And here we have yet another ancient and long-neglected figure from my collection, this one hailing from the Revenge of the Fallen portion of the short-lived but truly excellent Human Alliance toyline. It sometimes feels as though I'll never run out of toys from that film - not least because, naturally, Studio Series is now chucking out some of the... er... less well-represented characters - but, of those that came out around the time of the film, I thankfully have just two more Human Alliance toys to write about... And Mudflap is one of them.
Human Alliance was essentially as close to Masterpiece as affordable, play-oriented toys will likely ever get, and in some ways could be considered superior to Masterpiece due to their semi-realistic interiors. Kind of a Binaltech/Alternators-lite, and packaged with less creepy human figurines than Kiss Players.
Frankly, it's high time I got round to dealing with the last handful of HA figures in my collection, so let's start here!
There's no getting around the fact that Mudflap's vehicle mode - the Chevrolet Trax concept car - was an ugly brute of a compact, 4-door hatchback. First introduced in 2007, this version of the car never made it into production, and was later redeveloped into a marginally prettier so-called 'subcompact SUV' which debuted a few years later. This concept car reminds me a little of the Toyota bB used for Binaltech Skids and Broadblast, but with a softer, more rounded design. From some angles, the chunky front end appears almost to have the exaggerate proportions of a Penny Racer/Choro Q-style car. The nose of the car - from the bottom of the bumper up to the bonnet - really does seem too tall for its width, and makes the windscreen look too small, despite it being a fairly average size. Adding to this, the wheels look positively minute in the context of the rest of the vehicle, but this appears to be because the sides of the vehicle are comparatively high, with comparatively shallow side windows.
In terms of the sculpted detail, ugly as it is, pretty much all of it is present and accurate. It does fudge some of the details, like the way the doorhandles work, the design of the wing mirrors, and the precise details of the head- and tail lights but, by and large, this is an excellent representation of the car, as one should be entitled to expect of a fully licensed toy. Where it starts to lose some points for accuracy is the paintwork... because there's barely any in evidence in this mode. The wing mirrors, central sections at the very bottom of both front and rear bumpers, wheel rims and the Chevrolet logo account for the meagre applications of silver. Both panels of the grille are painted matte black, and the numberplate at the back is painted red, with Mudflap's name stamped over the top in black. The head- and tail lights are painted, but on the outer surface, making them look cheap and unrealistic. What's missing is all the finer details, like the door handles, indicators, the frames of the lower half of the front grille and the small vents above the front wheels, the metallic clips for the bonnet just above them, as well as the smaller lights in the lower part of the front bumper. The 'Trax' branding on the boot, the break light in the rear windscreen and the small, roof-mounted spoiler are also unpainted, along with the sections of window frame on the doors that have been left as bare translucent plastic.
As far as the plastic colours go, the sparkly burnt orange plastic looks spot on. Perhaps a shade too light, but the main issue is that it's just nowhere near as glossy as the real-life vehicle. The colour is far warmer or more saturated than that of the Deluxe class toy, and its metallic sparkle is rather more prominent, though the end result still doesn't look especially metallic, even when the light catches it just right. The grey is flat with no sparkle at all, definitely several shades too light and, again, substantially less glossy than it needed to be. Nevertheless, this gives it a strong basis, and it's only things like the absence of paint on the window frames and the perfunctory painted circles on the head- and tail-lights that are outstandingly bad. The fact that the robot's thumbs and toes stick out below the base of the vehicle, is a little awkward, though they're not especially egregious and don't affect his ground clearance.
To be fair, all this is mostly par for the course with TransFormers toys, and good as this toy is in vehicle mode, it has clearly suffered from budgetary restraints... but I can't help feeling that the Deluxe looks slightly better in vehicle mode. Both manage to have their transformation seams in fairly sensible places, so they're not disrupting the vehicle's appearance unduly. While the rear bumper is split on this one, the entire front end of this one is far tidier, despite actually having more seams.
The other advantage this model has over the Deluxe class toy is the main feature of the Human Alliance line - the open section inside the vehicle which features both driver and passenger seats, along with a steering wheel featuring some additional detailing sculpted onto the steering column. There's no real dashboard detail, as such, but one of the screw holes on the passenger side almost looks as though it could represent a dial. The obvious elephant in the room on the car's interior is the Gatling gun mounted between the seats, which is one of the robot's integrated weapons, but this doesn't have any significant impact on the space available to the human figures.
Robot Mode:
The first thing that hit me about HA Mudflap is how weird his proportions are. It's nothing unusual for a TransFormers toy to have a disproportionately small head, and one of the defining features of the twins in Revenge of the Fallen was their mismatched arms, though this was exaggerated for the toys... The Deluxe class toy had fairly spindly limbs, apart from the massive left forearm, but this one takes the spindly arms to a whole new level. Because they essentially form the base of the car, they're not only slender but very flat. It's not so noticeable on the right arm because it's smaller anyway, but the bulked-up left arm looks like it's missing a part. That said, based on the CGI, this version may be slightly more accurate than the Deluxe. The legs, on balance, get the cartoonish proportions right, with very slim thighs and lower legs on which it's impossible to determine where the leg ends and the foot begins. My only complaint is that they seem over-long, but that's been a common feature of a lot of TransFormers toys, particularly where 'chubby' characters are concerned.
The sculpted detail on all the limbs is generally quite good, though some of it appears misplaced (the circular details on the upper of his two 'elbows' resembles a detail on the shoulders of the CGI, for example) and, while the arrangement of armour panels on his upper body is broadly accurate, most of them are coloured grey because they form parts of his front bumper in vehicle mode, when all of them should be the metallic orange according to the CGI. Another obvious gripe is that the underside of his left forearm is very gappy - just the sort of thing that could be solved by the sorts of 'filler kits' that have become popular in recent years. The upper body additionally seems too long, with the pelvis extending too far down below the level of his hips. This is partly because the sculpted details on the belly panel have been embellished, leading to a feature that should have been above the waist joint - a row of circular indentations on a raised band - ending up below it. One strange feature of the sculpt is that the faux grille in the chest has a completely different style to the vehicle mode's grille. The latter is a simple grid pattern of square indentations, while the one on display here is a pattern of chevrons. I get the impression that both the Deluxe class toy and this one were based on pre-production artwork, but I suspect the artwork used for this one was either slightly closer to final approval, or simply more detailed.
The breakdown of colour - both plastic and paintwork - is.. honestly a bit weird. The chest armour panels between his headlights - and the grille 'behind' them - have been molded in orange plastic, then painted over in grey, presumably to look less incongruous alongside the bumper sections. A grey plastic with a metallic/pearlescent swirl has been used for the belly, pelvis, right hand/forearm, the left hand's fingers and thumbs, the seatback parts of his vambraces, the Gatling gun, and the main core of the lower legs/feet, all of which look so good I initially mistook the plastic for having been painted silver. The more extensively-jointed parts, such as the upper arms and the area around the knee, are molded in a lighter, flat grey. The rich, sparkly orange of vehicle mode is supplemented by a paler, less saturated orange plastic used for Mudflap's collar, hip fronts, shins, toes, the left forearm and the seat base parts of the vambraces, while the backs of the hips are molded in black plastic. As a result of this mix of plastic colours, there's very little paintwork on robot mode - the aforementioned grey on the upper chest, a black chunk at the bottom of the pelvis, touches of black on the sculpted tyre detail on the feet and then, bizarrely, a patch of orange paint - a marginally closer match to the vehicle mode's plastic, but still without the sparkle - on the upper shin. By and large, I think more of this figure would have been better cast in one or the other of the orange plastics, particularly as the pale grey plastic looks so flat, and is used in places that appear more orange in the CGI.
Weapons-wise, everything available to Mudflap is fully integrated into his body. The larger hand is the most obvious place to start, although it's built-in feature is technically not a weapon. Even so, the vambrace can unfold into its seat position and then further deploy a set of handlebars so that the accompanying figure can... ride Mudflap's grappling hook? Funny thing - and I had to watch some clips of the movie to be sure - it's Skids that uses a grappling hook to catch Mudflap while they're tackling Devastator, so this gimmick is on the wrong figure. Even so, it's a neat feature, and comes with a surprisingly long nylon thread - from its point of exit on his wrist to the tip of the 'hook', it's about 18cm/7" - and there's a convenient crank on the side of the wrist for winding it back onto the spool in the forearm. A Gatling gun can be deployed from behind the head, to be operated by one of the human figures who has to stand in the vehicle shell backpack. Within this 'bucket' arrangement is a platform that the human figures be pegged onto, though getting their feet attached to the two pegs is probably more trouble than it's worth as, given the number of clashing parts already inside Mudflap, they would probably come unpegged pretty quickly. Additionally, I'm not sure the figures are quite tall enough, with a long enough reach to make it work... though I may have misaligned some of the inner parts, making life more difficult for myself in the process. Mudflap's final weapon is so subtle, I didn't even notice it until I watched a video review of the toy. If the vambrace on the right arm is rotated back to its vehicle mode position, it becomes a double-barrelled blaster of sorts. No gimmicks associated with this one, and it leaves the seat facing backwards, but it's a nice feature, and frees up an additional hinge on that wrist.
Mudflap has probably the ugliest head design of any of the robots from the series of TransFormers movies directed by Michael Bay and, to be honest, the bar was set pretty high by Bumblebee in the first film. The eyes are large and droopy, the 'ears' hang down to about the same level of his chin, and the rest of the 'face', such as it is, looks like the result of sustained beatings over the course of many years. I may never understand how this design got approved at the concept art stage, let alone making it all the way into the final CGI of the movie... Nevertheless, what we have here is a pretty faithful adaptation of that CGI into excruciatingly ugly plastic and, true to the original design, it looks like it's been smashed up and is now missing the parts that actually give it a face. Strangely, its construction would theoretically allow for light piping, but the smoky grey translucent plastic appears to be too dense for it to be effective, even if the eyes weren't painted over with the standard 'AllSpark Blue'. The only other paintwork on the head is the few touches of grey to the top of his head, the 'ears' and the upper lip
Given the comparatively small difference in size between the HA and Deluxe class toys, it's quite amazing to see how different the transformations are. Both end up with fairly substantial backpacks comprised of the majority of the vehicle's shell, but even that is arranged differently. Here, the roof splits in half on a double hinge with a rotation joint that allows the grille, bonnet, windscreen and the front half of the roof to fold back and wrap around the back end of the car, hooking on to the rear bumper. This entire shell then hangs down behind his legs rather than plugging in to his shoulders. The legs are stashed at the back of the vehicle rather than the front, while the arms simply lay down the midsection of the vehicle, with the shoulders ending up pegged inside the front wheel wells, while the vambraces become the seats. The front end of the vehicle is a bit of a nightmare to transform because so much of the robot is up there and, for some strange reason, the designers decided to put the front wheel sections onto hinged ball joints, and have them effectively switch places with the upper arms during transformation. This would be troublesome enough, but the thin sections of the front wing that fold out in front of the robot's shoulders constantly get in the way, and the left side front wheel fights for space inside the torso with the steering wheel. It's possible to transform in either direction without anything popping off but, chances are, one or both of the ball joints will pop apart. Similarly, those slivers of wing are mounted on c-clips, and either the wheels or the robot's arms can easily get into a position that dislodges them, and one of the clips finally broke on me while I was working on this write-up (something which is rapidly becoming a tradition when I go back to older toys). Additionally, I find that the door sections have a habit of getting in the way at various points in the transformation, largely because of the grey lower trim part which, despite being hinged for convenience, never seems to find a convenient place to be, however the doors themselves are oriented. What I find most baffling about the transformation is that the rear wheels remain on the outer face of the ankles, when the CGI suggests they'd be better placed on the inside, which is theoretically achievable because the engineering of the lower leg is such that it can rotate a full 360° to accommodate the 180° swing of the rear door panel onto the inner face of the leg. Technically, the wheel itself sits inside the foot, and is here represented by sculpted detail - it's just the wheel well that appears on the inner face on the CGI. This is probably one of the more involved or fussier Human Alliance figures, but the end results are pretty good.
Mudflap's articulation is better in theory than in reality, partly because of the vehicle mode parts hanging off the back and shoulders, and partly because the joints he has just aren't that useful. For example, while the shoulder joints can rotate a full 360° on ratchets, the car doors behind the shoulder and the sliver of car wing sticking out in front of the shoulder put strict limits on their active range. The arms can swing out about 110° on a dedicated joint, as well as via the transformation joint, which offers another 90°, with the arm eventually butting up against the raised bonnet sections behind his headlights. Each arm features two joints which could be elbows - one in the middle of the grey upper arm, the other just below the bicep rotation joint - and then the right arm is a fixed pose, but the enlarged left has pinned joints for the thumb and the uppermost knuckles, with his three fingers molded as a single piece. The problem is that the arms are arranged such that the elbows bend inward based on the orientation of the forearm. An additional rotation joint below the lower of the two elbow joints would have improved this no end. He has waist rotation, but it's limited to about 30° due to the structural plastic just behind the pelvis, while the hips can swing out to the sides by about 120°, forward about 130°, but only about 30° backward due to the low-hanging vehicle shell. There's a mid-thigh tilt joint that's more for transformation (compressing the legs together to get them back into vehicle mode) than for articulation, a double jointed knee that gets a touch more than 90° of natural movement, but can fold right back on itself the opposite way, due to transformation. There's a rotation joint just below the knee, and then the front of the foot can tilt down and to the sides due to transformation. This isn't so useful in practice because the bumper sections that become Mudflap's heels are spring-loaded and prefer to be either straight down or folded back into the rear of the car, but he can nevertheless balance reasonably well in some fairly extreme poses. The head can rotate a full 360° and tilt forwards/backwards due to a transformation in the collar, and there's a little button on the top of his head that makes his lower jaw move, just because all the Human Alliance figures seem to have some sort of gimmick on their heads.
Chromia:
Both of the mini motorcycle Femme-Bots included with Human Alliance figures are understandably cut-down in their execution versus the Deluxe class figures, and even the more recent Studio Series set. Of the two, though, Chromia looks by far the most accurate... except that she's accurate to Arcee in every aspect except colour. The colourscheme is bang on for Chromia - a darker, glossier blue than the original Deluxe class toy - and works fairly well on the mold, but that doesn't change the fact that it's fundamentally wrong.
Transformation is surprisingly complex for a figure of this size, with the wheels pulling away from the body on a couple of hinges, then folding together around a ball joint for articulation, while the shoulders rotate 90°, essentially from being arranged parallel to the bike to being perpendicular to it. One arm hangs below the nose of the bike (each on its own ball joint) while the other leads into the rear of the bike. The blade-like protrusion from her right shoulder hangs down rather than pointing up, as it's not articulated separately from the shoulder/upper arm, while the forearm is disproportionately large due to being most of the rear section of the bike, with a perfunctory hand folding out between the exhaust pipes. Given that it has an integrated stand (attached to the same joint as the bike's rear wheel) and plenty of joints - including a ball joint just for the head - I was all set to say this was pretty much the best Human Alliance accessory from the entire line...
...However, when I finally got round to writing it up, Mudflap and Chromia had been in storage (in a plastic box atop my wardrobe) for several years. Both had been in vehicle mode and, as soon as I started transforming Chromia, she fell apart in my hands. The shoulder joint for the right arm and the 'waist' ball joint literally crumbled, leaving her in four parts. Worse still, both joints lost a tiny fragment of black plastic and, while I was able to locate one, the other disappeared. I don't believe I'd have been able to successfully repair her, even if I'd been able to recover both pieces, but it's frustrating nonetheless.
Seymour Simmons:
None of the Human Alliance character figures were particularly good likenesses to their on-screen counterparts, but Simmons at least vaguely resembles John Turturro if you look at it from the right angle and squint. The face looks drawn, emaciated, and yet also somehow saggy. The uniform skintone paint coupled with the beady black eyes and harsh black eyebrows, it almost looks like someone wearing a John Turturro mask.
He's portrayed wearing a leather jacket, scarf and tan trousers, per his appearance in the portion of the movie set in Egypt, and the sculpted detail on the clothing is excellent. His hands appear to lack thumbs, and there's a slight mismatch between the glossy tan paint on the pelvic area and the tan plastic for the trouser legs, but it's not too bad. The main problem is that the joints - both at the hips and the knees - were cast in brown plastic rather than tan so, along with the paint mismatch, it looks almost as though he has brown tags hanging out of tan underpants worn over the trousers. Like all the others, he's made to a completely different scale to the main robot toy, being the height of a child when standing next to Mudflap in vehicle mode.
Articulation-wise, he's about par for the course with these figures - the head rotates, the arms are on friction joints that allow them to rotate 360° and swing out to the sides by about 160-170°, which starts to look really weird due to the sculpted bend at the fixed elbow. The legs can swing almost 90° forward, about 25° back and rotate about 180° at the hip, while the knees bend a fairly uniform 90°, but can rotate freely 360°. The waist seems to have some kind of ball joint, but the sculpting of the upper body - with the jacket draping down over the pelvis - restricts its rotation, and allows only a small amount of forward/backward tilt. He stands fairly well but, thanks to the fixed-pose feet, can't really adopt any dynamic poses, and the articulation is really only present to allow him to sit inside Mudflap.
Much as I strongly dislike the 'comic relief' antics of both Skids and Mudflap in the disastrous Revenge of the Fallen movie, Hasbro's toy versions of them somehow ended up being among the best in the line. The Deluxe class figures are simpler and less accurate in terms of overall detail, yet Deluxe Mudflap turns out to be slightly more accurate to the CGI in terms of details like the positioning of the front wheels and car doors in robot mode. This Human Alliance figure, meanwhile, is vastly more accurate in the overall look, but messes up on several of the specifics. Both are fairly panel-tastic, and both feature gimmicks that are somewhat detrimental to the toy as a whole, though both are nevertheless a lot of fun because of the added play value provided by the gimmicks.
On balance, I'd say that the Human Alliance version of Mudflap is the better of the two, and possibly even one of the best HA toys out of the (albeit small) range. However, that comes with a caveat about the (apparently quite fragile) wing slivers in front of his shoulders and the exceedingly fussy transformation.
Then again, I am perhaps a little biased as, when looking back at Human Alliance as a toyline, I'm beginning to think of it as among the best the TransFormers brand has ever offered and, one of these days, I'd really like to see it expand beyond the live action movie series.
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