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Zob's Thoughts on Studio Series '86 Voyager-Class Ratchet
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Zobovor
Oct 27, 2023, 3:02:50 PM10/27/23
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I pre-ordered Ratchet about the same time as Studio Series Ultra Magnus and Studio Series Frenzy (Red), so I expected they would all show up at about the same time. I've been oddly excited about Ratchet's arrival, despite already owning Ironhide (he's not a new toy experience by any stretch of the imagination). In fact, I was so excited that I started drafting this review before he even showed up on my doorstep!
So, in recent years we've gotten Siege Ratchet from 2019 (a Cybertronic vehicle, and also a Walgreens exclusive that not everybody could find) and then Earthrise Ratchet in 2020 (a rejiggered version of the Siege toy that was available in a 2-pack with Lifeline, and an Amazon exclusive, so still a bit hard to find). Not including the tiny Core-class toy, this is the first mass-marketed Ratchet we've gotten in a while.
The Siege and Earthrise releases also suffered from a handful of design problems and color-mapping issues. Siege Ratchet has red-painted parts in seemingly random places (his toes, the front of his legs, his wrists... red was pretty much everywhere except the shoulder crosses and the fists, where it needed to be). Earthrise was more G1-like, but it took the approach of just popping off the roof and turning it into a shield, and the robot feet poked out of the back of the van rather obvously. He also had the wrong-colored fists.
Some of this could be mitigated with various third-party add-on parts, but I think we can all agree that you shouldn't *have* to buy additional parts to make these toys look the way they're supposed to.
Ironhide was sold to us not quite a year ago, in late 2022, so we knew the Ratchet redeco was inevitable.
So, the robot mode is by far the most accurate of the three Deluxe-sized toys —he has the correct red-colored pelvis and fists, and doesn't have any of the extraneous red-painted details that the others toys were saddled with. The fists are cast in white plastic but painted a glossy red (you can still see a little bit of the white inside his fist-holes). Hasbro did remember that Ratchet has a slightly different robot design than Ironhide, and they replaced the pelvis-flap with a different design that doesn't include the diamond shape found on the SS86 Ironhide pelvis.
The only weapons or accessories he comes with are the twin handheld pistols, the same ones included with Studio Series '86 Ironhide, and the only things Ratchet is shown to be equipped with in The Transformers: the Movie. They are cast in black plastic but painted silver, except for the pegs (they were evidently part of the same sprue as his vehicle-mode wheels), making them impossible to distinguish from Ironhide's weapons once you throw them in your toy box.
Transformation was tricky because the roof lights kept popping off. They are in two halves, and they don't stay on too well. I almost think you should remove them deliberately while you're locking everything together, because otherwise you'll just have to keep pushing a cat off your lap and crawling around on the floor looking for the pars that went flying off, as I did. I may end up gluing the roof lights on, because there's no reason to ever remove them.
Vehicle mode is distinctly two shades of white. The plastic is a muted white, like the color of printer paper, but the painted parts (the roof section to which the emergency lights are attached) are significantly brighter.
His ambulance mode is awfully plain-looking. As with Studio Series '86 Ironhide, who is missing the orange stripes on the sides, Ratchet lacks the red stripes on either side of the ambulance that we tend to associate with the character. He looks a lot like First Aid now. I understand why there are no crosses on his sides (the Red Cross tends to get very cross about those sorts of things) but the red stripe is pretty important. I guess I'm going to need to get a ToyHax sticker set for Ironhide AND Ratchet now.
The guns can replace the roof lights or be mounted to the undercarriage of the ambulance to serve as exhaust pipes.
Regarding the red cross symbols, specifically, I kind of wish Hasbro had found some kind of workaround. I loved the way Takara came up with stickers for the Masterpiece version of Ratchet that just happened to resemble the red cross insignias if you cut the corners of the stickers off with scissors. Well, it's likely ToyHax will do something similar.
I honestly would not be super surprised if we got another two-pack of dead/dying Autobots at some point, with a slightly remolded Ratchet and Brawn featuring battle damaged parts and blast effects. I mean, we already got the Ironhide and Prowl set, so why not?
Hasbro's done a great job in recent years of systematically knocking out all the major characters and giving us these great, truly definitive releases. I was super dissatisfied with the Universe versions of Ironhide/Ratchet from 2008, for example, and there was a time that I thought those were the best attempts we were ever likely to get. I'm really glad to be proven wrong sometimes!
Zob (you know we're doing pretty good when the only "major characters" who haven't gotten updates yet are, like, the Throttlebots)
So, in recent years we've gotten Siege Ratchet from 2019 (a Cybertronic vehicle, and also a Walgreens exclusive that not everybody could find) and then Earthrise Ratchet in 2020 (a rejiggered version of the Siege toy that was available in a 2-pack with Lifeline, and an Amazon exclusive, so still a bit hard to find). Not including the tiny Core-class toy, this is the first mass-marketed Ratchet we've gotten in a while.
The Siege and Earthrise releases also suffered from a handful of design problems and color-mapping issues. Siege Ratchet has red-painted parts in seemingly random places (his toes, the front of his legs, his wrists... red was pretty much everywhere except the shoulder crosses and the fists, where it needed to be). Earthrise was more G1-like, but it took the approach of just popping off the roof and turning it into a shield, and the robot feet poked out of the back of the van rather obvously. He also had the wrong-colored fists.
Some of this could be mitigated with various third-party add-on parts, but I think we can all agree that you shouldn't *have* to buy additional parts to make these toys look the way they're supposed to.
Ironhide was sold to us not quite a year ago, in late 2022, so we knew the Ratchet redeco was inevitable.
So, the robot mode is by far the most accurate of the three Deluxe-sized toys —he has the correct red-colored pelvis and fists, and doesn't have any of the extraneous red-painted details that the others toys were saddled with. The fists are cast in white plastic but painted a glossy red (you can still see a little bit of the white inside his fist-holes). Hasbro did remember that Ratchet has a slightly different robot design than Ironhide, and they replaced the pelvis-flap with a different design that doesn't include the diamond shape found on the SS86 Ironhide pelvis.
The only weapons or accessories he comes with are the twin handheld pistols, the same ones included with Studio Series '86 Ironhide, and the only things Ratchet is shown to be equipped with in The Transformers: the Movie. They are cast in black plastic but painted silver, except for the pegs (they were evidently part of the same sprue as his vehicle-mode wheels), making them impossible to distinguish from Ironhide's weapons once you throw them in your toy box.
Transformation was tricky because the roof lights kept popping off. They are in two halves, and they don't stay on too well. I almost think you should remove them deliberately while you're locking everything together, because otherwise you'll just have to keep pushing a cat off your lap and crawling around on the floor looking for the pars that went flying off, as I did. I may end up gluing the roof lights on, because there's no reason to ever remove them.
Vehicle mode is distinctly two shades of white. The plastic is a muted white, like the color of printer paper, but the painted parts (the roof section to which the emergency lights are attached) are significantly brighter.
His ambulance mode is awfully plain-looking. As with Studio Series '86 Ironhide, who is missing the orange stripes on the sides, Ratchet lacks the red stripes on either side of the ambulance that we tend to associate with the character. He looks a lot like First Aid now. I understand why there are no crosses on his sides (the Red Cross tends to get very cross about those sorts of things) but the red stripe is pretty important. I guess I'm going to need to get a ToyHax sticker set for Ironhide AND Ratchet now.
The guns can replace the roof lights or be mounted to the undercarriage of the ambulance to serve as exhaust pipes.
Regarding the red cross symbols, specifically, I kind of wish Hasbro had found some kind of workaround. I loved the way Takara came up with stickers for the Masterpiece version of Ratchet that just happened to resemble the red cross insignias if you cut the corners of the stickers off with scissors. Well, it's likely ToyHax will do something similar.
I honestly would not be super surprised if we got another two-pack of dead/dying Autobots at some point, with a slightly remolded Ratchet and Brawn featuring battle damaged parts and blast effects. I mean, we already got the Ironhide and Prowl set, so why not?
Hasbro's done a great job in recent years of systematically knocking out all the major characters and giving us these great, truly definitive releases. I was super dissatisfied with the Universe versions of Ironhide/Ratchet from 2008, for example, and there was a time that I thought those were the best attempts we were ever likely to get. I'm really glad to be proven wrong sometimes!
Zob (you know we're doing pretty good when the only "major characters" who haven't gotten updates yet are, like, the Throttlebots)
Banzaitron ATT
Oct 28, 2023, 3:43:28 PM10/28/23
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-Banzaitron (I too am also not dead)
Zobovor
Oct 28, 2023, 5:35:46 PM10/28/23
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On Saturday, October 28, 2023 at 1:43:28 PM UTC-6, Banzaitron ATT wrote:
> Unfortunately for Hasbro, their effort will be rewarded with most collectors (myself included) not buying these characters ever again. I don't think they can substantially be improved, they are that good.
Well, that's kind of a double-edged sword, isn't it? The original G1 fans are likely going to be aging out of collecting soon, if past history is any indication. I plan on being a fan until my dying day, but that still realistically only gives Hasbro perhaps three decades more of my loyal customer support at most. People who grew up in the 1980's simply won't be around by, say, 2050 or so.
> Unfortunately for Hasbro, their effort will be rewarded with most collectors (myself included) not buying these characters ever again. I don't think they can substantially be improved, they are that good.
So, if they're going to offer the definitive versions of the G1 characters, the time to do it is NOW. It's likely you or I won't feel the need to buy another Ironhide or Ratchet after these amazing Studio Series toys, but in some ways that also absolves Hasbro of the responsibility of having to *produce* another one. They are freed up to address other characters or even other toy lines. (Whether they are still succesfully forming lifelong fans, given the current media landscape, is another story altogether. In the year 2027, I find it hard to imagine that adults will cite the 2007 Michael Bay movie as being the thing that made them Transformers fans for life.)
The Transformers brand might end up like Star Wars, which largely focuses on merchandising brand-new characters now, or it could also end up like Star Trek, which basically has zero representation on toy store shelves these days. I think one advantage Transformers has over other brands is that the toys can be fun puzzles, unto themselves, even if you have no attachment to the brand or its characters or its history. That honestly might be their saving grace as they march into the future—and perhaps the Collaborative series will become the rule rather the exception, and the goal will be to create various transforming toys out of media characters and vehicles that contemporary audiences are more familiar with.
> I keep my 86 line toys in their own box as not to get them infected with the mediocracy of the previous toy lines.
> -Banzaitron (I too am also not dead)
Zob
Zobovor
Dec 13, 2023, 8:56:44 PM12/13/23
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On Friday, October 27, 2023 at 1:02:50 PM UTC-6, Zobovor wrote:
> Regarding the red cross symbols, specifically, I kind of wish Hasbro had found some kind of workaround. I loved the way Takara came up with stickers for the Masterpiece version of Ratchet that just happened to resemble the red cross insignias if you cut the corners of the stickers off with scissors. Well, it's likely ToyHax will do something similar.
So, I finally got around to ordering stickers for Studio Series '86 Ironhide and Studio Series '86 Ratchet. The Ironhide set was sold out for a while, but I just wanted to place a single order and pay shipping once, so I waited.
> Regarding the red cross symbols, specifically, I kind of wish Hasbro had found some kind of workaround. I loved the way Takara came up with stickers for the Masterpiece version of Ratchet that just happened to resemble the red cross insignias if you cut the corners of the stickers off with scissors. Well, it's likely ToyHax will do something similar.
The Ironhide set comes with a LOT of stickers, arguably far too many, to decorate him. Some of it is functional and useful, like headlights and tail lights and license plates, and some of it is kind of silly, like stickers meant to evoke the labels on the G1 toy (not sure why anybody would want to tart up a Studio Series toy to look like the Diaclone-era release). There are also stickers for the windows, including the unpainted rear window.
There are two types of yellow stripes, one set that more closely evokes the G1 toy, with some printed detail on the stripes, and another set that's just basic yellow, no embellishment. The yellow ones are the ones I used, and they're made of a slightly stretchy yellow vinyl. They stick well to the plastic (I didn't wash it or anything) and remain affixed after casual handling.
For Ratchet, in addition to the red stripes he desperately needed to complete the look of his ambulance mode, he also needed those red-colored cross symbols. They are red with a shiny red metallic outline. There is a red cross for his roof, two smaller ones for the sides of the ambulance, and also ones for his shoulders in robot mode. The shoulder stickers are a bit weird, because there are notches cut out of each sticker so that the labels can lay flat on each shoulder panel, even with the raised sculpted detail. But, you can still see some of the original painted detail as a result of this. I would have honestly preferred square-shaped stickers that just covered that raised detail.
Ratchet's sticker set comes with a lot of stuff I didn't use, like city-specific stickers or "EMERGENCY" stickers or the same goofy G1 toy-based stickers. I really only wanted the red stripes and the crosses.
These stickers go a long way towards abating my issue with the lack of factory paint on these guys. The toys look much better now to my eyes. The Ratchet set goes for $15 and the Ironhide set is usually $10, but I got them when ToyHax was running a deal for fifty percent off.
Zob (did end up gluing the roof light pieces down on Ratchet, just because I really don't want to lose them)
Codigo Postal
Dec 14, 2023, 1:18:04 PM12/14/23
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Zobovor
Dec 14, 2023, 9:32:06 PM12/14/23
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On Thursday, December 14, 2023 at 11:18:04 AM UTC-7, Codigo Postal wrote:
> In terms of satisfaction and playability, setting aside considerations of cost and scale, do you prefer this or the Masterpiece? I ask because MP Ratchet is one of the few Masterpieces I actually enjoy handling - it's visually pleasing, and its transformation is both clever and intuitive (which is generally not the case with MP figures, both official and 3rd party).
I'm honestly not really satisfied with the Masterpiece versions of Ironhide/Ratchet. Their robot modes are oddly-proportioned, and those hip plates really bother me. Now that they're replaced Starscream and friends with much better redesigned versions, I'd call Ironhide/Ratchet the worst of the G1 Masterpiece toys that I have on display. (I put away the old versions of Megatron and Bumblebee when the new ones came out.) I honestly wouldn't be shocked if they did a rejiggered version some day with alternate engineering. It's super clever how the van mode basically turns inside-out to form the robot, don't get me wrong. It's just not a great robot.
> In terms of satisfaction and playability, setting aside considerations of cost and scale, do you prefer this or the Masterpiece? I ask because MP Ratchet is one of the few Masterpieces I actually enjoy handling - it's visually pleasing, and its transformation is both clever and intuitive (which is generally not the case with MP figures, both official and 3rd party).
No, I love the Studio Series '86 toys. I've been keeping them accessible because I knew my stickers were coming in the mail. I kept telling myself to keep them in van mode, so I could slap the stickers on when they showed up, but I couldn't help it! They're really fun to fiddle with. The transformation is complex without being frustrating, but it results in both a really good van mode, and robot styling that I really like. Somehow I'm more okay with van window panels hanging off the sides of the lower legs than hip plates. I admit that's pretty arbitrary.
I like that the Masterpiece toys exist, and I'm glad I own them, but in the case of Ironhide/Ratchet, I don't love them.
Zob (now, say, Inferno on the other hand... he's perfection in plastic form)
Codigo Postal
Dec 14, 2023, 9:41:00 PM12/14/23
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*pauses for a cigarette*
That said, I'm sufficiently intrigued by your review to now want to purchase either of both of the SS86 versions of these characters, just to experience the mold. Of course, that would mean supporting Hasbro, a cold-hearted corporation that has turned its backs on its own employees right before the holidays. I will wrestle with this dilemma, and let their availability online for a reasonable price be my moral guide.
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