Had to work overnight last night for the post-Easter conversion at Walmart. I swear, as I get older, the overnight shifts are getting harder for me to recover from instead of easier. Sure, I can power through a work shift in the middle of the night with no sleep, but then I suffer for like a week because my sleep schedule's been so badly derailed. Also, I was only able to sleep for about four hours when I got off, so I'm cranky and irritable.

It figures that Gears would show up today, of all days. I'm too tired to even enjoy him. The delivery guy didn't even ring the doorbell. He was just sitting there on my porch in the cold for who knows how many hours. He'll probably shatter the first time I try to transform him.

(I was just going to complain throughout this entire review, like Gears would do, but the truth is that I really like this toy a lot, and I don't want to give the impression I'm dissatisfied. He's actually pretty awesome.)

Hasbro Pulse sold out of this guy so quickly that I was unable to secure one, but thankfully, Big Bad Toy Store came to my rescue!

So, Gears here is the first official G1 release for United (though I did get a shipping notification from Hasbro Pulse for Sandstorm, so I should have him at some point this week, I think). The lack of gooey, delicious Geewun goodness for this product year means I've been spending a lot less on toys... well, a lot less on Transformers, anyway. The money finds its way towards other products like the MOTU toys on Mattel Creations or the many delicious NECA Ninja Turtles sets at this year's Target Haul-A-Thon (well, or it would if I could find any of the stuff). My point is that if Hasbro doesn't want my money, there are plenty of other toy companies who do.

He's marketed as "G1 UNIVERSE AUTOBOT GEARS," which is a bit weird, since G1 is typically the default and they don't often go out of their way to specify that. But, using the long appelation creates a more legally-defensible trademark than just "Gears" since it's a common dictionary word (regular words like Hound or Jazz are always harder to defend legally than made-up names like Sunstreaker or Skywarp), so that's likely why they did it here.

He stands at just under 4.5" in robot mode. According to the Sunbow scale guide used for the G1 cartoon, out of the six original Mini Autobots, Bumblebee and Cliffjumper and Windcharger and Gears were all pretty close to the same size (Bumblebee is the smallest in fiction) while Brawn and Huffer stand a little bit taller. For Legacy, Gears actually stands eye-to-eye with Kingdom Huffer and Studio Series '86 Brawn, which actually kind of makes more sense, since he's a truck, so he would be a bit bigger than a sedan.

He's a bright red color complemented by a medium blue for the arms and parts of the legs. Evan Brooks mentioned in one of the last Hasbro livestreams that they were aware that Gears changed color in the cartoon when he transformed, and they tried to maintain as much fidelity to his cartoon look as possible. I wasn't expecting this, but they managed to make all four of his wheels disappear for his robot mode. Two of them are tucked inside his robot chest, and two more are folded up inside his backpack. That's quite impressive that they accomplished this at this scale. His robot shoulders have sculpted detail that suggests that his front wheels "really" shrink down and become embedded within his shoulders, which is a close approximation to what the abstract shapes of his cartoon model tended to suggest (on the G1 toy, the wheels were on his robot arms and the backs of the legs).

He's got very impressive articulation for a toy of this size. He's got shoulders that move on an x and y and z axis, double-hinge elbow joints, a swivel waist, hip joints that both swivel and pivot out, mid-thigh rotation, double-hinge knees, and the all-important ankle tilts. The extra shoulder movement is because of a transformation hinge, but it's super cool. He can grasp his gun with two hands, like Masterpiece Bumblebee! Where his head was frozen in place on the G1 toy, this version had the ridiculous block-shaped head which is mounted on a ball joint. And I love his little head sculpt. He's so surly. Also, there's an "M" symbol emblazoned upon the back of his head, a fitting homage to his origins from the Microchange toy line in Japan.

The toy is C.O.M.B.A.T.-ready to some degree, with five-millimeter holes in the bottoms of his boots, the sides of his legs, the sides of his backpack. But, you can tell an effort was made. It seems like they're falling away from making toys compatible with Tamashii-style figure stands, as Gears lacks the mounting point for one (Brawn didn't have one either). He comes with a cute little black rifle that is blast effect compatible. (Remember blast effects? Remember how cool they were?)

Rather infamously, the toy is designed with an opening chest panel, designed to replicate the scene from the episode "Changing Gears" in which a circuit card is removed from him which modulated his personality (I think that Mark Maher called it the "grumpy circuit"). This absolutely wasn't necessary, but that story was arguable Gears' spotlight episode, and it's great that they wanted to pay homage to it. There was sadly no room to include a removable circuit card. I love character-specific details like this. (When they do a Deluxe-class Powerglide, I fully expect him to have an opening chest with some lights in the shape of a little heart.)

It's worth noting that the chest panel is packaged separately, wrapped in tissue and included with his gun, taped to the back of the inner cardboard tray and is NOT ATTACHED in robot mode. It will look to consumers like the piece has already been stolen, but it's likely Hasbro did this specifically to prevent it from being stolen (this happened with the chest piece for Origin Jazz at countless Target stores). It's mentioned in the instructions, and it's a one-time assembly. You don't need to pop off the chest to transform the toy... though you may want to! Read on.

As with a lot of these neo-G1 updates, the transformation is based on the vintage toy but with some new tricks. The robot legs fold up into the back of the truck as you might expect, but this time the robot arms fold up and tuck into the undercarriage. The backpack becomes the hood of the truck, covering the robot head (and you can turn it backwards if you don't want his face visible underneath). Pieces inside the robot feet form part of the truck cabin, and the robot chest, weirdly, ends up plainly visible on the back of the truck. Oh, no! It's Siege Starscream all over again!

There are a couple of solutions to this. You can either pop the chest off and just set it aside, or you can attach it upside-down so that it folds up and mostly tucks under the truck mode. Actually, I wonder if perhaps this was part of the original design, perhaps using a secondary hinge, until some Hasbro bean-counter wanted to simplify the toy's design and save a few pennies. I think attaching the chest with a ball joint would have solved this problem nicely. But, they didn't do that.

Truck mode is not quite 3.5" from bumper to bumper. It's got opaque painted light blue windows (no translucent plastics here!) Many people have complained about how skinny the tires are. They're like bicycle tires. Obviously, it was necessary due to his design and the way they tuck away during transformation, but it does make the truck mode look odd. (They're about the same as the wheels on Kigndom Huffer, and nobody really complained about that.) You can fold all four wheels under the truck if you want him to do an impression of the DeLorean from Back to the Future. ("Where we're going, we don't need roads. And who wants 'em anyway? They're so bumpy, and it messes with my suspension...") Instead of the Penny Racer styling, he's styled closer to a GMC Topkick this time (Ironhide's vehicle mode in the 2007 Michael Bay movie) which is actually reasonably close in style and shape to his original look.

In this form, he's got two five-millimeter peg-holes in his roof, and four more on the sides of the car, one above each wheel. Lots of options to attach weapons and things. His handheld gun can plug into the side of his truck mode (the right side, really, because the ammo magazine gets in the way on the left side).

Gears is already reportedly on the slab for a Small Foot redeco, which I expect will use the colors of the e-Hobby toy and end up being orangey-yellow and red. It's highly likely that Gears will also be reused as Swerve in some capacity at some point. Unlike Gears, whose truck wheels were all eliminated from his robot design for his Sunbow animation model, Swerve is drawn much more closely to the shared toy design, and has wheels embedded within his arms and legs. Whether Hasbro modifies the wheel placement or whether they just keep the same transformation and engineering remains to be seen. (They didn't change it for Pipes, so it's possible they'll just do little fake wheels for Swerve's shoulders like they did for Masterpiece Red Alert.)

I know there are lots of different iterations of Transformers to celebrate, but I'm an old school fan, so I'm mostly just collecting G1 over here (and, to a lesser extent, Beast Wars). There have been a lot of toys released this year that haven't interested me at all, but grumpy little Gears here makes me really happy.

Zob (and now I can't waaaaaaaaait for Windcharger!)

Zobovor wrote:

> Rather infamously, the toy is designed with an opening chest panel, designed to replicate the scene from the episode "Changing Gears" in which a circuit card is removed from him which modulated his personality (I think that Mark Maher called it the "grumpy circuit").

Mark Maher has recently suggested on Instagram that the Laserbeak cassette that came with Core-class Soundwave would make a good circuit card for Gears. It's a bit too large to be able to stuff into his chest compartment and close it back up, but I think it's a cool idea, and a fun way of repurposing existing parts to slightly improve the play value of the current releases.

Of course, if Core-class Laserbeak is too big, it follows that the World's Smallest Transformers version of Ravage might actually be a better size. I'm sure he would fit with room to spare!

Zob (all my WST's are in a box somewhere, or I would try it right here and now)

Props to getting into character. I thought the opening of your review seemed atypically negative, and then it all clicked. Now you have to go back and do the Dead End review...