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Zob's Thoughts on Studio Series '86 Voyager-Class Wreck-Gar
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Zobovor
Aug 2, 2021, 11:17:06 PM8/2/21
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I had indeed pre-ordered this toy through Hasbro Pulse, but he showed up at Walmart today (and for less money, too—something like $26 versus the $32 Hasbro Pulse and BBTS are asking). I need to go back and get a second one for my son, plus we both want to see how successfully two of the toys interact with each other. Double your pleasure, double your fun!
Most of the Wreck-Gar toys have been awful. The G1 toy has always been a loose, floppy mess, in my experience, and it's arguably the best one we had for a long time. Seems like every time Hasbro sells a motorcycle toy like Groove or somebody, they ask the inevitable question about how they're going to redeco it and sell it to consumers again, and then somebody remembers that Wreck-Gar was also a motorcycle, and we end up with an orange Groove that nobody asked for.
This toy, however, is phenomenal. It's a slam dunk in a way that Hasbro very, very rarely manages to achieve. Like, I honestly can't believe this isn't a third-party toy that cost me a hundred dollars. It's that good. The fact that this thing only cost me $26 just blows my mind. I'm not gonna pay a lot for this muffler!
So, he's a Voyager, so he stands at about six and three-quarters inches tall. It's a little hard to determine his true height since he's hunched over slightly in the Sunbow animation scale chart, but he's nearly the height of Springer but taller than Hot Rod and Kup and Blurr, so this seems right. His colors are a thing of beauty, honestly. I do believe the original idea was that he was meant to be the color of various tarnished metals (i.e., brown and orange and red are all the color of rust) and while previous Wreck-Gar toys tend to be mostly orange, this version really nails the cartoon color scheme. (He had a different color scheme in "The Big Broadcast of 2006" with weird-colored gauntlets, but that's a one-off so we can pretty much ignore it.) His CG render on the back of the box seems to suggest some parts were going to be vac-metal chrome, or metalized silver, but they wisely decided against it.
The surface texture on the toy is mottled in places to reduce the sheen of the plastic, and honestly it's a great way of making him look less than pristine. It's most evident on his shoulders and pelvis and the saddle bags on his hips. He doesn't have Autobot symbols on him anywhere, which is correct to the G1 animation (the Junkions were portrayed as maybe-villains in the beginning, which probably explains the red eyes, so Autobot badges would have been a dead giveaway that they eventually turned out to be friendly).
His articulation is about what you'd expect from a modern-day Transformers toy, with knee joints whose range of movement is a bit more limited than the usual, and toe tilts that move separately from the rest of his feet. He's probably not designed to be disassembled per se, the same way that Kup was, but you can pop off his head at the ball-and-socket joint, ad his arms and fists and legs can all be slipped out of their mushroom joints without the use of tools. Any more elaborate dismantling would require a screwdriver. Some disassembly required, batteries not included, but I believe in me!
He's got all these great little details. His moustache and beard are made of rubbery plastic, so you can bend them a bit without accidentally snapping them off. For the spiked tires he wore as armor, the spikes have been reduced to child-safe nubs, which is unfortunate but understandable. They still look pretty good. He's got huge thermoplastic spikes on the sides of his arms and knees, and both tires are removable, designed to slip over those spikes. His chest guns are on ball-and-socket joints, so they will pop off before they will break, which I'm sure was the intention. He comes with his axe, as per the animation, but does not come with an accellerator laser like the G1 toy did. (I imagine some third-party chaps will produce one, eventually, but it seems largely unneccesary, to be honest.)
I'm actually a little sad that Wreck-Gar, out of all possible characters, is completely devoid of battle damage. I know that was a contention of Siege, and Earthrise to a lesser extent, but still. Irony, thy name is Hasbro.
Wreck-Gar's transformation to motorcycle mode was one of those things that looked good on paper, but resulted in an awful toy. Like the animation design for Blurr, Wreck-Gar's head was required to grow to monstrous proportions when he transformed to vehicle mode, as his robot head became the entire front end of the motorcycle. There's no way you could accomplish this in three-dimensional space. It's life, Jim, but not as we know it. So, Hasbro had to cheat a bit and give him a second motorcycle front end, one that is not formed out of his head. It's tucked inside his upper chest.
His transformation is essentially the same as G1, but with a bit more complexity. As before, the robot arms come together to form the front fork tubes, with one of the wheels plugging into his wrists (not the fists, which retract on this model). The robot head tucks inside the second, larger front fairing and windshield assembly. There are lots of fidgety hinges that allow the robot chest to end up in the right spot with respect to everything else. It's not a bad design, certainly, but it's definitely less elegant and far more complex than the simple G1 toy.
The legs end up on either side of the vehicle, as you might expect, and the feet connect to the chest piece in ways that the G1 animation model dictates but which the G1 toy was unable to pull off. The end result is kind of abstract and unrealistic, but it's accurate to animation, and that's what counts here. I'll take Slavish Accuracy for $500, Alex!
Motorcycle mode is a little over five inches in length. As with the Reveal the Shield toy, it's designed specifically for another copy of Wreck-Gar to ride himself. There's a tab on the motorcycle seat which corresponds to a slot on Wreck-Gar's pelvis in robot mode. Tomorrow I'll pick up another Wreck-Gar, if it's still at Walmart, and test the compatibility of both toys. Two great tastes that taste great together!
I've heard that we're supposedly getting a generic Junkion out of this mold. It wouldn't take much to make some cosmetic changes to the robot parts while leaving the motorcycle parts alone. There were a number of distinctive, unique Junkion generics so they could get some mileage out of this production mold if they really wanted to.
This is honestly one of the best G1 updates ever. Not just because Wreck-Gar has desperately needed a good toy for a really long time, but because he's arguably one of the objectively best, and most cartoon-accurate, neo-G1 toys we've ever gotten. He's phenomenal.
Zob (plus, if you act now, you'll receive this handsome "Junkion Dance Party" backdrop, constructed from the highest quality recycled cardboard, absolutely free! NOW how much would you pay? But wait—there's more!)
Most of the Wreck-Gar toys have been awful. The G1 toy has always been a loose, floppy mess, in my experience, and it's arguably the best one we had for a long time. Seems like every time Hasbro sells a motorcycle toy like Groove or somebody, they ask the inevitable question about how they're going to redeco it and sell it to consumers again, and then somebody remembers that Wreck-Gar was also a motorcycle, and we end up with an orange Groove that nobody asked for.
This toy, however, is phenomenal. It's a slam dunk in a way that Hasbro very, very rarely manages to achieve. Like, I honestly can't believe this isn't a third-party toy that cost me a hundred dollars. It's that good. The fact that this thing only cost me $26 just blows my mind. I'm not gonna pay a lot for this muffler!
So, he's a Voyager, so he stands at about six and three-quarters inches tall. It's a little hard to determine his true height since he's hunched over slightly in the Sunbow animation scale chart, but he's nearly the height of Springer but taller than Hot Rod and Kup and Blurr, so this seems right. His colors are a thing of beauty, honestly. I do believe the original idea was that he was meant to be the color of various tarnished metals (i.e., brown and orange and red are all the color of rust) and while previous Wreck-Gar toys tend to be mostly orange, this version really nails the cartoon color scheme. (He had a different color scheme in "The Big Broadcast of 2006" with weird-colored gauntlets, but that's a one-off so we can pretty much ignore it.) His CG render on the back of the box seems to suggest some parts were going to be vac-metal chrome, or metalized silver, but they wisely decided against it.
The surface texture on the toy is mottled in places to reduce the sheen of the plastic, and honestly it's a great way of making him look less than pristine. It's most evident on his shoulders and pelvis and the saddle bags on his hips. He doesn't have Autobot symbols on him anywhere, which is correct to the G1 animation (the Junkions were portrayed as maybe-villains in the beginning, which probably explains the red eyes, so Autobot badges would have been a dead giveaway that they eventually turned out to be friendly).
His articulation is about what you'd expect from a modern-day Transformers toy, with knee joints whose range of movement is a bit more limited than the usual, and toe tilts that move separately from the rest of his feet. He's probably not designed to be disassembled per se, the same way that Kup was, but you can pop off his head at the ball-and-socket joint, ad his arms and fists and legs can all be slipped out of their mushroom joints without the use of tools. Any more elaborate dismantling would require a screwdriver. Some disassembly required, batteries not included, but I believe in me!
He's got all these great little details. His moustache and beard are made of rubbery plastic, so you can bend them a bit without accidentally snapping them off. For the spiked tires he wore as armor, the spikes have been reduced to child-safe nubs, which is unfortunate but understandable. They still look pretty good. He's got huge thermoplastic spikes on the sides of his arms and knees, and both tires are removable, designed to slip over those spikes. His chest guns are on ball-and-socket joints, so they will pop off before they will break, which I'm sure was the intention. He comes with his axe, as per the animation, but does not come with an accellerator laser like the G1 toy did. (I imagine some third-party chaps will produce one, eventually, but it seems largely unneccesary, to be honest.)
I'm actually a little sad that Wreck-Gar, out of all possible characters, is completely devoid of battle damage. I know that was a contention of Siege, and Earthrise to a lesser extent, but still. Irony, thy name is Hasbro.
Wreck-Gar's transformation to motorcycle mode was one of those things that looked good on paper, but resulted in an awful toy. Like the animation design for Blurr, Wreck-Gar's head was required to grow to monstrous proportions when he transformed to vehicle mode, as his robot head became the entire front end of the motorcycle. There's no way you could accomplish this in three-dimensional space. It's life, Jim, but not as we know it. So, Hasbro had to cheat a bit and give him a second motorcycle front end, one that is not formed out of his head. It's tucked inside his upper chest.
His transformation is essentially the same as G1, but with a bit more complexity. As before, the robot arms come together to form the front fork tubes, with one of the wheels plugging into his wrists (not the fists, which retract on this model). The robot head tucks inside the second, larger front fairing and windshield assembly. There are lots of fidgety hinges that allow the robot chest to end up in the right spot with respect to everything else. It's not a bad design, certainly, but it's definitely less elegant and far more complex than the simple G1 toy.
The legs end up on either side of the vehicle, as you might expect, and the feet connect to the chest piece in ways that the G1 animation model dictates but which the G1 toy was unable to pull off. The end result is kind of abstract and unrealistic, but it's accurate to animation, and that's what counts here. I'll take Slavish Accuracy for $500, Alex!
Motorcycle mode is a little over five inches in length. As with the Reveal the Shield toy, it's designed specifically for another copy of Wreck-Gar to ride himself. There's a tab on the motorcycle seat which corresponds to a slot on Wreck-Gar's pelvis in robot mode. Tomorrow I'll pick up another Wreck-Gar, if it's still at Walmart, and test the compatibility of both toys. Two great tastes that taste great together!
I've heard that we're supposedly getting a generic Junkion out of this mold. It wouldn't take much to make some cosmetic changes to the robot parts while leaving the motorcycle parts alone. There were a number of distinctive, unique Junkion generics so they could get some mileage out of this production mold if they really wanted to.
This is honestly one of the best G1 updates ever. Not just because Wreck-Gar has desperately needed a good toy for a really long time, but because he's arguably one of the objectively best, and most cartoon-accurate, neo-G1 toys we've ever gotten. He's phenomenal.
Zob (plus, if you act now, you'll receive this handsome "Junkion Dance Party" backdrop, constructed from the highest quality recycled cardboard, absolutely free! NOW how much would you pay? But wait—there's more!)
Irrellius Spamticon
Aug 12, 2021, 8:58:08 PM8/12/21
to
On Monday, August 2, 2021 at 10:17:06 PM UTC-5, Zobovor wrote:
> I had indeed pre-ordered this toy through Hasbro Pulse, but he showed up at Walmart today (and for less money, too—something like $26 versus the $32 Hasbro Pulse and BBTS are asking). I need to go back and get a second one for my son, plus we both want to see how successfully two of the toys interact with each other. Double your pleasure, double your fun!
>
How do two toys interact with each other? Well do you want a quad bike or not?
> I had indeed pre-ordered this toy through Hasbro Pulse, but he showed up at Walmart today (and for less money, too—something like $26 versus the $32 Hasbro Pulse and BBTS are asking). I need to go back and get a second one for my son, plus we both want to see how successfully two of the toys interact with each other. Double your pleasure, double your fun!
>
https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=384860749875636&set=pcb.384860826542295
Zobovor
Aug 12, 2021, 9:44:37 PM8/12/21
to
On Thursday, August 12, 2021 at 6:58:08 PM UTC-6, Ob1k...@att.net wrote:
> How do two toys interact with each other? Well do you want a quad bike or not?
I just picked up a second Wreck-Gar today. It's for my son, officially, but we did have some fun having one ride the other. The quad bike idea did occur to me, but clearly somebody else beat me to the punch. Maybe I need to find a third Wreck-Gar and build a six-wheeled vehicle...
> How do two toys interact with each other? Well do you want a quad bike or not?
Zob (It's time to play "End of the Line, My Valentine!" Gee-Ronny-Do-Ron-Ronny-MOOOOOOO!")
Codigo Postal
Oct 2, 2021, 8:10:06 PM10/2/21
to
My harsh take - he's fantastic. Currently a contender for Best Release of 2021, and that's saying something in the Warden-led WfC/SS86 era.
He looks like he stepped straight off the screen. His transformation is intuitive and smooth. Although there are various upgrade kits available, he doesn't really require any - unlike many modern releases, there aren't any glaring deficiencies that require fixing.
He's a cool ride for Hot Rod, or a R.E.D. figure, or Kingdom Optimus Primal. He's a worthy adversary for his onscreen opponent, Siege Springer.
Good size, solid and hefty, strong plastics, exceptional colors. I struggle to find anything wrong with him. His ab crunch is a little loose, I'd like it to snap in more firmly, but a dab of floor polish could probably fix it. Count me in for his inevitable repaints.
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