By and large, the Buzzworthy Bumblebee line has been filled with
products I have been perfectly content to live without: regardless of
which line the toys are derived from, they have been mostly
superfluous repaints. When it comes to the boxed sets, there have been
far more misses than hits. When the Worlds Collide set
came along, I ended up buying the
Blackarachnia
figure
purely because she's a Femme-Bot and it was a decent reference to the
original Beast Wars toy's box art, while the other figures were reportedly a mess of loose joints.
This second 'Collides' set was, at first, marginally more
interesting. I wasn't overly fussed by the scarcity of the
Netflix-branded Earthrise Bumblebee toy because,
having already bought
Cliffjumper, I knew it wouldn't be a patch on the Classics toy from 2006... But
Goldbug was another matter, because I'm quite fond of the G1
Throttlebot, and he's sufficiently distinct from Bumblebee. Similarly,
I'd passed on the TV show-inspired Kingdom Scorponok figure because I
was disappointed by the look of it but, now I own a reissue of the
original toy in show-accurate colours, a
toy-coloured repaint of the Kingdom figure was potentially a fun
comparison. Skywasp was a stupid/amazing pun,
and so instantly interesting, in spite of the new mold's obvious
inferiority to
Generations Waspinator... Which left Ransack: a repaint of the Legacy Kickback figure that's
barely an improvement on the G1 original, representing one of
the 'Deluxe Insecticons' which, back in the day, had a
wholly unique mold that was never made available in the UK.
So, when presented with this set at a RRP of £93, I turned my nose up and
avoided it,
even though that breaks down as four figures for slightly less than the
price of four individual Deluxes. However, seeing it cut down to £45 at GAME, it seemed like a sweeter
deal... But let's see how I feel about it with the figures in-hand...
