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Dave's TF PotP Rant: Voyager Grimlock
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Dave Van Domelen
Feb 11, 2018, 5:04:17 PM2/11/18
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Dave's Transformers Power of the Primes Rant: Voyager Wave 1
Grimlock (T.rex, torso)
Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Gen/VGrimlockP
CAPSULE
$25-30 price point.
Grimlock: Proportion issues in pretty much every mode, holds together
okay but not great, but at least the colors (and even the stickers) are
nice. Mildly recommended.
RANT
Packaging: Same as Starscream, but with red instead of purple accents.
Prime Armor addendum: While all Voyager Prime Armors have ankle joint
pegs, Grimlock's lacks fold-out pegs on the underside, using peg holes for
connection instead. They also have peg holes right behind the ankle pegs,
which I suppose might be useful in some very limited situations.
AUTOBOT: DINOBOT GRIMLOCK
Assortment: E1136
Altmodes: T.rex, Torso
Transformation Difficulty: 8 steps
Previous Name Use: Yes
Previous Mold Use: None
Prime Master I Got: Prima
Prime Master Ability: Inspires allies with courage and might.
Weapon: None
Function: Dinobot Commander
Motto: "Me, Grimlock, am riddle wrapped in Enigma."
How will the legendary DINOBOT leader wield the POWER OF THE PRIMES?
Wow, that's about as information-free as you can get, yes?
Packaging: Packaged in robot mode, 7 ties on the robot and a rubber band
around the chest. One tie each on the two Prime Armor pieces and the Dinobot
Enigma. The box/card art is of dino mode rather than robot mode. While
Volcanicus is not mentioned on the box, it is named in the instructions
sheet.
Robot Mode: Well, it looks mostly right, but.... Like Starscream, he
has some proportion weirdness to accomodate the combiner mode, but the
warping is different. His torso is super-deep because it has to also work as
a torso when rotated 90 degrees on a horizontal axis (the top of the robot
torso becomes the front of the combiner torso). The boots are a little too
small and the toes are almost missing, because they need to become both
thighs and the tail. The forearms are too short, perhaps because the torso
mode transformation requires they fold away in a particular way. He does
have the "wings" that Slug lacks, although they're a little small compared to
the hugh shoulcers. Basically, while not the worst Grimlock robot mode ever,
it's definitely in the bottom half, maybe the bottom quarter.
6.5" (16.5cm) tall, in the Dinobot color scheme they've picked for this
line: silvery gray, clear plastic with dull gold painted on the back facing,
black, and red. Black plastic is used for the Prime Armors, fists, shoulder
inner joint bits, combiner peg lock tabs, head, collar area, thighs, and some
stuff inside the torso. I'm pretty sure the pelvis is also black plastic
dipped in red paint. Red plastic is found on the waist, the hip joints, knee
joints, and the hinge that holds the dino head onto the backpack. A softer
and slightly darker silvery gray plastic is used on the dino forelimbs, the
dino knee hinge in the upper arm, the ankle pegs on the Prime Armor, and the
tail tips. Clear plastic is used on the outer shell of the torso, the dino
neck, and the Dinobot Enigma. All else is more rigid silvery gray plastic.
Other than the Enigma, all the clear plastic has dull gold painted on
the inner surface, and there's dull gold on the dino toes on the wrists, on
some vent details on the boots, and on circles on the shoulders. The pelvis
is painted red, and red paint is also used on the "goggles" and on details on
the shoulder fronts. The Enigma is dipped in silver with detailing on front
in red. The Autobot symbol on the chest is printed red on silver rather than
a sticker, probably because even Hasbro recognized that their stickers might
not work well on a piece that splits in two. The stickers are otherwise
pretty good, all told, being mostly limited to tech details on the shins and
wings. Notably missing is any sort of sticker or paint on the toes, which
are molded with vents that run horizontal rather than the vertical lines of
the G1 stickers there. Some sort of color on the toes would go a long way to
helping remove the feeling that he's missing his feet. I think I can match
the dull gold paint, so I'll probably do that rather than hope a label will
stay put.
The head turns on a restricted ball joint, the waist turns on a ratchet
swivel. The combiner pelvis armor buttplate looks like it should impair
waist motion, but it doesn't. The shoulders are universal joints, but
lifting them up too high to the sides looks weird. There's a swivel just
below each shoulder, and then two hinges. The top hinge is really for the
other modes, but it can be used as an elbow if you'd rather have a short
upper arm than a short forearm. No useful articulation on the fists. The
hips are soft-ratcheting universal joints, there's swivels just above the
hard-ratcheting knee hinges. No ankles.
The hands hold 5mm pegs, and there are shallow 5mm peg holes on the
"back of the hand" side of the wrists. There's no 3mm peg holes for use with
a base. What there are, however, are 5mm pegs sticking out the sides of the
forearms, on the same facings as those wrist peg-holes. The Prime Armors are
supposed to mount on these pegs as cestus-like weapons. About the closest
you can get to a ranged weapon for him with just what's in the box is to turn
the Prime Armors around so that their peg holes face forwards, and say
they're mortars. Some stickers could help with that interpretation. The
Enigma is a very tight fit inside the Prime Armors, likely due to the coat of
paint (the Seeker Enigma is only painted on the front, not the sides).
Transformation: Really simple transformation to beast mode. Flip the
dino head up over the robot head, fold the tail tips out from the feet and
peg the legs together, pull the chest halves apart and move down so that the
arms become dino hindlimbs, fold the wings closed over the dino upper torso.
The instructions are a little vague on it, but you're supposed to bend the
robot knees a few clicks to get the tail bent at its root.
While the instructions don't show it, moving the combiner pelvis front
down helps cover the gap in the tail...but makes more of a gap in the back,
so again it's a choice of how you want something to look bad.
Getting the fists back out can be very difficult, depending on how stiff
the ratcheting action on yours is. Mine was a significant problem even with
a knife.
If you just transform the dino head, you get a humanoid dino-warrior
sort of deal.
Beast Mode: This is meant to be G1 Grimlock, but as with some of the
recent RiD Grimlocks the way the legs become the tail results in way too much
junk in the trunk. If you go completely straight-legged as in G1 it looks a
bit too leggy, the instructions suggest using that upper not-elbow as a knee,
bending it as far as it'll go so that the combiner sockets on the forearms/
lower legs are de-emphasized. If you took about two inches off the tail, the
proportions would be reasonably G1-ish. In any case, you get a robot T.rex
with an oversized tail that seems to be carrying around a piece of Tokusatsu
chest as a butt-pack. (Getting Superhuman Syber Samurai Squad/Gridman
flashbacks here.)
9" (23cm) from noodle to tail tip, so around 1:50-1:60 scale.
Starscream is now even more smug. Very little new color is revealed, just
some red and gray bits on the back and the details of the head, because the
transformation reveals and then conceals the inner torso bits. The red and
black are largely de-emphasized in this mode, which is mostly silvery gray
and dull gold. The boot stickers are on the underside of the tail, but the
wing stickers now wrap around the chest and look pretty good. The dino head
has red eyes and an Autobot symbol sticker on the top of the head.
The head can lift up and down, and the jaw opens on the shared hinge.
The forelimbs are on ball joints, and the sockets have a notch in them that
let the arms drop closer to the body in one direction (specifically, "down"
when you have the figure in a tail-dragger pose). While the rear hips retain
full universal jointing, Grimlock doing a sploot looks weird, so mainly use
the swivel part. Similarly, the upper arm swivels look weird when used in
this mode. The knees bend about 45 degrees away from straight. As noted in
transformation, the tail can bend up and down at the root, so you can go for
a modern reconstruction pose if you want, with the entire spine and tail held
horizontal (although you need to fiddle with the legs a bit to keep it from
tipping over backwards). A more digitigrade pose can be obtained by using
the upper arm swivels to reverse the lower legs, but the combiner socket
becomes a lot more visible.
There's a Prime Master/Titan Master heel spur slot on the back of the
neck so he can be ridden, and a pair of 2mm pegs on top of the butt pack so
another figure can ride facing backwards. There's another pair of 2mm pegs
on the tail for a third passenger, and if you have trouble keeping the tail
halves together a figure there can lock the pieces in place. If you open
Grimlock's mouth all the way, an Enigma or a folded up *Master can fit inside
via another heel spur slot. Traveling economy on Grimlock's Uber is rough.
There's no 5mm interfaces except for those on the forearms, and the only
storage for the Prime Armors is to stick them on his legs pointed
horizontally. Annoyingly, even if you put the claw end up, the flat end is
not flush with the bottom of the foot, it goes a little below that and makes
the actual feet hover slightly above the table. Not that this looks very
good otherwise. If they HAD to be attached to the legs somewhere, the hips
would look a lot better.
Torso Mode: Getting the shoulders properly connected so that they won't
sag is slightly trickier than it was for Starscream, but is a similar issue
and the instructions are a bit vague on it. The instructions are outright
wrong with the thighs...if you want a decent stance, the robot knees need to
be bent at about 45 degrees away from straight so that the robot thighs angle
down and out. The instructions have the robot legs being straight and
separated by a couple of clicks from vertical. There's a few tabs and holes
that look like they might be useful for torso mode but don't appear to be
used for anything, I suspect they might be pretools for the likely retool
team. The Prime Armor feet have three squared off toes with spikes above
each.
While nothing could be as bad as The Beast in terms of porportions
(http://tfwiki.net/wiki/The_Beast), Volcanicus does have a wasp waist and
super-broad shoulders, as if he has Metroplex-envy. Displaying the Dinobot
Enigma in the chest a la King Starscream requires lifting up the T.rex head
to point forwards. The chest is a bit gappy, as the rectangular holes on top
of the torso from robot mode now face forwards. (These gaps are needed for
it to fit around the hips in dino mode, though.) I've seen a fan mode that
uses multiple Slashes to fill in the gaps in the chest and make the thighs
beefier, but there doesn't see to be any canonical attachment point for her.
The new head is made of black plastic, two pieces glued together (or
not, in the case of mine...I'll probably paint the eyes a little better
before gluing it back together). The head rests on a bright red plastic
collar area that's made of two pieces that hinge together. There's a sort of
crown on the head, not inspired by the G1 comics though, and a shinstrap
added to the faceplate. The front of the crown is painted dull gold, the
visor is red (and kinda badly in my case, as noted), and the chinstrap is
silver. The pelvis plate seems to also be black plastic dipped in silver
with the belt buckle sort of part in dull gold. It's held to the waist with
a red plastic hinge piece.
In addition to the limb-based articulation, the head turns on a swivel
and the waist turns on a 16 point ratchet. The pelvis armor does not lock
onto the legs, so the hip articulation is the same as on the regular robot
mode.
http://www.dvandom.com/images/Volcanicus1.JPG to see what he looks like
with just the wave 1 limbs. With the legs in that configuration, he stands
11.5" (29cm) tall.
Overall: On the one hand, we're finally getting the long-demanded G1
Dinobot combiner. On the other, this is a pretty lackluster toy, hampered by
too many compromises made in service of the combiner team goal.
Dave Van Domelen, off to the Leader class now.
Grimlock (T.rex, torso)
Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Gen/VGrimlockP
CAPSULE
$25-30 price point.
Grimlock: Proportion issues in pretty much every mode, holds together
okay but not great, but at least the colors (and even the stickers) are
nice. Mildly recommended.
RANT
Packaging: Same as Starscream, but with red instead of purple accents.
Prime Armor addendum: While all Voyager Prime Armors have ankle joint
pegs, Grimlock's lacks fold-out pegs on the underside, using peg holes for
connection instead. They also have peg holes right behind the ankle pegs,
which I suppose might be useful in some very limited situations.
AUTOBOT: DINOBOT GRIMLOCK
Assortment: E1136
Altmodes: T.rex, Torso
Transformation Difficulty: 8 steps
Previous Name Use: Yes
Previous Mold Use: None
Prime Master I Got: Prima
Prime Master Ability: Inspires allies with courage and might.
Weapon: None
Function: Dinobot Commander
Motto: "Me, Grimlock, am riddle wrapped in Enigma."
How will the legendary DINOBOT leader wield the POWER OF THE PRIMES?
Wow, that's about as information-free as you can get, yes?
Packaging: Packaged in robot mode, 7 ties on the robot and a rubber band
around the chest. One tie each on the two Prime Armor pieces and the Dinobot
Enigma. The box/card art is of dino mode rather than robot mode. While
Volcanicus is not mentioned on the box, it is named in the instructions
sheet.
Robot Mode: Well, it looks mostly right, but.... Like Starscream, he
has some proportion weirdness to accomodate the combiner mode, but the
warping is different. His torso is super-deep because it has to also work as
a torso when rotated 90 degrees on a horizontal axis (the top of the robot
torso becomes the front of the combiner torso). The boots are a little too
small and the toes are almost missing, because they need to become both
thighs and the tail. The forearms are too short, perhaps because the torso
mode transformation requires they fold away in a particular way. He does
have the "wings" that Slug lacks, although they're a little small compared to
the hugh shoulcers. Basically, while not the worst Grimlock robot mode ever,
it's definitely in the bottom half, maybe the bottom quarter.
6.5" (16.5cm) tall, in the Dinobot color scheme they've picked for this
line: silvery gray, clear plastic with dull gold painted on the back facing,
black, and red. Black plastic is used for the Prime Armors, fists, shoulder
inner joint bits, combiner peg lock tabs, head, collar area, thighs, and some
stuff inside the torso. I'm pretty sure the pelvis is also black plastic
dipped in red paint. Red plastic is found on the waist, the hip joints, knee
joints, and the hinge that holds the dino head onto the backpack. A softer
and slightly darker silvery gray plastic is used on the dino forelimbs, the
dino knee hinge in the upper arm, the ankle pegs on the Prime Armor, and the
tail tips. Clear plastic is used on the outer shell of the torso, the dino
neck, and the Dinobot Enigma. All else is more rigid silvery gray plastic.
Other than the Enigma, all the clear plastic has dull gold painted on
the inner surface, and there's dull gold on the dino toes on the wrists, on
some vent details on the boots, and on circles on the shoulders. The pelvis
is painted red, and red paint is also used on the "goggles" and on details on
the shoulder fronts. The Enigma is dipped in silver with detailing on front
in red. The Autobot symbol on the chest is printed red on silver rather than
a sticker, probably because even Hasbro recognized that their stickers might
not work well on a piece that splits in two. The stickers are otherwise
pretty good, all told, being mostly limited to tech details on the shins and
wings. Notably missing is any sort of sticker or paint on the toes, which
are molded with vents that run horizontal rather than the vertical lines of
the G1 stickers there. Some sort of color on the toes would go a long way to
helping remove the feeling that he's missing his feet. I think I can match
the dull gold paint, so I'll probably do that rather than hope a label will
stay put.
The head turns on a restricted ball joint, the waist turns on a ratchet
swivel. The combiner pelvis armor buttplate looks like it should impair
waist motion, but it doesn't. The shoulders are universal joints, but
lifting them up too high to the sides looks weird. There's a swivel just
below each shoulder, and then two hinges. The top hinge is really for the
other modes, but it can be used as an elbow if you'd rather have a short
upper arm than a short forearm. No useful articulation on the fists. The
hips are soft-ratcheting universal joints, there's swivels just above the
hard-ratcheting knee hinges. No ankles.
The hands hold 5mm pegs, and there are shallow 5mm peg holes on the
"back of the hand" side of the wrists. There's no 3mm peg holes for use with
a base. What there are, however, are 5mm pegs sticking out the sides of the
forearms, on the same facings as those wrist peg-holes. The Prime Armors are
supposed to mount on these pegs as cestus-like weapons. About the closest
you can get to a ranged weapon for him with just what's in the box is to turn
the Prime Armors around so that their peg holes face forwards, and say
they're mortars. Some stickers could help with that interpretation. The
Enigma is a very tight fit inside the Prime Armors, likely due to the coat of
paint (the Seeker Enigma is only painted on the front, not the sides).
Transformation: Really simple transformation to beast mode. Flip the
dino head up over the robot head, fold the tail tips out from the feet and
peg the legs together, pull the chest halves apart and move down so that the
arms become dino hindlimbs, fold the wings closed over the dino upper torso.
The instructions are a little vague on it, but you're supposed to bend the
robot knees a few clicks to get the tail bent at its root.
While the instructions don't show it, moving the combiner pelvis front
down helps cover the gap in the tail...but makes more of a gap in the back,
so again it's a choice of how you want something to look bad.
Getting the fists back out can be very difficult, depending on how stiff
the ratcheting action on yours is. Mine was a significant problem even with
a knife.
If you just transform the dino head, you get a humanoid dino-warrior
sort of deal.
Beast Mode: This is meant to be G1 Grimlock, but as with some of the
recent RiD Grimlocks the way the legs become the tail results in way too much
junk in the trunk. If you go completely straight-legged as in G1 it looks a
bit too leggy, the instructions suggest using that upper not-elbow as a knee,
bending it as far as it'll go so that the combiner sockets on the forearms/
lower legs are de-emphasized. If you took about two inches off the tail, the
proportions would be reasonably G1-ish. In any case, you get a robot T.rex
with an oversized tail that seems to be carrying around a piece of Tokusatsu
chest as a butt-pack. (Getting Superhuman Syber Samurai Squad/Gridman
flashbacks here.)
9" (23cm) from noodle to tail tip, so around 1:50-1:60 scale.
Starscream is now even more smug. Very little new color is revealed, just
some red and gray bits on the back and the details of the head, because the
transformation reveals and then conceals the inner torso bits. The red and
black are largely de-emphasized in this mode, which is mostly silvery gray
and dull gold. The boot stickers are on the underside of the tail, but the
wing stickers now wrap around the chest and look pretty good. The dino head
has red eyes and an Autobot symbol sticker on the top of the head.
The head can lift up and down, and the jaw opens on the shared hinge.
The forelimbs are on ball joints, and the sockets have a notch in them that
let the arms drop closer to the body in one direction (specifically, "down"
when you have the figure in a tail-dragger pose). While the rear hips retain
full universal jointing, Grimlock doing a sploot looks weird, so mainly use
the swivel part. Similarly, the upper arm swivels look weird when used in
this mode. The knees bend about 45 degrees away from straight. As noted in
transformation, the tail can bend up and down at the root, so you can go for
a modern reconstruction pose if you want, with the entire spine and tail held
horizontal (although you need to fiddle with the legs a bit to keep it from
tipping over backwards). A more digitigrade pose can be obtained by using
the upper arm swivels to reverse the lower legs, but the combiner socket
becomes a lot more visible.
There's a Prime Master/Titan Master heel spur slot on the back of the
neck so he can be ridden, and a pair of 2mm pegs on top of the butt pack so
another figure can ride facing backwards. There's another pair of 2mm pegs
on the tail for a third passenger, and if you have trouble keeping the tail
halves together a figure there can lock the pieces in place. If you open
Grimlock's mouth all the way, an Enigma or a folded up *Master can fit inside
via another heel spur slot. Traveling economy on Grimlock's Uber is rough.
There's no 5mm interfaces except for those on the forearms, and the only
storage for the Prime Armors is to stick them on his legs pointed
horizontally. Annoyingly, even if you put the claw end up, the flat end is
not flush with the bottom of the foot, it goes a little below that and makes
the actual feet hover slightly above the table. Not that this looks very
good otherwise. If they HAD to be attached to the legs somewhere, the hips
would look a lot better.
Torso Mode: Getting the shoulders properly connected so that they won't
sag is slightly trickier than it was for Starscream, but is a similar issue
and the instructions are a bit vague on it. The instructions are outright
wrong with the thighs...if you want a decent stance, the robot knees need to
be bent at about 45 degrees away from straight so that the robot thighs angle
down and out. The instructions have the robot legs being straight and
separated by a couple of clicks from vertical. There's a few tabs and holes
that look like they might be useful for torso mode but don't appear to be
used for anything, I suspect they might be pretools for the likely retool
team. The Prime Armor feet have three squared off toes with spikes above
each.
While nothing could be as bad as The Beast in terms of porportions
(http://tfwiki.net/wiki/The_Beast), Volcanicus does have a wasp waist and
super-broad shoulders, as if he has Metroplex-envy. Displaying the Dinobot
Enigma in the chest a la King Starscream requires lifting up the T.rex head
to point forwards. The chest is a bit gappy, as the rectangular holes on top
of the torso from robot mode now face forwards. (These gaps are needed for
it to fit around the hips in dino mode, though.) I've seen a fan mode that
uses multiple Slashes to fill in the gaps in the chest and make the thighs
beefier, but there doesn't see to be any canonical attachment point for her.
The new head is made of black plastic, two pieces glued together (or
not, in the case of mine...I'll probably paint the eyes a little better
before gluing it back together). The head rests on a bright red plastic
collar area that's made of two pieces that hinge together. There's a sort of
crown on the head, not inspired by the G1 comics though, and a shinstrap
added to the faceplate. The front of the crown is painted dull gold, the
visor is red (and kinda badly in my case, as noted), and the chinstrap is
silver. The pelvis plate seems to also be black plastic dipped in silver
with the belt buckle sort of part in dull gold. It's held to the waist with
a red plastic hinge piece.
In addition to the limb-based articulation, the head turns on a swivel
and the waist turns on a 16 point ratchet. The pelvis armor does not lock
onto the legs, so the hip articulation is the same as on the regular robot
mode.
http://www.dvandom.com/images/Volcanicus1.JPG to see what he looks like
with just the wave 1 limbs. With the legs in that configuration, he stands
11.5" (29cm) tall.
Overall: On the one hand, we're finally getting the long-demanded G1
Dinobot combiner. On the other, this is a pretty lackluster toy, hampered by
too many compromises made in service of the combiner team goal.
Dave Van Domelen, off to the Leader class now.
Irrellius Spamticon of the Potato People.
Feb 12, 2018, 8:55:12 AM2/12/18
to
2. There is a number of fan modes for this guy already, many people put the extra combiner hands to fill in the sides of the torso,
http://news.tfw2005.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/01/Power-of-the-Primes-Volcanicus-In-Hand.jpg
3. Perfect Effect is also making corrections before the whole team is even out.
https://tformers.com/ig.php?mode=view&album=33086&pic=Perfect+Effect+PC-23+Kit+For+Dinosaurs+Upgrades+Grimlock%2C+Volcanicus%2C+Gives+Dinobots+More+Weapons+%281%29.jpg&dispsize=800&start=0&sl=perfect-effect-pc-23-kit-for-dinosaurs-upgrades-grimlock-volcanicus-gives-dinobots-more-weapons/33086
When originally announced, I was expecting The Beast.
Zobovor
Feb 12, 2018, 9:35:21 PM2/12/18
to
On Monday, February 12, 2018 at 6:55:12 AM UTC-7, Irrellius Spamticon of the Potato People. wrote:
> 3. Perfect Effect is also making corrections before the whole team is even out.
They look like Dino-Riders!
> 3. Perfect Effect is also making corrections before the whole team is even out.
Zob (wants to give Grimlock weapons, but those dumb dino-claws make it hard for him to hold a gun)
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