Dave's Transformers Studio Series Rant: Leader Wave 9

86-15 Dinobot Sludge (Brontosaur)

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

Unlike Grimlock and Slug, this one does not come with a little partner
to ride on him, either because they ran out of ideas for passengers or as a
cost-cutting move.

CAPSULE

$53 on Amazon, I gave up on finding it on the shelf. Still haven't seen
it on the shelf as of August 1, 2022.

Dinobot Sludge: Good animation-accurate robot mode, beast mode suffers
in a few significant aesthetic ways, and mine had some manufacturing issues.
But even a good copy wouldn't really thrill me the way Grimlock did, and
there seem to have been some compromises made to the design along the way.
Mildly recommended.

RANT

Packaging: Unlike the previous two Dinobot Leaders, this is in a
no-window box, so there's more room for the art on front. It's also a little
smaller, since it doesn't need to worry about showing off the contents. I
don't have Coronation Starscream, but I think this box is the same size as
that one. 10.5" (26.5cm) tall, 8.75" (22cm) wide, and 4" (10cm) deep, just a
little shorter and narrower than the window boxes.
Since there's no window, the front is a full piece of art with Sludge in
dinosaur mode fighting a horde of relatively tiny Sharkticons. Like, smaller
than his head, which is a bit more of a size difference than I recall from
the movie.
There IS a display backdrop inside, just the walls of the Sharkticon
pit, pretty generic. The figure is tied down to a simple brown cardboard try
folded so that it doesn't rattle around inside. The dino head and neck are
detached and separately tied to the tray, since a fully assembled figure
would be too thick to fit in the box.
The instructions are loose behind the display tray.

AUTOBOT: DINOBOT SLUDGE
Assortment: 86-15
Altmode: Robot Brontosaur
Transformation Difficulty: 31 steps
Previous Name Use: RiD (as Dinobot Sludge, just "Sludge" was G1, and the
character got renamed Slog for a while)
Previous Mold Use: None
Movie: TFtM
Scene: Mockery of Justice

DINOBOT SLUDGE breaks down the courtroom door and crashes the QUINTESSON
trial.

Packaging: Seven rattan ties hold the robot to the tray, with five of
them (all but the wings) reinforced with more cardboard on the back. There's
a few holes in the backing tray for things like heel spurs and wrist claws.
The bronto head and neck is held separately to the tray with two ties. (Yes,
there's a page of the instructions devoted to assembling the robot after
removing all the bits from the tray.) The gun is rolled up in tissue paper
and taped to the back of the tray.

Note: this figure does not come with a ride-on companion, nor did they
provide connectors to let him "borrow" Spike or Wheelie.

Robot Mode: As with the other Dinobot Leaders in Studio '86, he's based
as closely on the G1 animation model as is feasible, with colors simplified
from the G1 toy. It seems most closely based on the illustration produced
for the Takara "Transformers Collection" re-releases from about 2002, as seen
as his main picture on TFwiki. A fair amount of molded detail, but the paint
apps are very simple and animation-friendly. Not that Sludge spent much time
in robot mode.
8.25" (21cm) tall, in the usual Dinobot colors: red chest; black helmet,
thighs, and fists; gray most of the rest of it, but some silver and gold
accents. Bright red plastic is used for the torso front and core. Black is
used for the head, a screwed-on panel in the center of the chest, the pelvis,
thighs, shoulder joints, elbow joints, fists, cannon, and some inobtrusive
hinges. Pretty much everything else in this mode is silvery light gray
plastic (I have suspicions about the beast head, to be covered below).
Not a lot of paint. The face and foreheads are silver, there's dark
gray on the outer faces of the shoulders and on some shin stripes, the eyes
are blue, the toes and some details on teh cannon are dull gold. There's
also silver tail tip details on the sides of the boots, and a lot of gold on
the beast head hanging down in back. A silver and red Autobot symbol is
printed on the sternum.
The head swivels, and the base where it's connected is on a
transformation hinge that isn't locked down, so he can look up a bit if you
don't mind seeing the hole in the torso where the head stows for beast mode.
Universal joint shoulders, swivel biceps that look bad when turned, double
hinge elbows, and swivel wrists (one of mine had a major problem, see below
in Transformation). Swivel waist, universal joint hips, upper thigh swivels,
and soft-ratcheting hinge knees. In my case (and apparently endemic to the
first run) the knees are very loose, and tightening the screws doesn't help.
I might remove the screw entirely and see if I can insert some sort of washer
or gasket to stiffen it up. The ankles have the now-usual side hinges, but
since the boots kinda origami out for transformation you can end up
accidentally making the foot fall apart. The wings have several hinges, most
of them pinned, so of course the one that isn't pinned pops apart at the
slightest provocation (especially during transformation).
The fists hold 5mm pegs, and there's 5mm sockets on the outer faces of
the shoulders and on the undersides of the feet. There's a hard to get at
3mm socket on the back of the pelvis, mostly blocked by the beast forelimbs.
There's decorative posts on the front and back of each shoulder, but they're
slightly conical and not meant as connectors.
The rifle is based on the animation model, but since Sludge spent so
little time in robot mode I can't find a reliable color version of it (a lot
of people tried their hand at scanning the Ark volume 1 lineart and coloring
it, though). The colors are consistent with the Transformers Collection
illustration. Made of black plastic with dull gold on the front end of the
barrel and the sight rail, it's 2.75" (7cm) long. The 5mm peg grip is near
the back, and the barrel opening is 5mm in diameter. There's non-standard
tabs on the left side for attaching in beast mode. The tip piece of the
five-part giant Fire Blasts (Omega Supreme, Tricranius pink set, Rodimus
Prime blue set...the orange version that came with Sky Lynx looks best here
though) works well for the cannon, and is probably the best for beast mode.

Transformation: Pretty involved, but I was able to figure it out without
the instructions (other than confirming that the toes weren't supposed to fit
into the hollow in the dino chest, they just sort of hang down). The boots
really do explode into a bunch of panels and bits that end up forming rather
a lot of the dino hide.
Getting the fists to stow was difficult in my copy because the snap-in
swivels weren't snapped all the way in, so even when the fist was turned the
right way it couldn't quite go in. And getting them back out was even
harder. I ended up taking that forearm apart entirely, the wrist disc was
either deformed on purpose to lock it into place or deformed by accident, but
no amount of force I was able to apply with various tools would get it to
snap firmly into place. I ended up having to sand down the disc so that the
fist could be pushed into the right spot, even if it will slide out pretty
easily (when reassembled, the forearm piece keeps the fist from coming out
entirely, it's just badly aligned).

Beast Mode: Well, other than the weird chest gap, it's a pretty good G1
Dinobot update. Because of the much more complex transformation, the gold
details on the back are NOT the robot toes, which instead poke out on the
underside and act as a sort of fifth leg (I spent way too much time trying to
get them to point forwards and fill in the chest gap, it makes me wonder if
the original design had a few more parts so that the toes could fold up to
fill that gap). The tail is extra thick for about half its length before
abruptly narrowing down, and it's pretty clear that they prioritized robot
mode in this design...which is odd given that Sludge tended to stay in dino
mode in the cartoon.
Total length depends on how you pose the neck, but in the cartoon-
accurate "raised neck" pose it's 12" (30cm) long. Only a little red is
visible in this mode, more accidental than intentional, at the rear hip
roots. Almost all the black plastic is hidden as well, in fact. I'm pretty
sure that the beast head and upper neck are totally painted over silvery
light gray plastic, but the 3mm post inside the throat is black plastic.
The front section of the back (the backs of the wings in robot mode) is
painted silver, as is the last third of the tail. The fake toes on the top
of the back are painted dull gold, as are the upper neck and the head. The
newly visible forelegs have dark gray circles on them to match those on the
hind legs (robot arms). The dark gray stripes on the boots contineu along
the flanks. There's a big red Autobot symbol printed on the forehead, and
the eyes are blue.
The hind legs have all the articulation of the robot arms except for the
now-stowed fists. The forelegs have swivel hips and mid-leg swivels, plus
hinge ankles. While you can sort of splay the legs out for "stepped on by
Devastator" posing, the robot toes remain as a support that's unsquishable.
The root of the neck is a soft-ratcheting hinge to lift up and down, the
boundary between gold and not-gold on the neck is a smooth swivel, the head
is on a hinge to lift up and down as well as let the lower jaw open up.
The 3mm post inside the mouth does not move, so you're limited to Fire
Blasts that can fit under the roof of the mouth (again, the Omega Supreme
blast tip shape works well). The shoulder 5mm sockets from robot mode are
still usable in this mode, but the other robot mode connectors are all
hidden. I'm not sure why they didn't add sockets to the neck to allow for
the previous two riders to peg in place, it's not like it would've gotten in
the way of any other function or range of motion.

On Tuesday, August 2, 2022 at 12:53:32 AM UTC-4, Dave Van Domelen wrote:
>
> Dinobot Sludge: Good animation-accurate robot mode, beast mode suffers
> in a few significant aesthetic ways, and mine had some manufacturing issues.
> But even a good copy wouldn't really thrill me the way Grimlock did, and
> there seem to have been some compromises made to the design along the way..

> Overall: There's some manufacturing issues that seem to be common
> problems and other that are maybe just mine, but it's still irksome to have
> them happen in a $50+ toy. Design-wise, it definitely feels like the
> prioritized the robot in aesthetics, which strikes me as the wrong choice..
> Even if you get one without any bad joints, it's still kinda mediocre, as if
> a few too many compromises had to be made to whatever the original design
> was.
>

There's a definite sense of diminishing returns with the SS86 Dinobots, and I gather from other boards that it's not an uncommon feeling in the fandom.. Grimlock was good, maybe great, even with his minor flaws. Slag benefited from the extremely low bar set by his PotP incarnation. And now we have a phoned-in Sludge with far too many design and production flaws for his pricepoint.

We're collecting these out of completism and scale, rather than from the excitement that the actual figure brings. It's sad when toy collecting, a completely elective and non-essential hobby, devolves into a joyless exercise in checking the boxes.