with a massive backpack... However, finding a small leftover in my Amazon Gift Card balance from Christmas, and a single Cliffjumper toy remaining in their stock, I decided to order...  

 

Vehicle Mode:

As mentioned, this reminds me a lot of the sleek, ground-based Autobots from the videogames released about ten years ago. When I first saw it, I actually thought it was a direct rip-off, but there are substantial differences. Broadly speaking, it's closest to Jazz, but curvier at the front and more covered-over at the back, with the defined spoiler replaced by a curved, forked 'wing' section, below which are exposed barrel-like details similar to those on Jazz's back, but unpainted.

 

I have to say, I really like the design... Perhaps a little less knowing that Cliffjumper was essentially just a 'pre-paint' for the inevitable Cybertronian Bumblebee (SS #70), and that whole thing of Cliffjumper being a repaint of Bumblebee is a tired, overused and extremely lazy cost-cutting measure which Hasbro have been employing since the Classics line, fifteen years ago. But, still, while the vehicle mode was only used for Bumblebee in the brief Cybertron sequence at the start of the movie, it's reasonable to assume that Cliffjumper, sharing a similar robot body type, would transform into a similar alien vehicle.

 

What I'm not so keen on is the extensive use of transparent plastic - known to be fragile, particularly when used in combination with metal pins. It's not even necessary, given that Bumblebee's 'window' - if that's even what it is - appears to be basically opaque in the few seconds of screen time it got. Cybertronian vehicle modes hardly need windows because they're unlikely to ever have passengers. The use of more opaque red plastic here would have been vastly more sensible, allowing the portion of the budget that went into painting over all the clear plastic to be used instead for detail work, including either black or dark blue for the 'window'. Just to emphasise what a foolish choice this was, the front fenders/bumper, 'bonnet', 'roof' and the transformation hinge toward the back of the roof are all transparent plastic, painted red. The paint may well be a good enough match the plastic (albeit lacking the subtle pearlescent component which is, in itself, a bit of a waste because it's barely discernible), but it's entirely unnecessary. Worse still, the front wheel mountings and the hinged arms for transforming the wing panels are also transparent plastic, and these - being pinned - are likely to be particularly fragile.

And as a result of all this transparent plastic, Cliffjumper's paint job feels very sparse. The red paint on the 'bonnet' doesn't extend round onto the tiny triangle of front fender on each side, between the bumper and the wheel arch sections, and, on mine, there's a slight overspray on the headlights, making them even less effective than they already were due to their small size and the matte finish of the transparent plastic. Aside from all the red paint required on the car shell, he has small applications of red paint on his wheels and dark gunmetal paint on what appears to be exposed engine parts (illuminated in the movie) visible at the front of the vehicle. Everything else is bare flat red, with only the wheels and the few exposed internal parts molded in black. On the upside, at least it's not Hasbro's usual, anaemic red... It's not the vibrant G1 red either, but its a few steps closer.

Except that's not quite true... Because, maddeningly, some bright spark decided it was worth painting the underside of the rearmost 'wing' section of roof black, even though it's basically invisible unless viewing the vehicle from below. This might almost make sense if it was visible in robot mode, but it's part of the backpack and facing into the body. There's sculpted detail in here, too, all of which is only visible during transformation. The waste of effort and paint budget is frustrating.

 

Cliffjumper's weapon is basically the same as the one packaged with Offroad Bumblebee, but cast in black plastic and actually painted. Sadly, just like Offroad Bumblebee, Cliffjumper is not equipped to mount his weapon in vehicle mode and, instead, it simply pegs in - loosely - to the underside of the vehicle shell... though good luck getting it to stay there if you attach it before closing the shell into vehicle mode. Pegging it in once the vehicle is transformed is fairly fiddly, since the robot's legs are in the way and it doesn't go in square to its slots, it attaches at a weird angle due to the presence of a transformation hinge right in front of the ports. Once it's in, it's pretty secure... though it will fall out during transformation back to robot mode and it's certainly disappointing that it can't be deployed in this mode. Then again, Bumblebee's vehicle mode guns deployed from the trapezoid panels sculpted onto the 'bonnet', so perhaps it would have been nice to have unique weapons to peg in here - or just re-uses of the weapons packaged with either Siege or Earthrise Prowl/Bluestreak/Smokescreen/Barricade - via appropriate slots in the frontmost section of 'bonnet'.

Robot Mode:

The fact that Cliffjumper's robot mode is derived from a well-designed original toy certainly works in his favour, though the issues of plastic quality are, sadly, still very much in evidence. Quite apart from the overly extensive use of transparent plastic, the weirdly bendy plastic used for the structural parts within the torso and some remarkably poor connections mean his robot mode doesn't hold together nearly as well as Offroad Bumblebee, who wasn't great on that score to begin with. 

 

The main problem is with his lower legs. Since they have much the same structure as Offroad Bumblebee, but back-to-front, the inner face of each leg is made of one of the car's front fenders, with the wheel folded into the calf, and then the side panels swing down to form the outer face... but the arm that attaches each panel to the leg clashes with the shin, while the panel itself clashes with the lower headlight section which sticks up out of the heel. Making matters worse, neither of these panels making up the sides of the lower leg actually peg in properly. There is a peg and socket for the outer panel, but the peg is small and rectangular, while the socket is larger and circular - a literal case of Hasbro trying to force a square peg into a round hole - so both panels end up rattling around and coming loose whenever the figure is handled. Even this wouldn't be so bad if his legs looked resonably coherent but, while the inner part looks OK apart from the footplate sticking out behind the knee joint, the outer face is entirely the wrong shape, and never really looks like part of the leg.

Still, from the knees up, and from the front at least, he looks pretty good, albeit just as lacking in paintwork as in vehicle mode. The chest works exactly the same way as on Offroad Bumblebee, being made up of two hinged panels that stow behind and switch places with the vehicle's rear plate. His entire arms, groin and the outer parts of his thighs are common to Offroad Bumblebee, and the only obvious paintwork is the red paint on the armour panels of his forearms... which isn't even screen accurate. In the film, his arms were largely black or gunmetal/grey, to mimic his appearance in the G1 cartoon, with just a bit of red trim. Plus, while the common upper arm parts work well enough, the forearms of his (and Bumblebee's) Cybertronian form were closer to the curvier design of Bumblebee's Beetle form than the squared-off Jeep version parts.

 

Similarly, the armour wrapped around his hips exhibits physical characteristics of Beetle Bumblebee (not least the indicator lights on the tops) and were supposed to be gunmetal/grey rather than black... but that's not the strangest part. For some reason, the unique inner thigh parts were molded in red plastic and painted black - the paint is feathered at the knee joint and missing on the inside, so bare red plastic is visible where the sculpt of the inner thigh doesn't line up with that of the outer thigh on the backs of the legs. There's also black paint on the shins and the bridges of the feet, and a dash of black on the bottom section of the chest panels, but all of this should probably have been gunmetal. Additionally, since the feet are molded in transparent plastic, all the red on the upper surface is painted, while the hollow soles of his feet are bare. What's missing is the silver/gunmetal trim around his 'toe' area and, ideally, some of the nicely-sculpted tech detailing inside his torso, on his groin, and on his inner thighs should have been picked out with a bit of paint.

 

The big problem with Cliffjumper is that ugly great backpack - all the more disappointing considering how clean Offroad Bumblebee was. Given how long the TransFormers franchise has been going, one would hope that better ways would have been found to make use of vehicle mode mass within robot mode... and yet we still see these massive backpacks quite regularly, and all the more egregious in the Studio Series line. While the faux chest works reasonably well, it made more sense on the original mold, where two versions of the vehicle's front grille simply switched places between modes. Here, the faux front fenders are concealed at the back of the vehicle, and the actual parts - segments of headlights included - end up split between the backpack and Cliffjumper's heels. Another concern is the sheer number of parts he has in common with Offroad Bumblebee. Sure, it makes sense from a manufacturing standpoint, but the arms and legs just don't match the CGI, and the use of the same pelvis section leaves him with the redundant hinge of an absent joint hanging off his hollow backside.

As mentioned above, Cliffjumper comes with exactly the same weapon as Offroad Bumblebee and, while its storage on that figure - clipped over the edge of the vehicle's bonnet on the robot's back - might seem a little perfunctory, it's infinitely more considered and secure than the option chosen for this figure. Behind Cliffjumper's head, between his shoulder blades and the folded up vehicle shell backpack, is what could be generously described as a 'slot'... and the gun simply drops into that. Sure, it's marginally more 'concealed' than Bumblebee's weapon storage, but it's also just sitting there, rattling around loosely within a coincidental hole between vehicle mode parts. Just as well that the gun looks vastly better in/on his hand than it did on Bumblebee thanks to the coating of silver paint over the main, multi-barrel section. Being the same mold, it still only fits on his right arm, but the way it attaches does a reasonable job of making it seem part of the robot rather than a plug-in accessory... Although I seem to recall Cliffjumper was (briefly) shown in the movie actually holding a pistol in his hand, and Bumblebee was the only Autobot shown to have an integrated weapon... Make of that what you will.

Of course, the most important thing on a Cliffjumper toy is a unique head sculpt and, for the most part, this Studio Series figure does not disappoint. The basic shape is close enough (though the sides of his helmet end a little higher than I'd have preferred, and it then tapers inward toward his chin), the horns are present and, like Offroad Bumblebee, there's a raised block on his central crest where his Autobot insignia was on the CGI model. The silver trim around his horns and crest are absent - no surprise - but the face is completely covered with silver and his eyes are picked out with a cyan paint slightly darker than the usual 'AllSpark Blue'. There's subtle fluting to the panels on either side of the face, and the sculpt of the face is fairly well detailed, but I don't feel it's entirely accurate... My main complaints are that the 'cheekbones' (for want of a better description) are too slim, giving him a sunken-cheeked look, and the area of the mouth features some vertical grooves that, under a layer of silver paint, are more prominent than the horizontal grooves indicating his mouth, so he ends up looking as if he has a weird mask over the bottom half of his face. Still, at least it's unique... It's also nice to see that, just like Offroad Bumblebee, he has a separate neck piece... though it looks a little too long and, on mine at least, Cliffjumper's head wasn't able to tilt down far enough to look straight till I cut away some of the black plastic on the front of the neck.

Given that Offroad Bumblebee's transformation was both fun and efficient within the bounds of the rubbish, flexible plastic used, it's disappointing to see that all the changes made for Cliffjumper are very much for the worse. The most obvious issue is that backpack. Bumblebee's was negligible, this thing is about a third of the outer surface of the car folded up, and it sticks out quite a way behind him. In robot mode, one section of the backpack is responsible for the stability of his shoulders, while another part fixes together the front end in vehicle mode. During transformation, it's difficult to get these three panels far enough out of the way of the shoulders and legs to deal with their transformation smoothly. Meanwhile, the legs are an absolute shambles. With the original version of the mold, the wheels tucked neatly into the calves while the wheel arches flipped from one side of the leg to the other - pegging in well enough, albeit not perfectly - and the vehicle's 'door' sections simply flipped back into the space formerly occupied by the wheels to form the outer face of his lower leg, revealing new internal tech detailing... Here, the wheels don't fold in as neatly, the wheel arches don't peg in at all and the 'door' sections swing down from the knee on a transparent plastic arm, but barely peg in and leave a huge gap through which their transformation arm remains visible. Vehicle mode may be nice and tidy, but robot mode is a mess.

On the upside, aside from the likelihood that the lower legs will come apart at the slightest touch, it's every bit as poseable as Offroad Bumblebee. With the same arrangement of a hinge and a ball joint at the ankle, the feet have more range of forward-backward movement, while losing some of their sideways tilt due to the vehicle parts on the backs of the feet clashing with the lower parts of the leg. The knees have a similar range of bend, despite the hinge being on the knee rather than behind it, while the hips are the same combination of ball joint right above an upper thigh rotation joint. The waist still rotates nicely - a little tighter than on Bumblebee - the arms are still only hindered by the wheels sticking out behind them, and the neck is the same arrangement of a ball joint at the base - offering full 360° rotation and a little bit of wiggle - along with a hinge at the back of the head which allows him to look straight up, due to the way the head flips back for transformation. I think the backpack - and the design of his feet - makes him marginally more inclined toward falling over backwards, but it's easy enough to adjust the legs to compensate.

I was keen to acquire Cliffjumper when he was first announced, but soon started to think that I wasn't going to bother with this iteration after all due to the lazy transformation. He went out of stock at Smyths while I was procrastinating, and his price on Amazon had started edging upwards. As I said at the start, pretty much the only thing that swayed me to buy him was finding that little bit of leftover balance on my Amazon gift cards from Christmas, and that was largely because I had cancelled my preorder of Kingdom Blackarachnia, having found her in stock elsewhere. Due to my nostalgic connection to Cliffjumper, I know that I am inclined to be more forgiving of new Cliffjumper toys, particularly if the base mold is decent, and I'm genuinely impressed that Hasbro bothered to make a Studio Series toy out of a character with little more than a minute's screen time in the Bumblebee movie, at the end of which he'd been bisected after having one arm removed. Of course, in retrospect, it's a Shadow Raider-level cash-grab, because they later released a Cybertronian Bumblebee/B-127 toy using the same mold, with a slightly more comprehensive paint job and a unique, battlemasked Bumblebee head.

I have been thinking for a while, though, that I'd like to break out my paintbrushes and start customising some of these hopelessly underpainted Studio Series toys, and Cliffjumper is certainly crying out for sprucing-up with some paint applications to his sculpted details.