Retro G1 Gears

Given that Hasbro have been recycling G1 now for almost five times longer than G1 actually existed, back in the day, it became increasingly baffling to me that each new iteration - particularly from the Prime Wars trilogy onward - that the focus has been wholly on the G1 cartoon rather than the G1 toys. Sure, the argument rages on, that the cartoon is the main reason TransFormers exists as a brand, but that's a particularly American point of view, and has me questioning whether some of these people are actually TransFormers fans, or simply fans of a TV show they view through nostalgia goggles, and afflicted with a compulsion to buy branded merchandise.

However, about 20 years after the Classics reboot, which brought a fresh new look and contemporary engineering to the old-favourite characters, Hasbro seem finally to be acknowledging that some TransFormers fans actually want familiar-looking, contemporary remakes of their old G1 toys... and so we have the Retro G1 line.

Essentially, it's a mix of latecomers in the grey area of an ongoing line that is War for Cybertron, Legacy and Age of the Primes, and including toys which, for whatever reason, are popping up first in the Studio Series '86 line. Their plastic colours and head sculpts are more toy-accurate, but it's like something the TransFormers Collectors' Club would do: a repaint with a new head, packaged under its own brand... only this is specifically targeted at the 40- to 50-something nostalgia hounds rather than the Premium Collector bracket. The inaugural pair were - to no-one's surprise - a repack of the War for Cybertron: Earthrise Bumblebee (which, having been a Netflix exclusive to being with, has since been repainted about a billion times already) that kept the animation-style head, and Legacy Gears.

Much as I might have wanted a new G1-style Gears, it wasn't just the ugly, animation-style head that put me off buying the Legacy toy... So let's see if this cynically-marketed re-release is enough to make me change my mind about an entire mold.

Packaging:

OK, so, at first glance, this 80s-style card-backed bubble is a 10/10 win for Hasbro. It looks great, it shows off the toy well, alongside the original Mark Watts artwork, and it even has a cut-out-and-keep Tech Specs card on the back. The instruction leaflet is formatted similarly to the old G1 toys, albeit not as a single, concertina strip and printed 2-colour on fairly heavy, uncoated paper rather than full-colour on gloss... but it feels like there's a sense of pride being shown here. It honours the 1980s presentation, including the unaltered 1984 space battle scene that wowed so many kids back in the day...

The only thing that would have made it better would have been packaging Gears in his vehicle mode rather than robot mode... but anyone familiar with Legacy Gears will know why they didn't: his vehicle mode is a bit of a joke. Curiously, though, they decided to package him just like the Legacy version: with his hinged chest plate wrapped up separately in the bubble rather than attached to his body. That being the case, his vehicle mode would have looked marginally better in the packaging.

But... then you realise that the bio is the first couple of sentences from Bob Budiansky's original text, with none of his skills and abilities, and the graph features just half of the categories from the original. Sure, it includes his function and his motto... but it condenses

GEARS is anti-social, a self-proclaimed misfit. Finds fault in everything and everyone. Acts this way to help cheer others up as they try to cheer him up. Tremendous strength and endurance. Totes heavy loads long distances. Launches to a height of 20 miles, floats down on compressed air. Becomes an easy target due to limited maneuverability. Can detect infrared.

into just

GEARS is anti-social, a self-proclaimed misfit. Finds fault in everything and everyone. Acts this way to help cheer others up as they try to cheer him up.

From a design point of view, I also find it unbelievably frustrating that the red bar across the top suddenly gets taller to accommodate the four icons over the graph... and the character image is stuffed into a narrow picture box that crops out both arms and most of one leg. Really piss-poor design., and there were many options for doing a better job than this.

Vehicle Mode:

This is where my impression of 'new' and 'updated' versions of G1 toys starts to fall apart... because, OK, they've correctly identified that G1 Gears was actually a pickup truck, and that his red shins and feet were some unspecified 'cargo' in the truck bed rather than part of the vehicle itself... but the proportions of this pickup truck are crazy in ways that even the Choro-Q-inspired G1 Mini Autobots were not, and Gears wasn't even one of those, he came from the Mysterians toyline.

Because, let's face it, this is essentially a legally distinct spin on the GMC Topkick, its height comically exaggerated to the point where it looks too narrow when viewed from the front. Then there's the wheels, which are far too small and thin for a vehicle this size. Then there's the way the arms collapse down into the sides of the vehicle... or, more to the point, the way they don't: there are weird barrel sections (the transformation/butterfly hinges) sticking out on each side, and the bottom of the vehicle extends to the same level rather than lining up with the sculpted doors/windows. The flatbed at the back ends a good 7mm higher than the front end of the vehicle. This could easily have been lowered to match, given that the net effect on vehicle mode would be nil, while robot mode would gain a longer heel spur.

The truck bed itself is obviously just the robot's feet and shins - the split between them just makes it worse by emphasising the lack of visual continuity... but it feels like there should have been a way to turn his toes into roof-mounted lights. Alternatively, given that the 'toes' on the G1 toy were virtually nonexistent, and the cartoon was known for its inconsistent sizing, they could have made the toes shorter at the front, so they'd line up better with the cabin roof.

And then, of course, there's the back end of the truck, which is blatantly just the robot's chest folded out and up to cover the inner workings of Gears' knees. This was another detail that put me off the Legacy toy, because it's such unnecessarily lazy engineering, and a more convincing tailgate could have swung in from each side, from resting in front of the wheel wells in robot mode.

Making matters even worse is the staggeringly ill-conceived weapon storage in vehicle mode. Gears has been given six hexagonal 5mm ports, with a gun that can only be mounted via the 5mm peg on one side because a long magazine right in front of the 5mm grip gets in the way. Thus, the gun has to be mounted upside-down on the right side of the vehicle, and only attaches securely to the frontmost port on the lefthand side. The rear port requires the gun be pointed backwards due to the protruding wheel wells. Either of the roof ports work well enough, though. The daft thing is, with a bit more thought, the gun could have been mounted to the underside of the vehicle - the inside of Gears' chest - to disguise it as an exhaust pipe, and with no significant impact on his ground clearance.

Paintwork is... there, but uninspired. The headlights, grille and hubcaps are painted silver (the latter diminished somewhat by the grey plastic clips extending from the centre). All the windows are painted black (versus the hideous cyan of the Legacy toy), the slightly raised box on his bonnet is also painted black, but the sculpted Mysterians logo - a stylised M common to all the Mini Autobots derived from that toyline - is just a painted outline here... which becomes all the more ridiculous once you get into robot mode.

But perhaps the most frustrating thing about this vehicle mode is the ease with which one can accidentally fold the wheels up. Some claim this is intentional, to give the options of a 'hover mode', but I'm more inclined to believe that's a lucky coincidence coming through a design flaw.

Robot Mode:

It honestly surprised me how much more I liked this deeply flawed Legacy mold once it got the right head sculpt. Gears finally looks like a robot again... Though his proportions are a mess, and he has one of the most egregious backpacks I've seen in quite a while due to a frankly idiotic design choice in his engineering. Sure, it would seem excessive to turn the entire nose of the car into his head but... that honestly would have been preferable to taking everything from the bumper up to the windscreen and folding it up behind the head... the back of which features a sculpted version of the Mysterians logo, closely matching the outline painted onto the bonnet.

Then you have his comparatively thin, boxy arms, which feature a sculpted partial wheel, because his actual wheels are folded inside his body, both front and back. It's not painted, and it's fairly small (though, somewhat ironically, wider than his actual vehicle mode tyres), so the detail just blends into his arm The grey plastic visible at the base of his torso has the effect of narrowing his waist, which then becomes a wide block of pelvis atop short thighs and gigantic, angular moon boots in red and blue plastic.

Sculpted detail is a mixed bag. It's there - in some places, at least - but it's mostly quite shallow and not particularly interesting, having been based more on his animation model than the original toy. The paintwork has been cut down, to better reflect the stickers of the toy - specifically the design in the middle of his chest, painted with both silver and yellow paint - but then his Autobot insignia has been stamped onto his waist rather than his pelvis, even though the latter is clearly designed to accommodate something the shape of the Autobot insignia.

As one much expect, the chrome of the original toy hasn't been reproduced here - instead, we have bare, pale grey plastic for his thighs, along with the elbows and hands. This is identical to the Legacy version, which is wholly expected, but ends up making him look a little untidy, and less like the G1 toy, whose arms and hands were entirely blue.

One cute feature - albeit obviously not unique to this version of the mold - is the internal detailing made in reference to Gears' spotlight episode in the G1 TV series, in which the Decepticons need some component out of his chest for their nefarious scheme-of-the-week, and this results in the normally grumpy Autobot becoming... nice. That this was Gears' spotlight story just goes to show how little the G1 show cared about what these alien robots were capable of. The Marvel comics showed Gears flying and landing via compressed air. It made reference to his strength and endurance. The Sunbow cartoon just said "but what if he wasn't grumpy?". Naturally, none of this detailing is painted, so it's impossible to say what any specific element is supposed to represent and, given that depictions of internal workings has been thoroughly inconsistent, except for these occasional references to spotlight episodes, it might as well be his vehicle mode's built-in stereo system.

The gun Gears is packaged with appears to reference his blaster pistol from the TV show, albeit much larger and more detailed. Where the Legacy toy's gun was unpainted black plastic, this one has been giving a coating of silver paint (except on the two 5mm pegs), but the blast effect peg on the end of the barrel rather ruins the effect, and I'm half tempted to cut it off, since the bare black plastic within would at least give the impression of an opening in the gun barrel.

I indicated at the start that the new head sculpt was basically the only reason I picked up this toy and, working on this write-up, I genuinely haven't come up with any better reason. It's a decent approximation of the G1 toy's head, but the silver paint has only been applied to the smaller, inner section of the two raised side parts, which makes the head look too narrow. The G1 toy gave the appearance of a dome-like head embedded in the underside of the truck, where this keeps with oddly-shaped head frame of his animation model. I wouldn't have expected anything else, since this is Hasbro taking the easiest option, and it's only the central section that has been replaced between this version and the earlier Legacy release, but it's more than a little disappointing that they didn't replace the entire thing with a silver dome. Gears doesn't have a face, just a battlemask below a plain blue visor, but that's what makes him a more compelling robot, vastly superior to the ugly mess of a humanoid physiognomy from the cartoon... It's superficially similar to the other Mysterian-derived toys, Brawn, Huffer and Windcharger, but also - coincidentally - a better match for the original toy Bumblebee and several of the Diaclone-derived toys.

Much as I might have little positive to say about this toy's vehicle mode or robot mode, his transformation is, at least, fairly interesting and fun. The legs are essentially identical to the G1 toy, simply bending right back at the knee and slotting in behind the vehicle's cab... but a section of the car's roof folds into the each foot to provide a perfunctory heel spur and a means of posing him a little more dynamically. The chest and backpack fold out 90° allowing the arms to fold in while the wheels fold out, and then the backpack folds forward to complete the front of the car, while the chest plate folds up to conceal the knees and to mitigate the space between the legs... Call me picky, if you will, but I don't feel that the robot's red, silver and yellow chest plate makes for a convincing tailgate for a blue pickup truck. I also find myself questioning the excessive complexity of the concertina chest, with the rear wheels folding into the torso, while the backs of the legs could benefit by accommodating the extra bulk of his wheels without any real impact on his articulation. 

Naturally, being a 2024 figure from the Legacy toyline, the articulation available here is excellent. Despite being such an odd size and shape, the head is on a ball joint, granting a hint of tilt along with full rotation. The arms can rotate a full 360° unimpeded and swing 90° out to the sides. He has unrestricted swivel at the bicep and wrist, with a double-jointed elbow due to transformation. On top of that, transformation affords him a shoulder butterfly joint with a full range of very nearly 90°. His backpack is high enough that it doesn't impede his waist rotation, or his hips, which can manage a hair over 90° forward or backward, and the regulation 90° out to the sides. He has unrestricted thigh rotation, his knees are double-jointed for transformation, and his ankles can tilt more or less 90° inward. Finally, as previously mentioned, the vehicle's roof panels can be folded out for additional foot support should the wide, flat toe edge prove insufficient.

The many, many alternative options for the arms and vehicle front, to reduce the size of his backpack, just don't bear thinking about... even framing this as a toy intended to replicate his appearance in the cartoon, it's a failure: Gears didn't have a huge backpack in the show. In many ways, much as I like the increased size and improved poseability of this figure, I prefer the 2014 30th Anniversary Legends class toy (though I only bought the very IDW-coded Swerve because that version of Gears had an even uglier head than the Legacy version). As with so many of Hasbro's recent efforts, I like the idea of this toy far more than I like the execution. According to TFWiki, this toy was created between Mark Maher at Hasbro and Shogo Hasui and, while Hasui's inventiveness is evident in the engineering of his transformation, Maher's struggles to think outside of right angles is all too conspicuous.

When I bought this toy, I knew I was going to customise it to some degree, and fixing the missing silver on his head was the primary intent. However, when I noticed that the sculpting of the red outer shell piece of his hip arrangement was actually sculpted with the angled design of the G1 toy, I quickly added some chrome in there. Finally, the lack of interior paintwork for the details in his torso were crying out for some attention, so I used some chrome and gold in there. Broadly speaking, I'm pleased with the results but, to my mind, it only serves to highlight this G1 toy update's shortcomings versus the simplistic 1983/84 original.