Dave's Transformers Studio Series Rant: Deluxe wave 22

#104 Nightbird (RotB, Nissan GT-R R33)
#105 Autobot Mirage (RotB, Porsche)

Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Studio/Deluxe22

CAPSULES

$25 price point.

#104 Nightbird: Probably the best toy available for this version of the
character, but that's very faint praise indeed. Robot mode is unstable and
looks wrong on many levels, transformation is mostly okay, vehicle mode is
good and licensed. Mildly recommended.

#105 Autobot Mirage: The more I played with this, the worse it got. A
lot of the problems seem to be in the execution rather than the core design,
but did no one actually play with a physical version this toy before sending
the specs off to the factory? Avoid.

RANTS

Packaging: Standard 2023 Deluxe boxes, which is to say that if you grab
the top of the box you've got a good chance of accidentally tearing the top
border of the front. Both have licensing marks on the back (a shiny holofoil
sticker for Mirage).

Licensing: On that topic, I wonder why these are fully licensed while
the regular movie line versions are not. It could be as simple as siloed
teams, with the RotB team not having a licensing budget while Studio Series
does. For some of the cheaper versions of Mirage and Nightbird, I suppose
they might not have been able to guarantee a certain minimum quality level to
be allowed to use the license, but the Deluxe version of Nightbird seems to
be sufficiently good even if Hair Scrunchy Nightbird was never going to
impress a licensor. I suppose it could be a combination of the two ideas as
well: the Studio Series line is consistently able to satisfy licensors so
they have a regular negotiator, but the "a few months and we're gone" movie
tie-in toy line didn't see the point of investing in as much (or any)
licensing.

DECEPTICON: NIGHTBIRD
Assortment: #104
Altmode: Nissan GT-R R33
Transformation Difficulty: 21 steps
Previous Name Use: GenSelects, RotB
Previous Mold Use: None
Movie: RotB
Scene: Attack at the Museum

NIGHTBIRD and the TERRORCONS fight back the AUTOBOTS to steal the
Transwarp Key.

Packaging: Five plastic ties hold the robot onto the inner tray, but the
back kibble is flattened out to fit and some of it ends up between the legs,
it looks pretty weird. The sword is in a folded out lower left corner of the
tray, but they added a plastic tie as well since I guess it's too narrow to
stay in with just the folded cardboard. Unless you want to just cut or tear
the tray, it takes some fiddling to get all the backpack kibble through the
hole in the tray to finish freeing the figure.
The backdrop is of the museum exterior art installation (that gets
pretty wrecked in that scene).
The first six steps of the instructions (teal-blue accent color) involve
getting it from packaged mode and into robot mode, and even then it's missing
a couple of bits (the toes need to be folded out, the shoulderpads flipped
up, the chest sides pressed together, and the center of the hood piece can be
folded up against the windshield). Really, the instructions just cover the
backpack. The tabs that hold the backpack in place are fairly week, resting
in four-sided rectangular indents rather than going into five-sided slots.
Oh, and it doesn't even completely cover the backpack, as TFWiki notes
there's a slot in the airdam that goes on a tab on the underside of the
spoiler, which might help stability if it wasn't more of a "rests in the
slot" situation. Negligible friction keeping it in, sadly. The whole
backpack seems to depend on an order of magnitude more friction than exists
on the real toy, probably one of those "it works in the renders, no need to
test a physical copy before sending it to the factory" situations.

Robot Mode: Technically she has the wings and claws of her movie model,
they're just very small. The wings are little fold outs at the top of the
backpack, more like imp wings than the almost-jet wings she had in the movie.
There's little molded nubs on the backs of the hands which I guess are
supposed to be the claws. Most of the vehicle mode is folded up into the
backpack or the hip armor, leaving slightly more than half the hood as part
of the chest, and some rear fenders on the feet. Ultimately, it looks less
like a female-form robot that turns into a car, and more like a female-form
robot that skinned a car to wear its shell as a poofy dress. Oh, and with
Breast Inflation Fetish levels of chest.
While I give props to the designers to making the effort to give her a
sort of feathered skirt look to keep with the "bird" part of her name, the
molding is split across several pieces and is all in unpainted dark gray
plastic so it sort of gets lost. It looks more like a cingulum (leather
apron thing in Roman armor) than like it's part of a larger skirt.
Ultimately, this is just a symptom of the larger problem of super cheaty
movie animation transformation schemes, which result in even greater "sins"
against toyeticism than the G1 Sunbow animation that Bay derided when talking
up the first movie.
4.75" (12cm) tall in mostly very dark gray with some accents in purple
and rose gold. The chest fender parts are clear colorless plastic, as is
much of the backpack kibble. The helmet forehead is either clear purple
plastic, or more likely clear colorless plastic with transparent purple paint
(nice effect, either way, if marred on mine by a sprue mark or other minor
damage). The wheels, knees, upper arms, skirt center panel, and winglets are
black plastic. Everything else is a very dark gray.
The chest fenders are mostly painted glossy dark gray with rose gold
trim. There's metallic purple on the tops of the winglets, on some details
on the shoulder fronts, and on the wheel hubs. The face is painted silver
with (I think) hot pink eyes. There's some additional rose gold on the shin
shock absorber molded details. The sword blade is painted gloss black.
The neck is a ball joint with the socket inside the head. The ninja
cowl detailing does restrict the range of motion somewhat, but since the edge
goes under the upper torso plates the head can still manage about 45 degrees
to the side either way. The waist is a smooth swivel, but there's so much
interference between the backpack and the hip armor that it can barely
wiggle. The shoulders are ball joints, with the armor pads separately hinged
on top of them. Swivels right above the hinge elbows, no wrist
articulation. Pinned universal hips with a pretty good range of motion
considering that they have those big armor skirts attached via restricted
ball joints. There's swivels right above the top knee joints, the knees are
double hinges with kneecap pieces in the middle rather than attached to upper
or lower leg. There's transformation hinges mid-shin that can be bent a
little to act as "keep the feet flat" joints. The toes fold out on
transformation hinges, otherwise not useful articulation (folding them all
the way out puts a brake on the wheels, too). The winglets are snapped onto
mushroom pegs and can sort of flap, I guess, but can't be completely put away
without ruining what little stability the backpack has.
As usual, the fists can hold 5mm pegs. There is technically a 3mm
socket in the back of the pelvis, good luck getting at it through all the
vehicle shell kibble. There's non-standard rectangular tabs on the skirt
armor and another on the back for attaching the sword...and that's it. Of
course, it's not like there's even room on the skinny feet to put a socket,
and the backpack is so unstable I wouldn't want to try putting any sockets
there either. Even the sword storage tab is dicey.
Oddly, she only comes with a single sword, despite having storage in
both modes for two. So, I guess you get to decide which hip to store the
sword in this mode, and which side of the underbody to use in vehicle mode.
The sword is a single piece of dark gray plastic 2.5" (6.5cm) long, with
panel lines along the blade implying it can do that "turn into a bladed
chain" trick or otherwise separate the bits for Purposes. The grip is a
rounded rectangle designed to go into 5mm fist sockets, there's a rectangular
slot at the top of the hilt that goes around a tab on either skirt side, and
a trigger-like tab that goes into a slot on the underside for vehicle
storage.

Transformation: Well, I got it transformed without anything breaking or
popping off, which is never a guarantee, so that went well. Lots of panel
folding and unfolding, probably the trickiest bit is that you need to fold
the legs up while rotating the side panels, and then get them snapped against
the front fenders while the forearms remain in the right position to take
some of the tabs on the panels. Once the panels are snapped in place, the
forearms can't be pushed upwards if they slipped out during the process, you
have to unpeg from the front and try again. Also, on the topic of the side
panels, the double hinges are hard to unfold all the way, but I had better
luck unfolding the hinge that's closer to the front of the car first, then
using its stiffness to unfold the other hinge. The other way around makes it
almost impossible to unfold the front hinge.