Dave's TF Studio Series Rant: Deluxe Wave 22

[Dave Van Domelen]

Dave's Transformers Studio Series Rant: Deluxe wave 22

#104 Nightbird (RotB, Nissan GT-R R33)
#105 Autobot Mirage (RotB, Porsche)

Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Studio/Deluxe22


CAPSULES

$25 price point.

#104 Nightbird: Probably the best toy available for this version of the
character, but that's very faint praise indeed. Robot mode is unstable and
looks wrong on many levels, transformation is mostly okay, vehicle mode is
good and licensed. Mildly recommended.

#105 Autobot Mirage: The more I played with this, the worse it got. A
lot of the problems seem to be in the execution rather than the core design,
but did no one actually play with a physical version this toy before sending
the specs off to the factory? Avoid.


RANTS

Packaging: Standard 2023 Deluxe boxes, which is to say that if you grab
the top of the box you've got a good chance of accidentally tearing the top
border of the front. Both have licensing marks on the back (a shiny holofoil
sticker for Mirage).

Licensing: On that topic, I wonder why these are fully licensed while
the regular movie line versions are not. It could be as simple as siloed
teams, with the RotB team not having a licensing budget while Studio Series
does. For some of the cheaper versions of Mirage and Nightbird, I suppose
they might not have been able to guarantee a certain minimum quality level to
be allowed to use the license, but the Deluxe version of Nightbird seems to
be sufficiently good even if Hair Scrunchy Nightbird was never going to
impress a licensor. I suppose it could be a combination of the two ideas as
well: the Studio Series line is consistently able to satisfy licensors so
they have a regular negotiator, but the "a few months and we're gone" movie
tie-in toy line didn't see the point of investing in as much (or any)
licensing.


DECEPTICON: NIGHTBIRD
Assortment: #104
Altmode: Nissan GT-R R33
Transformation Difficulty: 21 steps
Previous Name Use: GenSelects, RotB
Previous Mold Use: None
Movie: RotB
Scene: Attack at the Museum

NIGHTBIRD and the TERRORCONS fight back the AUTOBOTS to steal the
Transwarp Key.

Packaging: Five plastic ties hold the robot onto the inner tray, but the
back kibble is flattened out to fit and some of it ends up between the legs,
it looks pretty weird. The sword is in a folded out lower left corner of the
tray, but they added a plastic tie as well since I guess it's too narrow to
stay in with just the folded cardboard. Unless you want to just cut or tear
the tray, it takes some fiddling to get all the backpack kibble through the
hole in the tray to finish freeing the figure.
The backdrop is of the museum exterior art installation (that gets
pretty wrecked in that scene).
The first six steps of the instructions (teal-blue accent color) involve
getting it from packaged mode and into robot mode, and even then it's missing
a couple of bits (the toes need to be folded out, the shoulderpads flipped
up, the chest sides pressed together, and the center of the hood piece can be
folded up against the windshield). Really, the instructions just cover the
backpack. The tabs that hold the backpack in place are fairly week, resting
in four-sided rectangular indents rather than going into five-sided slots.
Oh, and it doesn't even completely cover the backpack, as TFWiki notes
there's a slot in the airdam that goes on a tab on the underside of the
spoiler, which might help stability if it wasn't more of a "rests in the
slot" situation. Negligible friction keeping it in, sadly. The whole
backpack seems to depend on an order of magnitude more friction than exists
on the real toy, probably one of those "it works in the renders, no need to
test a physical copy before sending it to the factory" situations.

Robot Mode: Technically she has the wings and claws of her movie model,
they're just very small. The wings are little fold outs at the top of the
backpack, more like imp wings than the almost-jet wings she had in the movie.
There's little molded nubs on the backs of the hands which I guess are
supposed to be the claws. Most of the vehicle mode is folded up into the
backpack or the hip armor, leaving slightly more than half the hood as part
of the chest, and some rear fenders on the feet. Ultimately, it looks less
like a female-form robot that turns into a car, and more like a female-form
robot that skinned a car to wear its shell as a poofy dress. Oh, and with
Breast Inflation Fetish levels of chest.
While I give props to the designers to making the effort to give her a
sort of feathered skirt look to keep with the "bird" part of her name, the
molding is split across several pieces and is all in unpainted dark gray
plastic so it sort of gets lost. It looks more like a cingulum (leather
apron thing in Roman armor) than like it's part of a larger skirt.
Ultimately, this is just a symptom of the larger problem of super cheaty
movie animation transformation schemes, which result in even greater "sins"
against toyeticism than the G1 Sunbow animation that Bay derided when talking
up the first movie.
4.75" (12cm) tall in mostly very dark gray with some accents in purple
and rose gold. The chest fender parts are clear colorless plastic, as is
much of the backpack kibble. The helmet forehead is either clear purple
plastic, or more likely clear colorless plastic with transparent purple paint
(nice effect, either way, if marred on mine by a sprue mark or other minor
damage). The wheels, knees, upper arms, skirt center panel, and winglets are
black plastic. Everything else is a very dark gray.
The chest fenders are mostly painted glossy dark gray with rose gold
trim. There's metallic purple on the tops of the winglets, on some details
on the shoulder fronts, and on the wheel hubs. The face is painted silver
with (I think) hot pink eyes. There's some additional rose gold on the shin
shock absorber molded details. The sword blade is painted gloss black.
The neck is a ball joint with the socket inside the head. The ninja
cowl detailing does restrict the range of motion somewhat, but since the edge
goes under the upper torso plates the head can still manage about 45 degrees
to the side either way. The waist is a smooth swivel, but there's so much
interference between the backpack and the hip armor that it can barely
wiggle. The shoulders are ball joints, with the armor pads separately hinged
on top of them. Swivels right above the hinge elbows, no wrist
articulation. Pinned universal hips with a pretty good range of motion
considering that they have those big armor skirts attached via restricted
ball joints. There's swivels right above the top knee joints, the knees are
double hinges with kneecap pieces in the middle rather than attached to upper
or lower leg. There's transformation hinges mid-shin that can be bent a
little to act as "keep the feet flat" joints. The toes fold out on
transformation hinges, otherwise not useful articulation (folding them all
the way out puts a brake on the wheels, too). The winglets are snapped onto
mushroom pegs and can sort of flap, I guess, but can't be completely put away
without ruining what little stability the backpack has.
As usual, the fists can hold 5mm pegs. There is technically a 3mm
socket in the back of the pelvis, good luck getting at it through all the
vehicle shell kibble. There's non-standard rectangular tabs on the skirt
armor and another on the back for attaching the sword...and that's it. Of
course, it's not like there's even room on the skinny feet to put a socket,
and the backpack is so unstable I wouldn't want to try putting any sockets
there either. Even the sword storage tab is dicey.
Oddly, she only comes with a single sword, despite having storage in
both modes for two. So, I guess you get to decide which hip to store the
sword in this mode, and which side of the underbody to use in vehicle mode.
The sword is a single piece of dark gray plastic 2.5" (6.5cm) long, with
panel lines along the blade implying it can do that "turn into a bladed
chain" trick or otherwise separate the bits for Purposes. The grip is a
rounded rectangle designed to go into 5mm fist sockets, there's a rectangular
slot at the top of the hilt that goes around a tab on either skirt side, and
a trigger-like tab that goes into a slot on the underside for vehicle
storage.

Transformation: Well, I got it transformed without anything breaking or
popping off, which is never a guarantee, so that went well. Lots of panel
folding and unfolding, probably the trickiest bit is that you need to fold
the legs up while rotating the side panels, and then get them snapped against
the front fenders while the forearms remain in the right position to take
some of the tabs on the panels. Once the panels are snapped in place, the
forearms can't be pushed upwards if they slipped out during the process, you
have to unpeg from the front and try again. Also, on the topic of the side
panels, the double hinges are hard to unfold all the way, but I had better
luck unfolding the hinge that's closer to the front of the car first, then
using its stiffness to unfold the other hinge. The other way around makes it
almost impossible to unfold the front hinge.

Vehicle Mode: So, after several not-quites or not-even-close unlicensed
vehicles, this one is an actual Nissan GT-R R33 (aka Skyline) with the
license and everything. (The most prominent previous "probably a Skyline"
Transformer was Armada Side Swipe and his redecos, which was kinda an R32 and
kinda a different Nissan and not close enough to either to need licensing.)
It has the oversized spoiler that was seen in the movie (and which the Jungle
Mission version had be the sword) and is pretty solid once all the tabs are
in the right slots. One thing that does work against it in this mode is that
there's actually two types of dark gray plastic, and they match poorly on the
hood. The hood is three distinct shades of gray, the two plastics (although
part of it might be the texture effect, the more matte gray plastic looks
lighter simply because it scatters light more) and the paint on the front
corners (which is a cooler gray). The differences didn't stand out as much
in robot mode because the parts weren't all next to each other.
4.5" (11.5cm) long, making it about 1:40 scale. It's predominantly
(several shades of) very dark gray with metallic purple wheel hubs and rose
gold trim along the bottom edges and around the headlights. Clear colorless
plastic is used for the roof/windshield/side windows piece and the front
corners. The more matte dark gray plastics found in three strips on the
hood, the hinge at the back of the roof, the transformation hinges in the
doors, and the oversized spoiler. Gloss dark gray plastic is used for the
rest of the shell, and the only visible black plastic is in the wheels.
The same gloss gray used on the...okay, I'll call them breasts...which
are now the front corners is also used on the roof and the posts between
windows. The louvered rear window is painted matte black, as is the upper
front grille. There's rose gold trim along the bottom edges of the front and
both sides, but not in back. There's also rose gold borders on the
headlights. The lower front grille is silver. There's a molded Terrorcon
symbol in the black part of the grille, which they tried to paint metallic
purple but the mask slipped or something and it ends up garbled.
Interestingly, not only did they paint the tail lights red, they painted the
ones that are mostly covered by the spoiler struts. The GT-R logo on the
back is molded but not painted, and there's also some odd molded detail on
the back that looks like breakaway covers for drag chutes or something above
the rear bumper...no molded license plate.
It rolls pretty well with the sort of negligible ground clearance
that a real Skyline tends to have, although you do need to be careful about
the alignment of the front wheels. The only accessible connection points in
this mode are the shallow slots on the underside for storing the sword.

Overall: The main plus on this one is the licensed and decently solid
vehicle mode. The transformation is a little less bad than the Jungle
Mission version, the robot mode has different problems than that version.
Still, if you want a version of the movie character, I'd give this one a
slight edge over the previous best of the alternatives (and she didn't
exactly get a lot of toys to begin with).


AUTOBOT: AUTOBOT MIRAGE
Assortment: #105
Altmode: Porsche 911 (964) Carrera RS 3.8
Transformation Difficulty:
Previous Name Use: Siege, Kingdom, RotB (the rest were just Mirage)
Previous Mold Use: None
Movie: RotB
Scene: New York City Getaway

MIRAGE and NOAH speed through the streets of New York City to outrun the
police.

Packaging: Seven plastic ties hold the robot into the inner tray, with
a significant hole in the tray to let the backpack, hip plates, and calf
wheels through. The arm cannon is held in the lower left corner by a folded
out flap of the inner tray.
The backdrop is of a mostly shuttered city street with graffiti, your
basic Bad Neighborhood cliche.
The package art shows him with his battle mask up, but the toy has it
down (well, entirely gone since it's a morph thing) and there's no gimmick to
put it up.
The instructions (red accent color) have two steps for getting him out
of packaging mode and into proper robot mode. One is almost unneeded, since
the hip plates kinda pull into the right position in the process of getting
the figure out of the tray. There is official storage for the cannon in
vehicle mode, but no mention of where to put it in robot mode when not in
use. The folded down panel in back (which is molded to look like a fake
bumper or something?) has several slots, none of which are the right size for
the tabs on the sides of the cannon. The cannon can just sort of rest on top
of that panel, but very loosely.

Robot Mode: First reaction upon pulling the inner tray out of the box
was, "Oh crap, the forearms are completely made of clear plastic." My second
reaction was that he has a very punchable face, which fits his voice actor
quite well. (Also, after transforming this toy, I want to punch it in the
face, so there's that.) Like Nightbird, his robot chest has the front
fenders pressed together after the center of the hood has been folded onto
the backpack, but more of his hood (including the headlights) goes onto the
backpack. A nice detail is that the obvious tabs for securing the center of
the hood aren't blank, they have additional mech detailing on the fronts. He
also has hip panels made from the vehicle sides, but they're not as big and
somehow WAY more of a problem in terms of getting in the way. He looks like
he's wearing flared boots, but they only flare to the inner side, since
that's where the swoopy rear fenders partly go (the rest of the rear fender
and the rear wheel goes on the outer face of the boot). This does keep him
from standing in a totally straight-legged stance, as the "cuffs" keep his
legs slightly angled apart. You can reverse the feet if you prefer the
aesthetics of having all the fender parts on the outside, it doesn't hurt
stability. (The figure can assume a ludicrously wide stance no matter which
way you have the feet, the reversed pose only adds a centimeter or so to it.)
One detail I didn't notice in the movie is that his forehead crest is not
symmetric, and looks more like a swoosh of hair that's been parted on the
left. While the lack of paint makes them kind of hidden, there's fake
headlights molded into the lower chest to "contradict" the actual headlights
that are part of the backpack.
4.75" (12cm) tall in mostly grays and silver, with some metallic blue
bits and the amber turn signals on the sides of his chest. (Which I bet he
never uses, the jerk.) Dark gray plastic is used for the head, inner torso,
fender-pecs, shoulders, upper arms, fists, pelvis, hips, thighs, hip panels,
most of the shin, fenders on the boots, all of each foot, some bits of the
backpack, wheels, and arm cannon. There's actually two shades of dark gray
(the biceps and abdomen being a tiny bit lighter, for instance), but I'm not
sure that's intentional or just a result of some of the more flexible plastic
pieces taking the dye differently. A light gray plastic makes up the top of
the torso, shoulder joints, and several transformation hinges inside the
torso, spins, and calves. A significant amount of the backpack is clear
lightly smoky plastic, as are (as noted earlier) the forearms.
Lots and lots of silver paint. In addition to just about everything
that's vehicle shell being painted silver (not the forearms, though, they're
the windows), the face and thigh fronts are also silver. Armbands on the
biceps and the armor-hair swoosh are metallic blue, and there's some little
metallic blue details on the tops of the forearms. (Some of the visible
vehicle kibble has metallic blue as well, I'll cover that below.) The eyes,
which have molded ring irises, are "Energon blue". The turn signals on the
chest are orange-yellow. The tiny white Autobot symbol on the car hood is
visible on top of his backpack in this mode, so I guess it counts. No paint
on the wheel hubs.
The neck is a ball joint with a little wiggle room for tilting to the
sides or looking up and down a bit. The waist is a smooth swivel, but can't
get very far before the hip flaps run into the backpack. The shoulders are
ball joints on the ends of struts that are hinged to lift up for
transformation. There's bicep swivels, hinge elbows, and wrist swivels.
Ball joint hips with thigh swivels right below them, hinge knees, and ball
joint ankles with a lot of range. The knees only bend more than a few
degrees if you have all the kibble on the legs transformed just the right
way, which leaves the rear fenders rotated way up and the rear wheels hanging
loose behind the calves. A more solid-looking configuration is basically
knee-locked. I have to wonder if the original design let the door panels
pull out on their swivels (which would have solved some other issues as
well).
The fists can hold 5mm pegs...and that's it. There's no other
connectors, they didn't even try to put in a 3mm socket for stands. The fake
vehicle kibble on the clear inner face of the roof on back has some slots
that look like they might be used for something, but none of the tabs on the
weapon fit them.
The gun itself is just a top half forearm cover 32mm long with a short
barrel and an aperture 0.25" wide and a 5mm peg on the interior that lets it
fit into either hand but not work for any other figure (Noah can't use it
either, he has 3mm fists). Dark gray plastic, no paint. As noted in
discussion of the instructions, there is nowhere to store it in robot mode.
Tabs on either side of the muzzle lock into slots on the underside of the car
very solidly, though.

Transformation: Ooog. While there's probably a Best Order to do this
and I just found one of the "it works but is bad" orders, this involved so
much panel massaging, along with really right hinges that needed to be bent
with almost no leverage (especially in the spine area). My hands hurt by the
time I was done, both from pointy bits shoved into my fingertips and from all
the Excessive Force required. The forearms, which turn into the side
windows, were the hardest to get fully aligned, since there's almost nowhere
to usefully push on them once the roof is snapped down. Be sure to rotate
the waist 180 degrees before messing with the spine. The door panels will be
a Problem no matter what you do, and I foresee a lot of scratched paint from
transformation. One positive (working HARD to find any) is that the arm
cannon stores very nicely on the underside using those two side tabs.
Even on later tries, when I technically knew where things were supposed
to go, it was a deeply un-fun process, with many tabs you can't see needing
to be forced into slots you can't see and hoping the required force didn't
pop three other tabs out of place. This is definitely going to be one of
those Transformers where once I'm done reviewing it the thing will never be
transformed again.
Going back to robot mode also requires significant force to start the
process, because once the car is properly put together it does NOT want to
come asunder. The ankles (rear bumper) are easiest to separate, but then
there's a lot of careful wiggling to get the rest of the sides undone...I
thought the roof might be easier to pop up first, but it really needs the
sides loosened first or you risk breaking the clear plastic.

Vehicle Mode: According to TFWiki, this is the first time there's been a
licensed Porsche in Transformers (G1 was basically a pirated Porsche, since
then it's always been just different enough to avoid lawsuits). There's a
certain dark humor in this happening for MIRAGE, rather than for Jazz. The
panel lines stand out harshly against the silver paint, so visually the mold
might work better for a Post Credits Scene Mirage redeco. But the good news
is that this mode is VERY solid. Too solid for ease of transformation, but
I'll take the good points I can find on this toy. I've commented on social
media that I'd gotten to the point I wanted to hit this toy with a hammer,
but that's about what it'd take to mess with this mode once everything is
properly connected.
" (12.5cm) long, which makes it 1:36 scale. Almost the entire
non-window vehicle shell is painted silver as an undercoat before details
were added. The whole canopy piece is clear smoky plastic despite the center
of the roof being opaque thanks to all the paint (I wonder if they considered
leaving the molded moonroof unpainted?). The hinge between roof and rear
window is unpainted lighter warm gray plastic that stands out pretty
strongly, and another hinge at the meeting of windshield and hood is
unpainted dark gray plastic. The tires are totally unpainted, and the side
mirrors are left unpainted as well (not even some silver on the mirror
parts).
The roof and the borders of the front and rear windows are painted
silver, but the side window borders are unpainted. The borders around the
headlights are left unpainted dark gray plastic, as are the fog lamps and the
two grille slits on the bottom of the front bumper. The headlights
themselves are also silver, which is a bit weird. A slightly metallic (or
perhaps slightly transparent) blue stripe is painted down the center of the
hood and on the middle of the spoiler. The raised hood symbol bit has a
small silver Autobot symbol printed on it, taking the place of the Porsche
logo. The tail lights are painted red and the turn signals are painted
yellow-orange. The doors have a blue stripe with "PORSCHE" in it near the
bottom, with thinner pinstripes above and below this. The RS 3.8 logo is
molded into the sides of the spoiler, but not picked out with paint.
It rolls well as long as all the wheel struts are aligned correctly.
Other than the dedicated gun storage, there's no accessible connectors in
this mode.
The blue paint on my spoiler is a little chipped, although I can't say
for sure if it was that way when I pulled it out of the box or got damaged
during transformation. There's a definite factory paint problem on the right
rear fender, where I think maybe some glue didn't get cleaned off before they
painted it, and the silver paint is also prone to chipping and scraping.
Again, this might work better with a credits-scene deco which is supposed to
look bodged together from scrap.

Overall: If Porsche decides to never let Hasbro make another licensed
version of their cars again, I'd totally understand. This is just not good
as a toy to play with, or even really that good as a toy to display unless
never removed from the box.


Dave Van Domelen, at least no real effort was put into finding these.