Studio Series #117 Hatchet

It's at least somewhat rare these days that I buy a figure knowing it's going to be shit. Particularly over the last couple of years, as Hasbro's QC is consistently found to be going down the toilet. When they take seven years to complete a set of characters from a movie that came out fourteen years ago, and balls it up not once (SS Crankcase using the SS Crowbar mold rather than TLK Berserker, despite having identical vehicle modes) but twice (as we're about to find out), one has to wonder if the delayed Hatchet precisely because they knew it was shit.

And, in all honesty, I wasn't really intending to buy Hatchet. As far as I'm concerned, Studio Series has devolved in exactly the same way as every other TransFormers line from Hasbro: its core idea - the most screen-accurate 'bots created using final CGI models as the basis - is no longer the foundation of the line, QC and material quality have taken a nosedive, and paintwork has been reduced significantly.

But... As with the Seekers, I felt a compulsion to complete the Dreads at the same scale and so picked him up at the MCM London Comic Con last month. The basis for the compulsion was largely that, while the original 'Commander class' DotM Hatchet toy was very cool for its size, the jet mode really made no sense. So, let's take a look at Studio Series Hatchet. It can't be that bad, surely?

Vehicle Mode:

If you're experiencing a strange sense of déjà vu, the obvious reason for this is that the Dreads all used the Chevvy Suburban as their vehicle mode... and so this toy uses all of the same vehicle panels to make up the outer shell, and has the same paint job, bar the omission of any Decepticon insignias. The only physical differences are where a piece of vehicle shell forms part of the inner robot, and that's also identical across all three figures: the passenger doors on either side. What's particularly egregious in this instance is the hollowness at the front, and the way the tail attaches to the underside, yet still sticks out below the rear bumper.

The hollowness is perhaps common to the other two, since the front wheels are mounted on the hips and the pelvis is quite low in all their vehicle modes, but the massive space here, between the wheels and the underside of the bonnet somehow seems worse here because the pelvis isn't jointed and hinged down from the waist, as it is on the other two. Weapon storage, meanwhile, has been going downhill on this set. Berserker could fit his pair of spiked cudgels into the underside of his vehicle mode, but Crowbar had to attach them to the sides of the vehicle, above the rear wheels. Hatchet doesn't really have a weapon, as such, just a tail accessory that unplugs due to the laziness of his design, and which gets stowed on the underside, barely tabbed into his 'hair'. What's ridiculous about this arrangement is that there's more than enough room for the tail to have been tucked further in, such that the end of the tail sits inside the bumper. All it would have needed was moving the two tabs further down from the tip of the tail.

I ended up taking a chrome pen to this almost as soon as I got it out of the box because, by this point, not only has the Suburban become a seriously boring vehicle mode, but the cheap-looking dull plastic completely fails to capture the look of the real-life car, which appeared glossy in some scenes and matte in others. I didn't do much... but may add more at some later date. I'll certainly go back to the other two and replicate what I've done here, at the very least.

Robot Mode:

Given the alien design of the Dreads' robot modes, it came as no surprise when Berserker, then Crowbar folded up the majority of their vehicle shell into a backpack, with the robot being almost entirely separate within... but at least on those two, it wasn't overly visible except from the sides and rear. Hatchet's vehicle shell appears to be floating slightly above his back, giving the impression of some kind of (Teenage Mutant Ninja?) tortoise rather than the aggressive canid robot from the movie. Gone are the spines running down his back, gone is the menacing bulk... and in its place, we have a lazily compacted vehicle shell. Even the Commander class jet version did better with its vehicle mode kibble. Worse still, look too closely, and you see that much of his torso is hollow, to accommodate the transformation hinge that lifts the vehicle shell clear of his body.

Sculpted detail is not bad, as such, but it's certainly nondescript, and there's barely any paintwork to liven it up. In fact, as far as I can tell, the only robot-specific paintwork other than on the head is on the backs of his hands, and that's barely visible. The best you can say for Hatchet's sculpted detail is that it's consistent with the other two, in that it looks like a fragmented exoskeleton on a creature that would have been more at home in one of the Lord of the Rings movies. The problem is that what detail there is gets wholly overshadowed by the incongruous car panels sitting on Hatchet's back, wrapped around his forearms, sticking out of his calves, and hanging off his backside... not to mention the wheels on his hips and heels. What's insane about the vehicle's grille hanging off his butt is that it can just as easily fold up toward the rest of the vehicle shell for a much tidier appearance... but that leaves no way to attach his tail, because the socket is at the base of the grille's transformation hinge. Had they added a socket to the bumper - right in the recess for the numberplate would have been ideal - or a 5mm clip on the inside of the bumper, this wouldn't have been a problem.

Then there's the 'waffling'. It's mostly limited to Hatchet's calves and the lower part of his thighs, and mitigated by the fact that it's only on the inner faces, but it's hideous and really lowers the tone of a figure that already has few things working in its favour. Add to that, the back is hollow to accommodate a large transformation hinge, the forearms are hollow behind their vehicle mode panels (albeit in a way only visible through the wheel wells, so mostly hidden from view) and the head is hollow, with the neck joint fully visible because it's a double-mushroom peg pushed in from below, and you've got a figure that's astonishingly cheap-looking when examined in any detail.

As one might expect from such a bestial Decepticon, Hatchet doesn't appear to have a weapon... yet, for some reason, the toy's designers decided to make his tail an accessory that can be plugged into his butt - with a connection so loose that even looking at it the wrong way causes the tail to detach - or wielded in the 5mm grip of his forepaws, into which it clips far more securely. The problem is that Hatchet can't stand in any way that would make sense as a biped. The position of his thumb is such that the tail can only be held underhand, like a dagger, when it's clearly supposed to be used as a bludgeon or flail. Even then, his wrists don't rotate because he's intended to be posed on all fours... and even if that weren't the case, the head can only rotate around the neck, since that's also only intended for posing on all fours.

And, speaking of the head, whatever happened to Studio Series' much-vaunted CGI accuracy? This thing is nothing like Hatchet's appearance in Dark of the Moon. It's too slim, too long, and the details are hopelessly wrong, from the spines on the top of his head to the weird goatee that points straight forward from the tip of his jaw. His two clumps of 'hair' are hinged for part of his transformation, but their range of movement is severely curtailed because his shoulders are mounted too far forward. Paintwork is minimal, with dabs of silver on his teeth, the crest painted silver and glossy black, and the eight beady little eyes picked out with dots of red paint. The Commander class toy from the DotM toyline was more accurate in almost every way, yet this was supposedly based on the final CGI? I don't think so... I strongly suspect that Berzerker, Crowbar and Hatchet were conceived for the TLK toyline, but only the first being released because the 'character' was a reuse of the CGI for Crankcase, while the others were omitted. Crowbar and this one then got churned out under the Studio Series branding as a cynical means of recouping their development costs.

Honestly, transformation is so pathetically similar to Berzerker and Crowbar that it's almost not worth writing about. The legs form the base and side panels of the vehicle, the arms fold back to form the rear side panels, and then the rest of the car shell basically unfolds between them from his unsightly backpack. The most complicated part is tabbing his tail/weapon into his hair, and even that has been handled poorly, because the tabs are at the tip of the tail, leaving the hilt unnecessarily poking out below his rear bumper, when there's plenty of room to have fit it entirely within the vehicle shell just by moving the tabs a few millimetres down the tail. Worse than this, however, is that the panels attached to Hatchet's forearms are so loose, they will inevitably fall off when transforming him in either direction.

Four-legged TransFormers toys always seem to get a raw deal, and Studio Series has a patchy record for articulation, but Hatchet has to be one of the most abysmal beastformers in recent years. Given that the likes of WfC:Kingdom Tigatron had a fairly respectable range to his joints in beast mode, there's really no excuse. Digitigrade legs never get the full range of movement at the hip or the knee and, while Hatchet's heel is articulated, the back legs just seem overlong for his size. Furthermore, the whole situation is exacerbated by the vehicle panels on his calves clashing with the grille, leading to the tail falling off at the slightest movement. Hips, knees and shoulders are all simple ball joints but, where there's no separate rotation joint for the hips, the shoulders at least have that... but it doesn't do enough to counteract the weird angle the shoulders are mounted at. Elbows, wrists and heels are pinned and certainly not loose, but they only make for a stable standing position in a very limited number of configurations, so Hatchet never looks as dynamic as he should. Perhaps the worst part, though, is that while his jaw opens nicely, the head only rotates around the neck, so Hatchet cannot look up, down, or from side to side.

The bottom line here is that this neither looks nor feels like a Studio Series toy, much less one that only saw release in 2025. Had it been released alongside Berzerker, back in 2017, it still would have been overshadowed by the likes of TLK Megatron and Nitro, but it would have at least been on a par with Berzerker and Barricade from that toyline, and not as outstandingly bad when compared to the likes of SS Hot Rod. Had Hatchet's release not conveniently aligned with me having a little disposeable income once again, I almost certainly would have declined to pick him up. Seeing him at the London Comic Con was enough to trigger my urge to complete the set of Dreads... but I don't feel good about it. This is Hasbro at their most low-effort, releasing a toy as 'better late than never' when, in all honesty, never may have been the better choice... at least for collectors.