Dave's Transformers Studio Series Rant: Buzzworthy Bumblebee Voyager
0;136;0c
#102BB Optimus Prime (semitractor cab)

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

Technically this uses a few parts from #38 (Bumblebee movie Optimus
Prime), but so few that this is less of a retool and more of a "grabbed a few
assets from the old computer model to make entirely new tooling" situation.
(According to TFWiki, just the windshield, wheels, and a few possibly
coincidental transformation steps...only so many ways to transform an Optimus
Prime.) So, this will be done as a New Toy review.

CAPSULES

$35 price point, Target exclusive but I got it on Pulse.

#102BB Optimus Prime: Good robot mode, interesting transformation that's
quite clever...in front. The back half of the vehicle mode seems to have
been written off for a tax credit or something. Mildly recommended.

RANT

Packaging: This is in the standard Buzzworthy trade dress, an
open-window box with mostly generic deco. However, one of the panels on the
left side has Rise of the Beasts Optimus Primal on it. It does have the Rise
of the Beasts logo on top, but since it's just black text on a yellow
background it doesn't really stand out. On the other hand, it's likely to be
the only Buzzworthy Voyager on shelves during the time it's available, so I
guess it doesn't need to be terribly recognizable. The instructions are in
the usual grayscale with yellow-orange as seen in other Buzzworthy subline
toys.

AUTOBOT: OPTIMUS PRIME
Assortment: #102BB
Altmode: Semitractor
Transformation Difficulty: 34 steps
Previous Name Use: Yes
Previous Mold Use: None
Movie: Rise of the Beasts
Scene: Street Festival Stakeout

"OPTIMUS PRIME and the AUTOBOTS keep watch in case of a TERRORCON
attack."

This is the scene in (probably) Mexico after the Autobots arrive in the
vicinity of the temple and meet up with Wheeljack, but before they encounter
the Maximals...I think. Not one of the more iconic or memorable scenes.

Packaging: Four rattan strings hold the robot to the inner tray. The
sword and hand-cannon barrel tip are wrapped up in tissue and taped to the
lower left corner.
The backdrop is a side street in the Mexican village, flanked by
two-story apartment buildings, with the street festival barely visible at the
distant intersection. Optimus would have a hard time fitting between the
buildings.
The render on the box back shows the gray plastic as being significantly
darker than it really is, either someone was messing with contrast settings
or they decided to go with a different shade of plastic after the render was
approved.

Robot Mode: Your basic greebled-up G1-inspired Optimus Prime, with the
split window chest that has a gap where the sternum would be, a non-smooth
faceplate, and lots of random techie details on the abdomen. There's long
but unchromed smokestacks on the outer faces of the shoulders, bent at the
tops to point outwards. There's fake headlights on the shoulder fronts,
oddly, I guess they wanted to show a few more vehicle mode bits even if it
was cheating (the shoulder fronts aren't even visible in vehicle mode). The
shin vents are excessively greebled up, and there's box shapes stuck to the
outer edges of the knees that look like they were maybe intended as rocket
launcher pods? There's no armor skirt in front, but there are narrow armor
panel flaps on either side of the waist. The back panel is the reverse face
of the truck front, and there's various mecha-shoulderblade panels and
sockets and a vaguely turbine-like shape acting as a hump.
A quite respectable (for modern Voyagers) 7" (17.5cm) tall at the head,
with the smokestacks rising to a total of about 7.5" (almost 19cm). In the
usual red/blue/gray of an Optimus Prime, with a few gunmetal, silver, and
yellow bits. Dark blue plastic is used for the head, most of the back panel,
the abdomen, the front of the pelvis, the outer shells of the boots, and the
feet. The sword is also dark blue plastic. Red plastic is used for the core
of the upper torso, the chest panels (other than the windows), most of each
shoulderpad, and the forearms. The chest windows are smoky clear plastic,
and the six wheels are all black plastic. The rest of the toy is light gray,
including the collar, shoulder struts, tops and outer armor panels of the
shoulders, outer stripes of the forearms, middle of the belly, and all the
"bones". The cannon barrel bit is also light gray plastic.
Gloss red paint is laid thickly on the backplate. There's silver on the
faceplate, the helmet crest, the stripes on the shoulder fronts and inner
faces of the forearms, the wheel hubs, the sun shades on the collarbone area
and some details on the underside of the chest panels A darker gunmetal
metallic paint is used on the blue plastic parts of the abdomen and pelvis,
the kneecaps, the shin vents, and most of the sword. The windshield wipers
are gloss black, the eyes are light bright blue, the waist details are done
in bright yellow, and the Autobot symbols on the shoulder fronts are white
outlines.
The neck is a ball joint, the waist a smooth swivel. There's also a
transformation joint that lets the torso bend forwards on a hinge and it can
bend fairly far before it starts to look like he got cut in half. The
shoulders are swivels on the end of struts that lift up on hinges. If you
need more range, the sockets of those struts are on swivels as well, for
transformation purposes. (Note, when transforming back to robot mode, make
sure to swivel the sockets back up, they're harder to move with the back
panel closed up.) Bicep swivels, double hinge elbows that bend backwards too
(for transformation), swivel wrists with a little bit of side to side hinge
movement on the transformation hinges. Despite the double hinges, the arms
can't bend double because of the bulky forearms and shoulderpads. The hips
are weird. Technically pinned hinge and swivel joints, but the swivels are
pinned almost a centimeter in front of the hinge center. So the legs cannot
swing backwards at all, and lifting them forwards more than a little ends up
looking very weird because the whole hip drops down. The little armor flaps
on the hips are hinged to get out of the way. Upper thigh swivels, hinge
knees, and the ankles are side to side hinges at the top and then restricted
ball joints where they go into the feet. No real forwards-backwards motion
at the ankles, the sockets are non-spherical so that if you bend the toes up
a little the foot just snaps back down. The chest can open up as if to
receive a Matrix, but there's no Matrix in there or socket for one, just a
light gray panel with slots for securing tabs on the window pieces.
Technically, the smokestacks are on swivels, but this seems to be mainly to
let them get a little out of the way during transformation and reduce the
chances of breakage, not because they can usefully point anywhere different.
As far as connections go, it feels like they're giving up on the idea of
standard 5mm and 3mm pegs here. Yes, there's 5mm sockets on the fists and a
couple on the back. There's 3mm sockets on the forearms to let the swords
attach over the backs of the fists using 3mm rods, and the main sword hilt is
5mm (rounded rectangle). But while the muzzle of the blaster tip is 5mm, it
attaches to the forearm via 4mm peg and socket, the storage peg on the side
of the sword is 4mm, and there's 4mm sockets on the outer faces of the
forearms in case you prefer a slightly different arm-blade look for the
sword. The inner thighs have 4mm sockets for vehicle mode sword storage.
The rectangular tabs on the sides of the cannon tip for storage also require
4mm sockets, and the back has a pair of those flanking the 5mm sockets.
There's 2.5mm pegs sticking out of the sides of the smokestacks, onto which
2.5mm sockets from the shins go in vehicle mode. The hip flaps peg down for
vehicle mode using 2mm pegs and sockets. Oh, and there's some slots on top
of the shoulders that look like they'd work with the tabs on the cannon
barrel, but are a tiny bit too small.
Instead of the usual hand-covering morph cannon accessory, this Prime
has just a short barrel end that goes onto the aforementioned 4mm peg
revealed when his fist is stored in his forearm, either side. It's only 18mm
long including a short spike that I suspect is inspired by the igniter on a
flame thrower, and it's a single piece of light gray plastic. While it does
have a 5mm hexagonal aperture, that spike means that most Fire Blast pieces
won't go in very well. It stores via one of the 4mm sockets on the back, or
if you want to pretend it's the Matrix it'll store inside the chest in robot
mode. It rattles around loosely if you do that, though. (Tip: use the sword
to pry open the center of the chest without needing to do more than just open
up the chest window panels first.)
The sword is the usual sort of kinda-khopesh blade Optimus usually has
in the movies, 3.25" (8cm) long including the 3mm peg sticking out of the
pommel end. It's blue plastic, painted over except for the 3mm peg and the
4mm side peg mentioned above. No energy effect paint this time. It can be
held as a traditional sword, attached over the back of the hand using the 3mm
socket above the wrist, or attached to the forearm via the 4mm side peg.
It's meant to be a right handed blade, and looks weird on the left forearm
with the blade ending up upside down. The 3mm peg also makes the sword a
handy lever for opening up the forearm panels to stow the fists if your nails
aren't up to the task.

Transformation: A lot of thought was given to getting panels to move in
the right ways to get a reasonably solid cab with a full roof (little panels
on top of the shoulders fold out to cover the bit behind the collar) and
sides (the front panels of the shoulders fold down to cover other gaps.
While it's a little tricky to get things done in the right order, kudos for a
well thought-out design. Maybe not the best execution, though, as I had a
shoulder come off during transformation and had to force it back together,
and several of the snap-together panel joints really needed to be pinned if
they didn't want them coming off during transformation.
The back half is kinda a write-off. It might've been better if they'd
just been lazy and had you point the toes and press the legs together, but
instead there's multiple panel foldings and rotations that don't result in
anything worthwhile. I suppose it's more stable than just pressing the legs
together (espcecially if you rotate the shoulder-side panels down to flesh
out the back of the cab and give the tabs on the shinplates somewhere to go),
but that's all I can really say in its favor. And the fuel tanks are the
same sort of "fold out but don't snap into position" half-cylinder deals that
seem to be the standard for Optimus molds lately. The sword storage has to
be done during transformation, since it's between the knees and just sort of
sticks up where a trailer hitch should be. The arm cannon muzzle goes on
either side atop some shin armor mess.
The sword is handy to have around when it comes time to pry up panels
that are too-solidly attached with poor leverage points.
Oh, one really weird bit of detailing: there's a fake vehicle grille
that is only visible during transformation. It does not face outwards in
either mode. As part of transformation, you open the chest and fold it up
over the robot face, but then the whole thing rotates down so the grille
piece faces backwards where the back is fairly solid. It isn't even visible
just from opening the chest, you have to fold that piece up to show the
grille detailing. Maybe it's supposed to be how this version reveals the
Matrix chamber, with the actual grille piece sliding up rather than folding
up? Not that there's an actual Matrix chamber or Matrix.

Vehicle Mode: This is the "offroad" variant mode used in the jungle
scenes, if less significantly modified than Bumblebee's, mostly just adding
the brushguard to the front. And yeah, while it's reasonably stable, it
really just pretends that nothing aft of the back of the cab actually
matters. It's a mess back there. I mean, a lack of a usable hitch is one
thing, but this is just miscellaneous robot bits with wheels. I am reminded
about the bit from Donna Barr's Stinz, in which a half-horse (do not call
them centaurs!) says, "Nobody cares about the hair end."
Just under 6" (15cm) long, 2.5" (6.5cm) tall at the cab roof and 3.5"
(9cm) tall including the smokestacks. The usual Prime colors, although the
blue in back is weirdly shaped as if it's trying to crawl up the back of the
cab. While the robot backplate was painted blue plastic, it's a sandwich
with the actual grille part being red plastic with light gray for the
brushguard. The silver stripe across the front extends onto the sides and
turns upwards at the back, with the paint actually covering hinges for once.
The grille and headlights are also painted silver, and the side windows are
painted gloss black. There is a molded spot at the top of the grille area
for a tiny Autobot symbol, but none is printed there. (Micromaster-sized
Toyhax labels should work, though.)
While there's slots for storing the cannon muzzle in the blue crud in
back, there's no standard connectors available in this mode (unless you count
the stored muzzle's 5mm socket). It rolls pretty well, but even with every
tab in its proper slot the six wheels aren't quite all on the same plane for
mine. To get all four rear wheels on the same surface requires popping a
very minor wheelie in front. (But not a minor Wheelie, one is not included.)

Overall: Pretty good robot mode, but it feels like they ran out of
budget or interest when it came to the rear of the vehicle mode. At least
it's not that inexplicable garbage-truck-ish mode several of the main movie
line Optimuses turned into.

Dave Van Domelen, still posting to alt.toys.transformers even after
Google shuts down their portal.