The strange thing about some of the device modes chosen for the Real Gear Robots line is that they offered little by way of actual play value. Sure, you could just about wear the earpiece provided with Booster X10 and Night Beat 7, but the buttons on the main unit were immobile. Much the same could be said for High Score 100, Speed Dial 800 and Zoom Out 25X, despite all being button-centric forms.
Enter Longview - not only one of the few to have missed out on the bizarre number suffixes applied to most of the figures in the line, but one of the few who, like Micro Change-derived toys such as Perceptor, have a semi-functional gimmick appropriate to their device mode... And all without the need for buttons.
If someone were to compile a list of devices that could function as a disguise for an alien robot, I don't think binoculars would be high on the list... and yet Longview is far from being the first. There was one in the Go-Bots toyline, another unique model that seems to have bounced around between various off-brand/pound shop cardbacked releases. Even Takara themselves got in on the act, with one of the later entries in Micro Change line being 'Binocular Robo Scope Man'. Needless to say, they achieved varying degrees of success in portraying a robot, and even their binoculars forms tended to be a little dubious. The Micro Change entry was probably the best, but only by going for the super-high-tech, chunky look, with chromed plastic and vague techy details in its design. By contrast, Longview goes for a distinctly non-traditional look, eschewing the usual pair of cylinders connectsed by a hinge look in favour of a fully-encased unit, as if they operate via digital cameras rather than optical lenses. The end result is that he looks more like the head of Wall-E's (marginally) cooler brother than a pair of binoculars due to the angular-framed, slightly-tinted lenses tagged on the front.
Naturally, this toy being sized for younger kids, the eyepieces are far too close together to be even remotely functional for a full-grown adult... but, frankly, I'm puzzled as to what age of child could actually make use of these. Even without the tinted panels over the front, the actual plastic lenses are so distorted and irregular that it's impossible to get a clear view of anything, quite apart from the fact that they don't actually enlarge anything. Making matters worse, the holes running through the toy are minute - only about 3mm in diameter - so the majority of what you see through the eyepieces is the interior of the toy. It's cleverly-designed, certainly, but for something developed more than 20 years after G1 Perceptor, its ostensibly 'functional' gimmick is distinctly flawed.
The bright yellow plastic used for the main body of the binoculars looks like the sort of thing you'd see on a product marketed for sports use - most binoculars tend to be much darker and more sober - but the textured, black plastic 'grip' panels on each side are quite effective, even though they feel nothing like the rubber or leather one would expect for these parts. What's odd is that the smaller panels, closer to the eyepieces, are yellow plastic painted black, even though bare yellow plastic would have been more appropriate, given that the deep sculpted panel line aligns with the one on the larger, yellow part of the eye piece.
The main body of the unit features five sculpted buttons, the central three of which being of indeterminate purpose, while the other two are triangular, pointing outward, suggesting either a zoom or focus function. The front panel, on which an Autobot insignia is stamped, can flip up to reveal some sort of faux-digital display in the form of a sticker (peeling slightly on mine) showing an image of Galaxy Force/Cybertron Landbullet/Cumplezone - just one of the handful of hints this line has that Real Gear Robots was originally conceived as an accompaniment or follow-up to the Cybertron toyline. To one side of the display, there's a small directional pad... of sorts: it's basically panel lines tracing a directional pad, with no paintwork and, just like the 'buttons' on the outer face, they're fixed details. The sculpted detail below this panel appears to be more for robot mode, as it doesn't seem to correspond to anything one might expect to find inside binoculars, digital or otherwise.
One small, strange detail about most (if not all) of these toys is that the majority of their screw holes are covered over with plastic caps. Given that this is not something they've done consistently with many other toylines - Masterpiece included - it's weird to see that level of commitment to what was, at the time, a bit of a throwaway, experimental line.
Robot Mode:
Longview makes for a surprisingly good robot, albeit with bizarre, exaggerated Quarterback-style proportions and massive lens protrusions from stubby shoulders that appear to bypass the bicep and go straight to the elbow. Given that the 'lenses' on his shoulders are a full centimetre from the shoulder joints, one has to wonder why they didn't simply take a small chunk off each side to give him some decent upper arm mass. By contrast, the lower body - everything from the waist down - looks surprisingly good. The thighs and shins are almost in proportion, given the clownishly large feet, but herein lies my biggest issue with Longview's appearance: his feet are round the wrong way.
Now, admittedly, I'm basing this on typical human physiology - I know, I usually rail against slavish aherence to such things, particularly in the movie line, which made a virtue of more alien physical forms among the Decepticons - but the 'toe' area is larger toward the outside of foot. Since the shape of the thighs forces a slight A-stance on the figure, this means he's only ever standing on the inner edges of his feet and heels, further emphasising the odd foot shape. It almost looks as if it would make more sense to rotate everything round so that robot mode faces 'backwards', but that doesn't solve the A-stance, or the angle of his feet. Additionally, there's a panel behind the robot's head and, while the upper back has more sculpted detail than the plain yellow panel on his chest, the sculpted button panel would make him look as if he was wearing a nappy. One interesting point to note about the legs is that there's a circular channel through them leading up from just above the knee joint to just below the thigh joint at the back, though it's not instantly apparent from either side.
There's not a great deal of sculpted detail specific to robot mode - the shins have some unpainted, recessed panels featuring minimal, simple linework, while the thighs have raised panels just above the knee and a coating of bluish silver paint down the front. With the larger panels now standing upright on his arms, the painted tech detail across the shoulders, around the smaller 'lenses', is more exposed, but that all feels like device mode detail rather than robot mode detail. The forearms are just the grips from his alternate mode but, on the upside, his hands are quite well-sculpted and molded in a bluish-grey plastic that vaguely resembles the paint on the thighs and shoulders. Since none of the Real Gear Robots came with accessories (other than the media player/bird ones, and those only at a stretch), it's no surprise to see that his hands don't have any molded grip, but it's nevertheless a little disappointing that he can't interact with weapons from other toys.
Real Gear Robots featured some truly odd design choices in their head sculpts, and Longview's looks either like someone (badly) cosplaying Robocop or someone wearing a VR headset with the closed-off display replaced by a chunky, see-through visor. While he has a humanoid face sculpted in below the visor - a tiny stub of nose, a triangular chin bump and a grim, downturned mouth quite unsuited to an Autobot - I don't believe there's actually any eyes sculpted behind the visor. It looks for all the world as if the face just ends about halfway up the visor, giving it a weird two-banded appearance. The chunks on either side of the jaw are fairly plain boxes that look as if they should have been painted yellow, like the rest of the helmet, but the only paint on the bottom half of the head is at the back, behind these chunks, and there's a small misapplication on the right side of his jaw on mine.
While Longview's transformation is very simplistic, it's not without elegance. The way the legs compress up towards the chest, fitting inside the arms, is all very straightforward, but the head reveal/conceal, whereby the yellow plate on his chest acts as the end of a lever that rotates the central section of his chest 180° and leaves the head behind the binoculars' control buttons, is surprising and clever. The way it all works reminds me a little of the old G1 Cassetticons, in that it takes a fairly simple shape and turns it into a (somewhat exaggerated) humanoid robot. The economy of it, overall, is similarly impressive, but the transformation of the feet - swinging down and flattening out via a double hinge - creates a less than optimal footprint. On the whole, it's a fairly effective transformation each way, but I found while larking about with him for this write-up that he doesn't peg together very firmly in his device mode - whether that's due to age or just how he was straight out of the packaging, I can't be sure... And it's not as if he falls apart, just that the few tabs and slots he has are fairly loose, and the only things holding his legs in place in his alternate mode are friction (at the hip/knee joints) and the arms tabbed onto the shins.
Longview's footprint is the biggest problem in terms of his articulation and poseability. Since the legs can never quite stand straight, he tends to be standing only on the very edges of his feet and heels. Add to that, the somewhat loose double hinges on the 'toe' section, and it can be difficult - though certainly not impossible - to get him into a good, dynamic, yet stable pose. The rounded heels mean that he often has to be leaned slightly forward to prevent falling over backward, even though he's not noticeably back-heavy. The rest of the joints are pretty good - the knees are quite tight and offer far better than average range because the lower legs collapse over the thighs for transformation. Additionally, there's almost no restriction on their forward movement, so their full range is somewhere close to 270°. Thigh rotation is unrestricted, though the bulk of the upper thigh automatically pushes the leg out to the sides as it rotates, while the requirements of transformation allow the thigh to swing through about 150° to the sides. Forward and backward swing are effectively unrestricted, as the legs can easily be manoeuvred around the bulky upper body. The shoulders can rotate through a full 360° and raise out to the sides by about 50° via their ball joints, while the elbows can bend to a surprising 150°-ish. The head is on a ball joint and mounted high enough that a small amount of tilt is available but, because of the panel behind his head, rotation is limited to about 280° - though that's far more than is natural for a human, so not something I can really complain about.
As a pair of binoculars, I'm not sure Longview is particularly
effective, even for his intended age group... Nevertheless, I can't help
but feel somewhat cheated by binoculars that don't magnify, even just a little. Plastic can
be molded into crude lenses - Perceptor (and its Micro Change
predecessor) showed that almost 40 years ago - and subtle curvature of
the lenses at both ends may have given the impression of a wider field
of vision than the slim channels through the robot's legs and chest
actually provide. The lack of pushable buttons and the cheap sticker for the digital viewfinder feature further reduce the sense of play value in this toy, so I struggle to consider Longview to be one of the better Real Gear Robots, especially since his decent articulation is offset by the awkwardness of his feet.
Whether it's just the colour or some aspect of his design, there's something vaguely Bumblebee-ish about Longview in my opinion. The lenses on his shoulders are slightly wing-like, but not in the traditional 'door wing' position, the head sculpt can hardly be considered a homage, even to the original battlemasked G1 toy, and the sense of bulk in the upper body is even more extreme than in the actual movie Bumblebee CGI.
I remember seeing photos online of a custom Cosmos figure made out of Longview with little more than a green, yellow and red paint job, a modified head and some boosters glued onto the upper arms lenses. His binoculars mode does bear a vague resemblance to a certain Corellian freighter from popular fiction, so I can certainly understand repainting it as a spacecraft. As he is, though, Longview presents further evidence that the Real Gear Robots line may have benefitted by a more real-world scale for its device modes... Just making him half as large again would have kept him within the contemporary Deluxe scale, but made him a better fit for the hands - and, more importantly, the eyes - of the kids who'd likely be playing with transforming devices such as this.
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