Yolopark AMK Series TransFormers One Elita-1 (Cogged Bot Mode)

Femme-Bot Friday #89

I'm honestly still not sure what I think of TransFormers One. While it was great to have a fully CG animated movie - and one that looked fantastic, at that - if felt more like a series of loosely-connected set-pieces than a coherent, considered - or even valuable - addition to existing TransFormers lore. I'm not a great fan of origin stories at the best of times, but the problem with creating one for the cinematic TransFormers oeuvre is that the general public will inevitably ask "but how does this connect to Bayverse?" and, no matter how one tries to convince them it's a new, wholly separate continuity, that's too much for the general public to grasp, given the cultural impact - for better or worse - of the Bayverse series movies. After all, each attempt to reboot the franchise since the diminishing returns of those five movies has met with failure - including TransFormers One.

On top of that, I've always been dubious of the concept of the T-Cog - the singular component that grants a Cybertronian their capacity to transform - because it simply makes no sense. How would a race evolve with such a huge aspect of their 'biology' reliant on a single 'organ', the removal of which poses no significant problem for their function? And why should the reintroduction of a T-Cog to their living anatomy - particularly a T-Cog from another Cybertronian, as presented in this movie - trigger an instant increase in physical size, rather than simply unlock the ability to transform that must surely have been already built-in?

All of which is, let's face it, entirely beside the point for a write-up of a non-transforming 'model kit' based on one of the movie's characters, so perhaps I should leave further discussion till I (can be bothered to) get round to writing up my full, unfiltered thoughts about the movie... Perhaps after I inflict it on Courtney give it a second watch. Instead, for now, let's focus on the supreme irony that is a non-transforming figure of the transforming, upgraded form of Elita-1.

Packaging:

Considering the small size of the completely figure, the box is surprisingly large - almost 32 x 20 x 6.5cm (30.5 x 8 x 2.5 inches), mainly due to it containing a rather unnecessarily deep plastic clamshell with the parts widely-spaced. It could easily have been made smaller using a two-tier clamshell, but I guess the large presentation box was part of the concept for these figures - the front of the box is a flap revealing most of the contents, along with photos demonstrating the articulation and accessories of the figure.

Build:

Unlike Flame Toys' model kits, Yolopark's figures come mostly pre-assembled, and pretty much all you have to do is plug some armour onto the arms and legs, then connect everything together with the head and the torso. The additional level of 'assembly' with Elita-1 is that her head comes in three parts: the central core, and the two 'flowerpot' protrusions from the sides of her head. For some reason, on mine, one side doesn't want to plug in fully, and keeps pushing its way out, so I may eventually resort to gluing it. 

Given what little work is involved in putting this 'kit' together, I'm confused as to why Yolopark don't just sell their kits as complete action figures. Even swapping the hands to facilitate more interesting poses, or the use of the included rifle, is not a step unique to these kits - many Third Party figures, even the transforming kind, use this option rather than poseable hands, and plenty of Gunpla kits come with multiple hand options. Even official figures, such as the Hybrid Style miniatures, used this method of improving the impression of poseability in figures whose hands were too small to articulate.

Figure:

When I first opened the package, my initial impression was of disappointment. Given the sharp, vibrant colour and metallic sheen of the movie's CGI, being presented with a plastic interpretation of Elita-1 that is largely flat dark magenta or flat white - including an unpainted, white plastic face - did not seem at all true to the movie. Given the simplicity of the paint job, one could be forgiven for expecting something a bit more extravagant of the plastic - particularly the pinky-purple. Alternatively, those few parts painted white could have used a pearlescent paint. The overall effect here is flat and lifeless, particularly when compared to the golden Bumblebee and the silver D-16. Even the cogged Orion Pax figure has a silver pelvis, thighs and forearms.

This is exacerbated by the artistic direction of TransFormers One: mostly smooth surfaces with very little sculpted detail visible through breaks in outer armour panelling. Detailing comes from the vaguely metallic, dark grey plastic that clearly makes up the inner robot. For the torso, this amounts to little more than 'rib' strips, breaking up the waist to allow for rotation and tilt. On the limbs, all the joints are exposed - both those present in the CGI and those required by the plastic model, with some aspects of the latter partly disguised by the sculpting of the former.

On top of that, since the vehicle modes designed for TFOne were wholly Cybertronian, meaning they were very slick, but also fairly basic and - with the obvious exceptions of Orion Pax and D-16 - almost totally unlike any real-world vehicle. Sure, there were loads of jets that were clearly jets, there were four-wheeled vehicles, three-wheeled vehicles, and two-wheeled vehicles... but they were all very 'sci-fi'. Worse still, these vehicles were barely reflected in the robot modes. Naturally, the jets often - but not always - had their wings still visible in their robot modes, but wheels invariably vanished. In theory, Elita-1 transforms into a three-wheeled vehicle, but only two wheels are visible on this figure, serving as her ankles. Like her on-screen counterpart - and very much unlike the Studio Series toy - she has no real backpack, and ends up every bit as slim and sleek as the CGI... just visually dull by comparison. It gets even worse when you compare to the premium action figure by ThreeZero, on which all the white of this figure is replaced by silver or, to keep with the same price range, even the AMK Series figures of cogged Bumblebee, Orion Pax and D-16, all of whom have a more metallic finish on at least some of their parts. The most you get here is a couple of spots of silver paint on each wrist.

Elita-1 comes with a total of six hands - three each for the left and right arms - with a pair of closed fists, a pair of open hands, a pointing hand, and one designed to hold the rifle, which is her only other packed-in accessory. Curiously, though, both of these are the right hand, so she can either point or use her weapon, but not both. This feels rather cheap on Yolopark's part, but it does seem consistent with the other AMK Series figures. On the upside, the weapon at least features some silver paint to add to its visual impact... but, on the downside, the trigger hand won't hold it securely.

The three-part head sculpt is no doubt pretty accurate to the CGI, but the unpainted white face looks too stark, framed by the flat, deep magenta helmet with its small applications of gunmetal paint on the 'ears' and the silver panel on the top of her head. The eyes are picked out in a nice, metallic cyan, but somehow they still manage to look quite dead when coupled with so expressionless a face.

The articulation offered by this kit is, admittedly, pretty fantastic, but not without its caveats. The head connects to the body via a neck that uses two ball joints, but the one in the base of the head is a far tighter fit than the one at the base of the neck, so the neck often ends up out of alignment. The shoulders are ball joints mounted inside butterfly joints and leading to hinges in the arms, but the combination of the first and the last still doesn't allow for her arm to be raised a full 90° out to the sides, with the ball joint doing the bulk of the work. Neither the butterfly joint nor the shoulder hinge have a range much greater than about 15-20° in themselves. The elbows are both fascinating and quite impressive, though. Bicep swivel occurs just above the elbow which, in itself, can bend a touch over 90°. However, just below the elbow is another hinge on a rotation joint specifically for the forearm, and that adds another 130° of bend. So, by rotating the forearm, the two joints act as a double-jointed elbow that allows for her forearm to bend right up close to her shoulder. The wrists are ball joints, for ease of swapping hands, but their range of tilt is negligible. The upper body connects to the waist section via a ball joint, which supplements a waist rotation that is limited by her hip skirts, along with an additional hinge just below the ball joint gives her a minimal ab crunch. Her hip joints are the standard sort of universal joint which allows for upper thigh rotation, a little over 90° swing from front to back, and outward swing that gets very close to 90° before the hip skirts pop off their ball joints. However, there's an additional 'drop' joint at the front of the pelvis which brings the hip joint down and forward, which then allows the thighs almost a full 180° swing from front to back. The knees are double-jointed, with the second joint extending the shin slightly to give the impression of almost 130° of knee bend. The ankles are probably the most curious joint, with the forward/backward tilt of the foot handled by the wheel, and the side-to-side tilt handled by a hinge embedded in the foot, which probably only shifts about 10° in either direction. There is a rotation joint, though, which is entirely unrestricted bar the potential clash with the while protrudences from the ankle wheels. Then, to finish up, there's a toe tilt... but, to be honest, the size of the feet (mainly in terms of their width) means she doesn't stand very securely unless both feet are planted firmly on the ground - dynamic poses will require the use of some kind of stand, though none is included in the set. Add to that, the fact that it's next to impossible to get her to point the gun in any particular direction without it flopping about in her hand, and you've got quite a frustrating action figure.

There are three subsets of the AMK line of TransFormers kits from Yolopark: AMK Mini, AMK Pro and, right in the middle, the plain old AMK Series. However, the scaling within these subsets is a little odd. From what I can find, the AMK Series and AMK Pro figures are about 20-22cm tall, with smaller figures being 16cm, regardless of how they scale with each other, but then there are PMK kits - some of characters from the same source movie - which are substantially larger so, for example, AMK Pro Soundwave from the Bumblebee movie is 20cm tall, but PMK Shockwave from the Bumblebee movie is 30cm tall, despite being about the same height in the movie. I can see this driving some fans nuts.

That said, I fully understand Yolopark's decision to place the cogless versions of the four characters in the AMK Mini set, while the cogged versions are AMK Series, even if that does lead to inaccuracies in the relative heights of the four characters.

I've said for years that I don't understand the point of non-transforming TransFormers toys, and this figure is the perfect example of why that is. As an action figure, it has its good points and its bad points... but I'd have to say that this is far more disappointing than Hasbro's wobbly Studio Series version of Elita-1 (which I will get to soon, honest!). Build quality is great, poseability is impressive, on balance, but there's just something underwhelming about Elita-1 versus the other three... and yet I still have no intention of buying any of them. I think I'd like this one a little more if she'd been given a metallic paint job, but I think this is a toy for TransFormers One enthusiasts and customisers more than the average TransFormers fan.