Real Gear Robots Night Beat 7

Real Gear Robots was a bit of an odd moment for me, as a Collector. Cunningly pitched as movie toys, but originally planned as being tangential to the Cybertron/Galaxy Force toyline, it was precisely the sort of thing I'd aim to avoid these days.

I surely can't imagine a similar toyline being popular now, especially given how simplistic and awkward most of them were... but, for whatever reason, I found the first wave or so quite compelling.

 

Real Gear Robots Power Up VT6

One of the most common problems with the Real Gear Robots line was that it was a combination of extremely basic engineering and the need to ensure the alternate mode was instantly recognisable as the gadget it was intended to represent. Given that many of the gadgets chosen for the line were either awkwardly shaped, or essentially small boxes with buttons.

Over the years, Hasbro and Takara have come up with some genuinely ingenious ways of transforming rectangular blocks of various thicknesses into reasonable-looking robots but, on balance, I'd say they've probably had more misses than hits.

But which category does Power Up VT6 fall into? Read on, and find out..!

 

Real Gear Robots Zoom Out 25X

If you were under the impression that the Real Gear Robots toyline couldn't possibly get any worse than Speed Dial 800... You'd be about right. However, it's a very close-run thing when it comes to the last few I bought. The funniest thing about the line is that, just 15 or so years later, so many of the alternate modes are so out of date, and Zoom Out 25x is saddled with one such example, along with another of the line's terrible names.

Given that there are already digital (photo) cameras and (ancient-style) cellular telephones available in the line, a camcorder feels like another logical addition. It has as much play value in its alternate mode as in its robot mode, and it's certainly the same kind of consumer technology... But is it a worthwhile addition to this strange and short-lived, movie-adjacent toyline?

Real Gear Robots Spyshot 6

All things considered, when Hasbro decided to launch a range of TransFormers toys modelled after real-world electronic devices, my thoughts and feelings tend toward "what took them so long?". Micro Change had been part of the foundation of the brand, back in the early 1980s, but the focus turned more toward vehicles as the line progressed... These toys might have been in development alongside the Cybertron/Galaxy Force line, but it took the 2007 live action movie to shift focus back. By positing that our technological leaps in electronics had been achieved by reverse engineering Megatron, the movie gave these toys some context.

Given the number of electronic devices already in the TransFormers back catalogue, one might have expected a new take on Soundwave or Reflector... but the closest we got to the former was Booster X10 - a clear reference to Laserbeak - and the closest we got to the latter... would be this little fellow.

But, of course, cameras have got substantially smaller since the 1980s, what with the digital revolution, and all... and just 15 years after this toy appeared, many people believe cameras, per se, to have been made redundant by those built into cellphones... So let's take a look at this relic of the past, and see how it works as a TransFormers toy.

 

Real Gear Robots Speed Dial 800

Given the increasing popularity of cellular telephony over the last few decades, it was perhaps inevitable that a toyline like Real Gear Robots would include a compact, hand-held phone as one of its innocuous devices... And, in fact, the concept has even been revisited since, with the 2017 au X TransFormers line of INFOBAR figures, featuring Optimus Prime, Megatron and (of course) Bumblebee, created as a promotion with the Japanese-made devices.

Weird as those are, though, they're not a patch on the abject insanity of the attempt Hasbro had made ten years earlier. Here, I present what must surely be the nadir of the Real Gear Robots line... Read on, if you dare!

 

Real Gear Robots Longview

The strange thing about some of the device modes chosen for the Real Gear Robots line is that they offered little by way of actual play value. Sure, you could just about wear the earpiece provided with Booster X10 and Night Beat 7, but the buttons on the main unit were immobile. Much the same could be said for High Score 100, Speed Dial 800 and Zoom Out 25X, despite all being button-centric forms.

Enter Longview - not only one of the few to have missed out on the bizarre number suffixes applied to most of the figures in the line, but one of the few who, like Micro Change-derived toys such as Perceptor, have a semi-functional gimmick appropriate to their device mode... And all without the need for buttons.

 

Real Gear Robots High Score 100

The question of scale is one that comes up with almost every TransFormers toyline, and it's only relatively recently that Hasbro have even attempted to make their toys vaguely consistent within a given franchise. Even in Studio Series, there are discrepancies in the size of the robots due to the consistent scaling of the vehicle mode, and abject failures where two robots of approximately the same size class somehow transform into vehicles of entirely different scales.

What hope, then, for the 2007 toyline that styled itself a contemporary reworking of Takara Tomy's Micro Change concept, with items of present-day tech transforming into dinky robots within the bounds of a single size class..?

Well, obviously it had to go wrong to one degree or another and, while it's easy enough to make a pocket-sized toy out of pocket-sized tech, the same doesn't quite hold true for some of the other bits of hardware chosen for the toyline... And High Score 100 is one such example.

 

Real Gear Robots Booster X10

If you think about it, the concept of Real Gear Robots is as much a homage to those G1 toys taken from Takara's Micro Change line as it was a logical extension of the 2007 movie line, inspired by the transforming robots created by blasts of energy from the AllSpark cube. What better way to honour the very beginnings of the TransFormers line than to revisit the concept of robots in disguise as life-size items of consumer electronics? In a way, isn't it more strange that Hasbro had avoided that segment of the original toyline for so long?

 

However, the connection to the movies was, by all accounts, sheer good fortune, because the toys had apparently been in development alongside the Cybertron/Galaxy Force toyline. Long overdue though this reboot was, I think Hasbro were right to hold off on it, since it has no tangible connection to that line, and probably would not have garnered the same attention as a standalone line at the time, as it later achieved as an offshoot of the first movie toyline.

But let's take a look at one of my first purchases of the line and see how it compares to its distant ancestors.