Real Gear Robots Booster X10

If you think about it, the concept of Real Gear Robots is as much a homage to those G1 toys taken from Takara's Micro Change line as it was a logical extension of the 2007 movie line, inspired by the transforming robots created by blasts of energy from the AllSpark cube. What better way to honour the very beginnings of the TransFormers line than to revisit the concept of robots in disguise as life-size items of consumer electronics? In a way, isn't it more strange that Hasbro had avoided that segment of the original toyline for so long?

 

However, the connection to the movies was, by all accounts, sheer good fortune, because the toys had apparently been in development alongside the Cybertron/Galaxy Force toyline. Long overdue though this reboot was, I think Hasbro were right to hold off on it, since it has no tangible connection to that line, and probably would not have garnered the same attention as a standalone line at the time, as it later achieved as an offshoot of the first movie toyline.

But let's take a look at one of my first purchases of the line and see how it compares to its distant ancestors.

Device Mode:

Booster X10 is a bit of an oddity, in that the main part of the toy is designed to look like an early iPod era portable media player. Both the Decepticon insignia and the 'BOOSTER X10' label have been applied only to the accompanying accessory - a combination earpiece and microphone, the likes of which became popular when Bluetooth started removing the necessity for trailing wires between headphones and their audio source. Considering its function, the name is far more fitting to the earpiece than the media player and, given that Music Label had given us transforming headphones the same year, I have to admit that I'm a little puzzled as to why the earpiece is a rigid unit bar the rubbery hook, when it could easily have been a smaller TransFormer in its own right rather than so basic an accessory for the robot formed by the media player.

The player itself is very plain and bare-bones, with the mixture of red, black and translucent orange plastic with silver paint making it look a bit like a bargain bin knockoff of the earliest, button-operated iPods. The buttons themselves are not labelled in any way, but the thumb-pad arrangement, with a square button in the middle, clearly defines them as directional controls for navigating menus which would be displayed on the 'screen' just above. Unfortunately, the choice to mold this in translucent orange plastic (where grey would have been more logical for the sort of LCD-style screen common to these early media players) means that robot parts are clearly visible, not least both the head and neck.

While the trend toward increasingly featureless design is seen as a virtue by Apple's most rabid proponents, it does make for exceedinly dull toys with very little play value. Unlike most of the other Real Gear Robots, the buttons on the media player have no 'travel', there are no controls even sculpted onto the earpiece and, honestly, what I believe is intended to be a microphone looks far more like a miniature cannon... which it is, of course, but only for the figure's robot mode. I'm also rather disappointed by the ear-hook, since it's designed for use on the right ear only, and is basically semicircular, so the fit it offers is neither particularly comfortable nor secure. Certainly, on an adult, it sits far too high on the ear, and the 'foam' padding on the underside is sculpted plastic detail rather than actual foam.

On the upside, the earpiece gets the lions share of the more apparent paintwork, with the 'mic' extending from the speaker part on and arm painted both black and silver. However, the apparent lack of paint on the media player is misleading - it's yet another example of extensive use of paint to conceal translucent plastic and match the opaqie plastic. Aside from the silver frame of the control pad, both red and black paint have been used on the front face, while the bottom flap on the rear is also red-painted translucent orange plastic, for no discernible reason.

Robot Mode:

OK, let's be honest here: this is Laserbeak, isn't it? A box that turns into a robotic bird whose primary colours are red and black? Orange beak, per the G1 box art? Weapon mounted on his back? Come on, who did Hasbro think they were fooling? And what's really maddening about this misnamed 2007 homage to a G1 stalwart is that it's infinitely superior to both the 2012 Fall of Cybertron data disc and the Titans Return abomination that emerged in 2016 - almost ten years after this toy - despite both essentially transforming into small, flat boxes.

So, what we now have is a - surprisingly convincing, if diminutive - robotic bird... and, considering he's an alien robot in disguise, there's a sense that, if real, it might actually be flight-capable. Sure, the wings are quite chunky, and don't necessarily look very aerodynamic, but they're really only let down by the mostly rectancular panel on the underside. Had this been able to move out of the way - perhaps to fill out the body - the wings would have worked much better. As they are, the bulky outer sections are joined to the body via a set of three translucent panels, each sculpted with robotic feather-like details, and arranged in such a way that the slide into place as the wings are extended from the body. These sections of the wing don't look quite large enough relative to the outermost parts, but I feel it only would have required one slightly longer part on each segment to balance it out. Each part is longest in the middle, even though there's space inside the device shell which could have accommodated a longer, outer 'feather' between the hip joint and the shell. The innermost section of wing on each side, which features a black-painted panel on its leading edge, is hinged at the base so it can raise up, but the red panel it's connected to - part of the media player's underside - prevents the wings hinging downward.

 

While he looks pretty good from most angles, viewing the underside shows how little there is of him. The legs occupy most of the space below the control pad in his device mode, meaning there's almost nothing there in robot mode.  There's the block that connects to his neck, the joints that his legs and wings are connected to... and that's about it. While there is some sculpted detail on the underside of the control pad, it's not really substantial enough for his robot mode. The legs are unpainted black plastic with a decent amount of tech sculpting considering their size, while the tail looks quite plain from above, but its translucent plastic features some sculpted detail on the underside.

The earpiece pegs into the back of the bird's neck, right in front of the control pad, via a single square peg. With no additional supporting connection at the back, it's rather wobbly - lift him up by the earpiece, and the bird will sag; hold the bird upside-down and the earpiece will sag away from his back. The bulk of the earpiece sits atop the media player's control pad, and the rubber hook just kind of hangs off the back, just in front of the bird's tail, leaving me with the sense that, had they just molded that in plastic, it could have accommodated a tab that could have plugged in just below the control pad, making the whole thing more stable. The other somewhat frustrating thing is that, while G1 Laserbeak had two guns sticking out either side of his head, this one has just a single cannon that hangs over the robot's head... It looks as though it should be able to rotate - the design of the earpiece certainly wouldn't preclude such a feature - but it's fixed pointing forward.

Another slight disappointment is the bird-bot's head. It fits with the long, slender neck well enough, but the sculpted detail is quite perfunctory, not to mention largely quite shallow, and the head just seems far too small for the size of the bird. The eyes are picked out with gold paint - another clear Laserbeak reference - but the fact that the orange-painted beak doesn't open is a real let-down. Also, the underside of both the head and neck is largely hollow and unpainted. The way the neck has been painted seems a little odd as well, considering the part painted black extends from a section of the body that's painted silver, and the unpainted, red plastic underside leads back to black plastic in the main body. The only silver paint on the neck is on a series of slightly recessed trapezoids running along the back of the neck, somewhat resembling a bar graph of some kind.

The transformation of the media player component into a robotic bird can be summarised as 'simple, but effective'. Basically, the tail flips round from below the control pad, allowing the unit to split in two, sideways, revealing the wings. These can then angle forward to make deploying the legs marginally easier, given that they're stashed in a confined space in the middle of the underside. For the device mode, the neck can be rotated 180° at the base to (slightly) better disguise them behind the translucent 'screen', but neither orientation looks great, to be honest. If the idea was for the design on the back of his neck to resemble some sort of level display on the device screen, they kinda missed the mark.

As is often the case with bird-type TransFormers, articulation isn't great... but it's at least on a par with the Energon/Superlink Divebomb/Shadowhawk mold. The legs are mounted via ball joints on a ring that allows them to swing out to the sides via the wings' transformation hinges. The ball joint itself offers a good range of swing from side to side, but only about 90° forward and back. Both knee and ankle are hinged, each offering about 90° of movement. The wings can swing through a range of about 135° forward and back while straight, and can be raised by 45° quite easily, locking in place at that position. Raising them further is possible but, since the hing is largely translucent plastic with a metal pin running through it, it's probably not wise to put undue strain on the joint. The head and neck articulation are infuriatingly basic - the neck is pegged into the body by a joint that barely qualifies as a mushroom peg and only offers rotation, while the head is attached via a similar peg, but that it has a small tab at the bottom that prevents any rotation. Either or both joints could - and should - have been ball joints but, for the sake of realism, the better option would perhaps have been to mount the neck on a ball joint, to handle as wide a range of movement as possible, and then have the head pinned to the other end so that it could turn left and right.

The problem with a line like Real Gear Robots is that it will inevitably draw comparison with the Micro Change-derived G1 TransFormers... and, despite many improvements in toymaking since the late 1970s/early 1980s, Hasbro have still yet to improve on the nigh-perfection of something like G1 Soundwave. Booster X10 has neither the style nor the play value of the original Soundwave but, in spite of its bland, underdeveloped alternate mode and basic articulation, I think this is probably one of the better Real Gear Robots... While I pretty much lost interest in the line after the first wave, I did buy the later repaint of this mold, Night Beat 7, which is surely some kind of recommendation.

In retrospect, I wouldn't be against the idea of Hasbro revisiting a Micro Change-style concept - effectively Micromasters disguised as life-size electronic devices - but the engineering would have to be better than it is here, and certainly better than those Titans Return mini-tablet things. Perhaps that 2016 Xiaomi/TransFormers Mi Pad 2 Soundwave was a little over-the-top, but it was certainly closer to the king of thing a contemporary Real Gear Robots should be. I think the main problem with the concept is that these devices have all become so homogenous now, they would no longer be remotely interesting as toys... even for kids that don't already have a real cellphone.