Dave's Transformers Rant: Robot Enhanced Design wave 2

Arcee (TF:Prime)
Cheetor (BW)

Permalink: https://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Gen/RED2

RED expands into lines other than G1, which is nice...there's nostalgia
for stuff other than the 80s, after all.

CAPSULES

$20 price point.

Arcee: Loose knees and disappointing accessories, but otherwise a decent
representation of a character I didn't expect to get any more toys.
Recommended.

Cheetor: The decision to cast the metallic yellow as dark copper makes
the figure look way off, and the non-standard blast effects look like candle
wax drippings. A decent figure, but Netflix Kingdom Cheetor looks better
overall, IMO. Mildly recommended.

RANTS

Packaging: Same basic format as wave 1, but with the relevant show logo
on the top of the box (helpful in picking them out of a stack) as well as in
the lower left of the front. The "flaking" color on Arcee is a pale purple
(probably to distinguish from Soundwave's blue), and Cheetor's is yellow.

AUTOBOT: ARCEE
Assortment: F0738
Series: TF: Prime
Accessories: Arm blades, arm blade energy effects, option fists, gun hands,
energon cube

Packaging: Two ties together across the chest of the robot, none on the
accessories. The winglets on back poke through the tray. The backdrop is
pseudo-blueprints of Arcee and her accessories.
The render on the back shows the energy effects as clear purple, but the
actual toy has them in opaque gray.

Robot Mode: Well, it's missing a few colors (they always do), but looks
pretty good. Oddly, the face is all printed, with small dots visible on the
eyes and lips as if they were printed in an old-style comic book. Weirdly,
the default hands are posed in "holding guns with finger on trigger" shapes,
despite the fact that the figure comes with no handheld weapons. They did
make some compromises to get the skinny femmebot look here, the biggest one
being that the "pants" piece is not actually connected to anything, and can
rattle around to help improve range of motion on the hips. The main joint
that seems to suffer from the skinny design is the knee. Both knees on mine
are super loose, even after washing and insertion of clearcoat. They don't
feel like they peg between knee and thigh can be safely removed (very wide
mushroom tip), but there's way too much space around the peg's shaft so even
if you can get the hinge stiffened up there's not much that can be done about
the rotation. Oh, and the chestplate is removable. This isn't a case of
"someone forgot to glue it down," there's details on the chest and the inner
face of the chestplate that are clearly meant to be seen. (Topless Arcee is
"safe for work" and fairly flat.)
A tiny bit taller than 6" (15cm) and very leggy as befits the Prime
design aesthetic. Mostly dark blue and medium gray, with some light gray and
dark copper bits. The head, chestplate, back wings, forearms, pants, pelvis,
and boots are dark blue plastic. Medium gray plastic is used for the torso
core, abdomen, upper arms, elbow joints, thighs, and toes. The hands are
light gray plastic.
There's light gray paint on the face, ear cups, sternum, shoulder gear
details, much of the abdomen, part of the knee joints, the knee spikes,
"spats" on the toes, and the hub parts of the wheels molded into the boots.
If you look carefully, there's also light gray on the hub of the wheel molded
into the back. Medium gray paint on the center of the chest, and much of the
tech spike greebles on the backs of the boots. Dark copper paint on the
helmet crest and cheek details, around the elbows, spikes on the wrists, and
the sides of the boots. The gem on the helmet crest is painted red, and
there's Energon Blue stripes on the thighs. The backs of the hands are
painted dark blue, a good match for the plastic. The face is printed with
shades of light blue for the eyes, and pink lips. The eyebrows and eye
borders are dark blue. Note, while the original toys generally had Autobot
symbols (particularly on the sternum), the animation model left that off.
There's a restricted ball joint at the top of the neck. The waist
doesn't turn, but there's a hinge in the abdomen that can rock back and forth
a bit, although it always snaps back. Universal joint shoulders, elbows, and
wrists (all option hands have the same jointing at their wrists). Universal
joint hips, upper thigh swivels, universal joint knees (swivel part is where
it attaches to the thigh, and that's the super loose part), universal joint
toes. There's 1/8" hexagonal sockets on the undersides of the toes, but
they're pretty shallow.
While her default hands can hold Cheetor's rifle, if you attach an
energy effect to it her elbow is generally not strong enough to hold it up.
Even if you try to straight-arm it, her elbow hyperextends a bit when holding
the whole thing.

Accessories and Option Parts: While the main figure looks decent, they
dropped the ball on these, especially the arm blades.

Arm blades and Energy Effects: Purely light gray plastic with no paint.
The lack of paint on the arm blades is tolerable, but the energy effects
might as well not be there at all if they're just rubbery light gray. It
makes it look like her blades are magnetized and picking up iron shavings or
something.
The blades extend a little past the trigger fingertips. They more or
less look like they extend from inside the forearms, but the lack of blue
paint on armor-like chunk makes this less obvious.
http://www.dvandom.com/kitbash/REDArcee.JPG for my touchup on these. I
used "purple flash" color shifting paint on the energy effects, they shimmer
between purple and blue.

Option Fists: Light gray plastic with dark blue on the backs of the
fists, they look better as default fists than the ones that hold nonexistent
guns.

Gun Hands: First, it's possible to put the gun hands in place while the
arm blades are still there. Each is 2" (5cm) long and light gray plastic
with a few details in medium gray. The wrist hinges bend sideways rather
than up and down, at least if you have the guns attached as in the package
photos.

"Energon Cube": This really looks more like a damaged AllSpark Cube with
lots of greebly surface details and a chipped off corner, just cast in purple
translucent plastic. As if they screwed up and swapped the plastic colors
intended for this and the energy effects. Roughly an inch (2.5cm) on a side,
with one corner more heavily eroded away than the rest.

Overall: Base figure looks decent, most of the appearance issues come in
the accessories. The knees are a literal weak point, though. Mostly worth
getting for the novelty of a mostly show-accurate Prime toy.

MAXIMAL: CHEETOR
Assortment: F0739
Series: Beast Wars
Accessories: Option hands (gun grip, open palm), rifle, two blast effects,
energon crystal

Packaging: No ties on the robot. Not sure if the chest was supposed to
be glued in place or not, but on mine it popped off quite easily. The
backpack stayed on during removal-from-tray, barely. No ties on the
accessories, the fatter energy blast had its tip bent over. Backdrop has
pseudo-blueprints of Cheetor and his accessories.
The package renders show the blast effects and energon crystal as clear
purple plastic, the actual things are cloudy translucent purple plastic.

Robot Mode: Okay, the mold is pretty close to the animation model from
season 1 of Beast Wars. But...so much bronze. They took all the parts that
were metallic yellow in the cartoon and instead of making them shiny yellow
or even gold, they went straight to something in the bronze or copper range.
Way too dark, as if they were using a reference image with bad lighting.
Yeah, having it be just shiny yellow would make the toy much lower in
contrast overall, but this is not an improvement. A lesser issue is that
while most of the spots are there, they left off the spots on the
front-facing parts of the beast-hips backpack, as well as paint on the claws
there. Both the beast head on the chest and the backpack of beast legs are
removable, and as with Arcee there's molded details on the chest that make it
clear the head should be removable.
6" (15cm) tall in a mix of yellow, slightly metallic blue, slightly
metallic copper, light yellow, and black. Slightly metallic grayish blue
plastic is used for the torso core, shoulders, and pelvis. A slightly
lighter and less metallic blue plastic is used for the shoulder, elbow, knee,
and ankle joints. Slightly metallic copper plastic is found on the biceps,
forearms, fists, and wrist joints. Bright yellow plastic for the head, back
panel, removable beast bits, forearm armor panels, thighs, shins, and feet.
Metallic blue paint that definitely looks shinier than the plastic is
found on the face, bottom edge of the helmet sides and back, the elbows, the
inner faces of the forearm armor, most of the shins (other than the shin
spikes), and the anklet. Copper paint is on the faceplate, thigh fronts,
knee sides, and round details on the front faces of the beast leg backpack.
Bright yellow paint (decent match for the plastic) is found on the sides and
back. Light yellow or cream paint is found on the forearm armor, sides,
chest beast head, calves, and "slippers". Except on the slippers, it's got
gentle fades into bright yellow. There's black spots on the beast head,
forearm armor, thighs, calves, heels, sides and backplate, and the back side
of the leg pack on back. Black is also used for various cheetah-face details
on the chest. The beast eyes are red with black pupils, the forehead gem is
red, and the robot eyes are squinty orange.
As is common with RED figures, there's a lot of universal joints:
shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips, and ankles (although they're a bit weird,
with the swivel part pointed mostly forwards). The neck is a restricted ball
joint, the waist a smooth swivel. The abdomen hinge is like Arcee's, but
will stay put within its 30 degree or so range of motion rather than snapping
back. Bicep swivels, and since the swivel part of the elbows is where they
meet the biceps, you can rotate the bicep pieces without moving the lower
arms. Upper thigh swivels, double hinge knees. There are 1/8" sockets in
the heels.