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Zob's Thoughts on Cyberverse Bumbleswoop
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Zobovor
Nov 12, 2021, 6:18:52 PM11/12/21
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So I generally don't buy anything from the Cyberverse line. I gobbled up a bunch of Sharkticons when they were available, some years ago, but for the most part I've been content to skip the toys entirely.
However, the Swoop toy that came with this set really appealed to me. It's basically like they took the G1 toy and... didn't change a thing. I absolutely love how close it is to the size and shape and even the transformation scheme of the 1984 toy. And it also came with an awful, awful Bumblebee.
Back when my son was younger, I would buy him the kid-friendly toys because the modern mainline stuff was just impossible for him to figure out. But, he's outgrown all that now, so we tend to not have nearly as many kiddie fare toys in the house as we used to. (Somewhere in this condo there's a whole box full of One-Step Changers and the like.) This is the first one I've bought in a while.
So the idea is that the toys can plug into each other to form one entity, presumably the Bumbleswoop mentioned on the packaging. Every set is like this, even when it doesn't make sense. Megatron and Slug can combine into Slugtron. Why would Megatron combine with a Dinobot? Why isn't the combined form called Slagtron? (The artwork shows their combiner head as having a Megatron-type design with dinosaur horn elements, but this seems to be artistic liberty as the toy isn't designed like this.) There's another set where Wheeljack and Grimlock connect to form Wheelgrim or something stupid like that. Grimjack would have been the obvious portmanteau, assuming they could yank the trademark out from underneath First Comics.
Bumblebee transforms into this vaguely Mustang-like sports car with a tuner engine and dinosaur claws poking out of the roof. They made no attempt to hide them at all. The connector peg to combine the two toys is also permanently poking out of the front of the car. It's kinda-sorta disguised as a gun, but not really. You pick it up and it just feels hollow and cheap. There's zero heft to this thing. Fans on the message boards complain about how awful the Kingdom toys are, and I really think they need to buy just one Cyberverse toy and get some serious perspective.
To transform Bumblebee to robot mode, you stand up the car on its rear bumper. There you go. You're done. Seriously. I mean, yeah, you can pull the robot arms out a little, and you can separate the robot legs a bit, but honestly that's just window dressing. It's icing on the cake, except the cake in this metaphor is actually a piece cardboard. The robot head does tuck into a compartment in his chest, but it's absolutely impossible to get it back out once you stuff it in there. Such awful design.
Swoop is a little better in some ways and a little worse in other ways. His robot mode theoretically stands at about four and a half inches tall, with a red helmet and a blue robot chest and a yellow dinosaur beak that seems inspired directly by the Sunbow animated color scheme. His color mapping isn't identical to the G1 cartoon (he's got blue legs, and robot arms that are painted red on the shoulders and wrists) but visually it's still really close.
The problem is, the toy has spring-loaded parts that won't cooperate AT ALL. The sides of the body are designed to spring open for conversion to other modes, but they absolutely refuse to lock in place. Maybe he locked together when I first got him? I don't remember. He was held together with rattan ties in the package. Maybe they were the only thing holding his robot mode together. I don't know. Swoop cannot actually achieve the robot mode shown on the packaging and the instructions, since the sides of his body spring open and force him to adopt the stance of a straddle-legged robotic dwarf.
So to transform him to pteranodon mode, it's basically G1 all over again. The pteranodon beak unfolds from the chest, hiding the robot face, and the robot legs back and around to form a pair of humps on the dinosaur back. Well, in theory. Again, the spring-loaded gimmick gets in the way, and the sides of the pteranodon to which the wings are attached refuse to stay plugged in. Oh, and he's got a gargoyle tail that plugs into his butt.
Maybe there's some mechanism that keeps the toy locked together, like some specific arrangement of parts that makes it all work, but I can't find it. And if I, as a collector of robot toys who owns many hundreds of these things, can't figure it out then you can forget about some little kid puzzling it out on his own. Awful, awful design.
For the combined robot form, Bumblebee forms the legs and Swoop forms the upper body. The back of Bumblebee serves as the front of the combiner legs, and Swoop's back becomes the combiner chest. Swoop's robot legs becomes the arms of the combiner, with little fists embedded inside the robot feet. Then you plug the halves together. It's like something from the Transformers: Energon toy line, if their budget were slashed in half and they hated children.
The combiner mode head is sort of based on Bumblebee, but he's got tremendous bug eyes. But, the upshot is that the combined form is easy to achieve, and the toy stands up easily, two things that have historically been a frustration in the past. Also, the faulty springs inside the Swoop component forces the toy to achieve the combiner configuration by default, so there's that.
I would probably write to Hasbro and complain about this toy purely on principle, but I think they're just ignoring me at this point because I still have two consumer complaints pending that they've never bothered to address. So, I guess I'll just accept the fact that this is a horrible toy, and it will serve as a reminder for me to stay well away from anything with the word Cyberverse on the packaging. Obviously, I wasn't expecting a sophisticated Geewuntastic toy made specifically for collectors, but I was kind of expecting a toy that you could actually put into robot mode. Silly me.
Zob (well, back to dealing with the flood in the laundry room and wondering how many disasters I'm expected to endure in this lifetime)
However, the Swoop toy that came with this set really appealed to me. It's basically like they took the G1 toy and... didn't change a thing. I absolutely love how close it is to the size and shape and even the transformation scheme of the 1984 toy. And it also came with an awful, awful Bumblebee.
Back when my son was younger, I would buy him the kid-friendly toys because the modern mainline stuff was just impossible for him to figure out. But, he's outgrown all that now, so we tend to not have nearly as many kiddie fare toys in the house as we used to. (Somewhere in this condo there's a whole box full of One-Step Changers and the like.) This is the first one I've bought in a while.
So the idea is that the toys can plug into each other to form one entity, presumably the Bumbleswoop mentioned on the packaging. Every set is like this, even when it doesn't make sense. Megatron and Slug can combine into Slugtron. Why would Megatron combine with a Dinobot? Why isn't the combined form called Slagtron? (The artwork shows their combiner head as having a Megatron-type design with dinosaur horn elements, but this seems to be artistic liberty as the toy isn't designed like this.) There's another set where Wheeljack and Grimlock connect to form Wheelgrim or something stupid like that. Grimjack would have been the obvious portmanteau, assuming they could yank the trademark out from underneath First Comics.
Bumblebee transforms into this vaguely Mustang-like sports car with a tuner engine and dinosaur claws poking out of the roof. They made no attempt to hide them at all. The connector peg to combine the two toys is also permanently poking out of the front of the car. It's kinda-sorta disguised as a gun, but not really. You pick it up and it just feels hollow and cheap. There's zero heft to this thing. Fans on the message boards complain about how awful the Kingdom toys are, and I really think they need to buy just one Cyberverse toy and get some serious perspective.
To transform Bumblebee to robot mode, you stand up the car on its rear bumper. There you go. You're done. Seriously. I mean, yeah, you can pull the robot arms out a little, and you can separate the robot legs a bit, but honestly that's just window dressing. It's icing on the cake, except the cake in this metaphor is actually a piece cardboard. The robot head does tuck into a compartment in his chest, but it's absolutely impossible to get it back out once you stuff it in there. Such awful design.
Swoop is a little better in some ways and a little worse in other ways. His robot mode theoretically stands at about four and a half inches tall, with a red helmet and a blue robot chest and a yellow dinosaur beak that seems inspired directly by the Sunbow animated color scheme. His color mapping isn't identical to the G1 cartoon (he's got blue legs, and robot arms that are painted red on the shoulders and wrists) but visually it's still really close.
The problem is, the toy has spring-loaded parts that won't cooperate AT ALL. The sides of the body are designed to spring open for conversion to other modes, but they absolutely refuse to lock in place. Maybe he locked together when I first got him? I don't remember. He was held together with rattan ties in the package. Maybe they were the only thing holding his robot mode together. I don't know. Swoop cannot actually achieve the robot mode shown on the packaging and the instructions, since the sides of his body spring open and force him to adopt the stance of a straddle-legged robotic dwarf.
So to transform him to pteranodon mode, it's basically G1 all over again. The pteranodon beak unfolds from the chest, hiding the robot face, and the robot legs back and around to form a pair of humps on the dinosaur back. Well, in theory. Again, the spring-loaded gimmick gets in the way, and the sides of the pteranodon to which the wings are attached refuse to stay plugged in. Oh, and he's got a gargoyle tail that plugs into his butt.
Maybe there's some mechanism that keeps the toy locked together, like some specific arrangement of parts that makes it all work, but I can't find it. And if I, as a collector of robot toys who owns many hundreds of these things, can't figure it out then you can forget about some little kid puzzling it out on his own. Awful, awful design.
For the combined robot form, Bumblebee forms the legs and Swoop forms the upper body. The back of Bumblebee serves as the front of the combiner legs, and Swoop's back becomes the combiner chest. Swoop's robot legs becomes the arms of the combiner, with little fists embedded inside the robot feet. Then you plug the halves together. It's like something from the Transformers: Energon toy line, if their budget were slashed in half and they hated children.
The combiner mode head is sort of based on Bumblebee, but he's got tremendous bug eyes. But, the upshot is that the combined form is easy to achieve, and the toy stands up easily, two things that have historically been a frustration in the past. Also, the faulty springs inside the Swoop component forces the toy to achieve the combiner configuration by default, so there's that.
I would probably write to Hasbro and complain about this toy purely on principle, but I think they're just ignoring me at this point because I still have two consumer complaints pending that they've never bothered to address. So, I guess I'll just accept the fact that this is a horrible toy, and it will serve as a reminder for me to stay well away from anything with the word Cyberverse on the packaging. Obviously, I wasn't expecting a sophisticated Geewuntastic toy made specifically for collectors, but I was kind of expecting a toy that you could actually put into robot mode. Silly me.
Zob (well, back to dealing with the flood in the laundry room and wondering how many disasters I'm expected to endure in this lifetime)
Irrellius Spamticon
Nov 12, 2021, 10:02:02 PM11/12/21
to
Looking up some of the Cyberverse, it looks like they have a Warrior Snarl, a Deluxe Slag (forever Slug now) and Ultimate Sludge, so it appears if each Dinobot is appearing in dfferent size classes. Maybe a better Swoop is still coming to Cyberverse, after all they had a better Slug. The Sludge looks very G1, and Snarl looks like G1 without his robot mode wings, but that swoop's wings are just all wrong looking, and that weird tail mace instead of underwing guns when he has clear space for mounting places on his wings.
How was slag a derogatory term since the 60s yet Hasbro didn't know that till the late 2000s?
Zobovor
Nov 12, 2021, 11:50:02 PM11/12/21
to
On Friday, November 12, 2021 at 8:02:02 PM UTC-7, Ob1k...@att.net wrote:
> I had to go look this up, and from the pictures I was kind of shocked you bought this. The wings look all wrong to my eye, though he does have that cartoon shade of blue I know appeals to your aesthetic.
The wings are wrong, but it's still a really Geewuntastic tribute. I arguably didn't need this toy (we're going to get a Studio Series Swoop eventually, which will blow this one out of the water) but I've been eyeing him for days. I couldn't not buy him.
> I had to go look this up, and from the pictures I was kind of shocked you bought this. The wings look all wrong to my eye, though he does have that cartoon shade of blue I know appeals to your aesthetic.
Oh, and my 13-year-old figured out why Swoop wouldn't lock together. There were little black clips inside his wings that were flopping around loosely instead of being plugged in place. So I do like him a bit better now.
> Looking up some of the Cyberverse, it looks like they have a Warrior Snarl, a Deluxe Slag (forever Slug now) and Ultimate Sludge, so it appears if each Dinobot is appearing in dfferent size classes.
> How was slag a derogatory term since the 60s yet Hasbro didn't know that till the late 2000s?
Zob (the name just means he melts his enemies into molten metal, no different than Megatron being nicknamed the Slag-Maker; where's the problem there?)
Irrellius Spamticon
Nov 13, 2021, 12:23:21 AM11/13/21
to
On Friday, November 12, 2021 at 10:50:02 PM UTC-6, Zobovor wrote:
> On Friday, November 12, 2021 at 8:02:02 PM UTC-7, Ob1k...@att.net wrote:
>
> > I had to go look this up, and from the pictures I was kind of shocked you bought this. The wings look all wrong to my eye, though he does have that cartoon shade of blue I know appeals to your aesthetic.
> The wings are wrong, but it's still a really Geewuntastic tribute. I arguably didn't need this toy (we're going to get a Studio Series Swoop eventually, which will blow this one out of the water) but I've been eyeing him for days. I couldn't not buy him.
>
I was significantly happier with the young audience toy I bought recently, probably because it focused on transforming and had no spring gimmicks.
> On Friday, November 12, 2021 at 8:02:02 PM UTC-7, Ob1k...@att.net wrote:
>
> > I had to go look this up, and from the pictures I was kind of shocked you bought this. The wings look all wrong to my eye, though he does have that cartoon shade of blue I know appeals to your aesthetic.
> The wings are wrong, but it's still a really Geewuntastic tribute. I arguably didn't need this toy (we're going to get a Studio Series Swoop eventually, which will blow this one out of the water) but I've been eyeing him for days. I couldn't not buy him.
>
> Oh, and my 13-year-old figured out why Swoop wouldn't lock together. There were little black clips inside his wings that were flopping around loosely instead of being plugged in place. So I do like him a bit better now.
> > Looking up some of the Cyberverse, it looks like they have a Warrior Snarl, a Deluxe Slag (forever Slug now) and Ultimate Sludge, so it appears if each Dinobot is appearing in dfferent size classes.
> Sludge has supposedly been showing up at Ross stores, despite being a brand-new toy. I actually went looking for him the other day, but I haven't found him. Snarl looks kind of cute, and I sort of want him.
> > How was slag a derogatory term since the 60s yet Hasbro didn't know that till the late 2000s?
> I think it was more an offensive term in the United Kingdom, and back in the day, the boys in Rhode Island didn't worry too much about what happened in other countries. Thanks to online e-commerce, international divisions aren't as important as they used to be, and so now Hasbro tends to think more globally.
>
>
> Zob (the name just means he melts his enemies into molten metal, no different than Megatron being nicknamed the Slag-Maker; where's the problem there?)
Gustavo Wombat
Nov 13, 2021, 10:29:08 AM11/13/21
to
Zobovor <zm...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>> How was slag a derogatory term since the 60s yet Hasbro didn't know that
>> till the late 2000s?
>
> I think it was more an offensive term in the United Kingdom, and back in
> the day, the boys in Rhode Island didn't worry too much about what
> happened in other countries. Thanks to online e-commerce, international
> divisions aren't as important as they used to be, and so now Hasbro tends
> to think more globally.
There’s generally a desire to be more niggardly with easily misinterpreted
>
>> How was slag a derogatory term since the 60s yet Hasbro didn't know that
>> till the late 2000s?
>
> I think it was more an offensive term in the United Kingdom, and back in
> the day, the boys in Rhode Island didn't worry too much about what
> happened in other countries. Thanks to online e-commerce, international
> divisions aren't as important as they used to be, and so now Hasbro tends
> to think more globally.
language these days. Sensitive kids or what-not.
Personally, though, I think it just sounds like they are slut-shaming
“Slug” who simply has a healthy, active sex life and was trying to reclaim
the word.
And given that the final result sounds like a mixture of Slut and Slag… I
don’t think they achieved whatever they thought they were achieving.
Anyway, he’ll always be Slut to me now.
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