Dave's Transformers Studio Series Rant: Deluxe Wave 16

#84 - Ironhide (retool of #82 Autobot Ratchet)
#85 - Arcee (sort of motorcycle)

Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Studio/Deluxe16

https://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Studio/Deluxe15 - Ratchet mold

A sort of half-wave, with Ironhide initially showing up in cases of wave
15, before Arcee got added in. I actually found Ironhide at my comic shop,
in what must've been a dedicated case since they had a whole bunch of
Ironhide and nothing else from Wave 15 or 16.
Both of these continue the "make toys of the characters who got a few
seconds on screen in the Bumblebee movie's opening scene" trend of recent
Studio Series releases. Also, note that as far as I can tell from looking at
current and upcoming releases, there will not be a #86, to avoid confusion
with the TFtM toys.

CAPSULES

$25 price point.

Ironhide: Original mold was mildly recommended and kinda finicky. I
figured out what one of my big problems was in transforming it, which makes
it slightly less bad but still finicky. Mildly recommended.

Arcee: A decent motorcycle-ish Arcee, although it suffers from "don't
look at the vehicle from behind" problems, and the clever wheels don't really
roll that well. At the low end of recommended.

RANTS

Packaging: Almost the same as Wave 15, but as noted in that review, now
they've removed the plastic from the windows.

AUTOBOT: Ironhide
Assortment: #84
Altmode: Cybertronian vehicle
Transformation Difficulty: 22 steps
Previous Name Use: Yes
Previous Mold Use: Studio
Movie: Bumblebee
Scene: Cybertron Falls

IRONHIDE and the AUTOBOTS take on the DECEPTICONS in a final stand.

Yeah, all of these "first scene of the movie" bios get kinda samey,
since almost no one did anything to distinguish themselves in the few seconds
of screen time they got.

Packaging: Six plastic ties hold the robot to the inner tray, and the
rifle is stuck in corner folds. The inner tray has a little lip folded up at
the bottom to make it harder for the rifle to shake loose.
The usual overpass battle backdrop, maybe a little tighter shot but not
fully zoomed in. Several combatants are visible, including a vehicle mode
B-127 (or someone very similar).

Color Swaps: Both grays become black, the clear blue is a deeper and
bluer hue (next to it, Ratchet's looks almost cyan). Some of the white
becomes red, and some becomes light gray, and it doesn't seem to follow a
simple "the UV-bright white all becomes gray" pattern either. The collar
area, pelvis, lower thighs, wheel fenders on the inner boots, and a joint
chunk inside each shoulder become light gray. The rest becomes red, although
the paint job on the shoulderslabs is good enough to make them look like
they're gray plastic even though they're actually red.

Paint Apps: The white paint parts on Ratchet are now red. There's also
some red on the abdomen (but not as much as Ratchet has, the abdomen is
mostly gunmetal), and on the real wheel hubs. In addition to most of the
abdomen, gunmetal paint is used on the face, the belt, the fake wheels on the
outer faces of the boots, different forearm details than Ratchet has painted,
the outer elbow bits, and "spats" on the feet. I think the Autobot symbol is
the same printed color as on Ratchet, it's just behind darker plastic. The
eyes are unpainted lightpiping.
In vehicle mode, the top and front edge of each center side panel has a
yellow stripe running along it. Other than the rear wheel hubs now being
visible, that's the only new paint in this mode.

Mold Changes and Other Notes: The waist is loose here too, if maybe a
little less loose than Ratchet's.
I figured out the problem I was having with the Ratchet transformation,
and will add a note to that review as well. There's these tabs on the
shoulder chunks that need to go into slots on the tops of the thighs, and it
requires significant force while also being a little hard to see as it
happens. There's TWO places in each thigh where the tab can slot securely,
but the one that's higher up in vehicle mode is the wrong one. If you have
one or both tabs in the wrong thigh slots, it's impossible to get the whole
thing to hang together properly. It's pretty stable if they're both in the
right tabs, though, and rolls well.
http://www.dvandom.com/images/SRatchetPeg.JPG for the picture I took of
Ratchet pointing out the issue.

Overall: I like the mold a little better now that I figured out the
problem, but the problem still IS a problem.

AUTOBOT: ARCEE
Assortment: #85
Altmode: Cybertronian motorcycle
Transformation Difficulty: 23 steps
Previous Name Use: Yes
Previous Mold Use: None
Movie: Bumblebee
Scene: Cybertron Falls

ARCEE loses contact with the capitol as the AUTOBOTS are overwhelmed by
DECEPTICON forces.

(I almost put a [sic] after capitol, but I suppose she could have been
trying to contact the specific building rather than anyone at all in the
capital city.)

Packaging: Seven ties on the robot mode, the two pistols are in the
lower corners. Same backdrop as Ironhide. Slightly mistransformed in the
box, in that her rear fenders are spread out flat and should be tilted back a
little. I prefer them pushed back all the way against the backpack, myself.

Robot Mode: While she does have the shoulderpods that suggest G1, her
chest reminds me more of Energon Arcee in that it comes to a sort of
trapezoidal point. Probably the first "Not-G1" thing people are going to
notice, though, is her feet, which have Sbarro-style hubless wheels on the
heels. While they're pretty much prevented from rolling in this mode, it's
easy to picture Arcee doing the anime mecha-skate thing. And while her head
is G1-ish in the way that the other BB movie cameos were, on top of the "face
is made of shifting plates and rods" effect they put a sort of antenna on the
left side of her helmet. One detail that caught my eye is the fact that
there's a couple of thin rectangular panels glued into the front of her
chest, in front of the disks for the shoulder swivels. The shoulders snapped
in from the back, so these don't keep 'em from falling out (they don't come
out with any amount of force I was willing to risk, anyway). My current
guess is that there was some benefit to casting the chest with those parts
hollow all the way through, and then plugging the holes in front. In other
details, while her hands are almost human in shape (and with only about 2/3
of a socket, so the guns tend to fall out easily), her feet are a petite
version of standard Bayformer random metal talon stuff. Stability is okay,
although it's a little too easy to pop the torso apart if you push back on
the head even a bit.
4.75" (12cm) tall, splitting the difference between "sexaroid"
slenderness and the "this was a Blurr mold" bulk seen in Titans Return, in
her usual pink and white with silver and dark gray added in because Bayformer
legacy. A dark and slightly metallic gray plastic is used for the collar,
the roots of her backpack pods, biceps, elbows, torso core, backpack struts,
a bit of visible greebly abdomen, hip struts and sockets, wheels, feet, and
guns. A somewhat dark ("innermost Energon") pink is ued for the backpack
pods, torso front and back, shoulders, forearms, some of the backpack, and
most of the pelvis. A slightly off-white plastic is used for the head,
hands, thighs, and the boots. The windshield piece on her backpack is clear
blue plastic.
The darker shade of pink is represented in paint on the sides of the
head, a lot of the clear blue piece on back, and the kneecaps. There's
gunmetal paint on her collar, the top and bottom edge of each backpack pod,
and the top and outer edges of her "pants cuffs". Her face is painted light
pink with gunmetal eyes, and a little triangle on her helmet is either silver
or a thin coat of gunmetal. There's a V of white paint on her chest and
another on her pelvis, plus some vehicle mode details in white on the
backpack. She gets a PINK Autobot symbol printed on her lower sternum, same
shade as the plastic. The fake wheels on her backpack pods are painted dark
gray with a little metalflake in a good match to the plastic. (I might add a
similar color to the greebly bits on the inner forearms, they could stand to
have paint over what is molded to be exposed metal.)
The neck is a ball joint with the socket in the head, and it can look up
pretty well. The waist is a swivel that is concealed behind the lip of the
pelvis top. The backpack pods are a combination of ball joints at their root
and swivels where the struts connect to the main pods, giving them a lot of
flexibility. Pinned universal joint shoulders, bicep swivels, double hinge
elbows. The wrists only bend inwards for transformation, but it's something.
Ball joint hips with swivels right below them hidden inside the thighs, hinge
knees, the usual side hinges on the ankles...and additional hinges that let
the ankles bend at the top of the foot part, pushing the sides of the boots
back like winged footwear. The instructions don't really show them in use,
but they greatly improve the range of dynamic posing and do so without using
a flimsy toe-only hinge...the wheel heels can stay flat on the ground. I
initially mistook those ankle hinges for transformation joints, and did
figure out how to use them to make a more Bayformery "wheelfoot" mode that
requires external support. http://www.dvandom.com/images/ArceeWheelfoot.JPG
The hands can loosely hold 5mm pegs, there's a 3mm socket in the back of
the pelvis, and that's basically it. The tiny feet can't accomodate a socket
on their undersides, and while she's covered in non-standard tabs and slots
they're mostly for transformation. One thing I did need the instructions for
was the purpose of some tabs on the sides of the "jetpack" pods, which aren't
used in transformation. They're gun storage points for robot mode...and
technically would work for that in vehicle mode too, but the official
location for the guns in vehicle mode is in her hands to help cover them up.
Undocumented bonus feature, when the guns are stored there in robot mode, you
can rotate the pods up to make the whole thing into shoulder cannons.
The pistols themselves are identical and fairly simple, 3cm long with
5mm grips at the back end and nonstandard rectangular slots on both sides
above the peg. The barrel itself is neither 3mm nor 5mm, so no Fire Blast
compatibility.

Transformation: Another one of those designs where it's pretty stable
once everything is tabbed properly, but up until the very moment everything
is in place, it's pretty unstable. Most of the tricky parts involve
unfolding the torso into four main panels and connecting them together the
long way. The head needs to be turned to JUST the right position for it to
fit through the hole in the cockpit area. The waist needs to be turned 180
degrees so that tabs in the elongated torso can go into slots on the fronts
of the thighs, and the arms need to be bent at the upper of the two elbow
joints so that the backpack pods can lock over the forearms. The hands don't
actually stow, so the guns are put into them to look like exhaust pipes and
partially cover the hands.
While it took me quite a while to figure it out from just the box
renders, it's a fairly quick transformation once you know which things to
bend where and know for a fact that the head can in fact fit through that
hole.

Vehicle Mode: Well, it certainly looks motorcycle-like, until you look
at the driver's compartment and see that there's a seat for a driver that's
about a centimeter tall. So more of a gigantic quarter miler with the front
wheels close together and the rear wheels more separated. Call it splitting
the difference between car and motorcycle. Under the fake rear wheels are
smaller wheels that in theory should let the toy roll along freely, but I
found one of them was pretty jammed up on mine. Even after popping it off
and smoothing off some mold flash, it doesn't roll all that well. Visually,
the front and sides hold work pretty well, but the very back is pretty
obviously a headless robot torso holding two pistols (which are hard to keep
totally parallel to each other).
5.75" (14.5cm) if you count the blasters acting as exhaust pipes, and
rather more pink than the robot mode, as the torso unfolded to make the upper
half and the rear fenders. The windshield/hood piece is clear blue plastic
but with a lot of pink paint (good match for the plastic) and the front end
has white paint and some gunmetal in an approximation of G1 Arcee's vehicle
front end. There's white paint on the borders of the piece under the
windshield, that's basically it for newly visible or prominent colors. The
Autobot symbol ends up at the very back.
The wheels, as noted already, don't roll very well, but they do roll,
with only the inner halves of the front wheels actually moving. As a result,
the effective ground clearance is just the amount by which the inner wheel
halves are larger than the stationary outer halves, which is about a tenth of
a millimeter. The backs of the "cuffs" are barely any higher off the table,
though. The 3mm socket on the back of the pelvis is accessible in this mode,
close to the back but not terribly far from the balance point since the
vehicle is back-heavy. No other useful connectors, the hands are spoken
for.

Overall: Well, it's not great, but it's pretty good. Definitely better
than Legacy Arcee and less hassle than Earthrise/Kingdom Arcee. Motorcycles
are hard to do well, and this one kinda cheats by not really making her a
motorcycle.

Dave Van Domelen, needs to buckle down and make a dent in all the store
exclusive redecos in his stakc....