From Newsgroup: alt.toys.transformers

Dave's Transformers Collaborative Rant: Scooby Doo X Transformers

Mysterious Prime (Mystery Machine) with
Automutt (Box of Scooby Snacks)

Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Collab/ScoobyDoo

Following in the footsteps (but not Foot steps) of the TMNT collab project, this also comes with swappable heads (and neckwear as appropriate)
to let the robot mode be any of the Meddling Kids. Scooby gets to be
separate. As with Party Wallop, the heads don't change the name, so I guess Mysterious Prime just disguises himself/herself as humans and it works for
the same reason the monsters always just accepted Shaggy and Scooby's disguises. Unlike Party Wallop, there's no "neutral" head, although I
suppose you could go for a G1 Ironhide look by leaving the head off entirely and making the windshield the face.


CAPSULE

$58 from HasbroPulse.

Mysterious Prime: A big hampered by a combination of an interesting but bulky gimmick and what I'm guessing is a directive to not split up the
Mystery Machine logo panels, it's still a decent Voyager that does a good job of collaborating.

Automutt: Basically a not-so-good cassette beast. I get that it's necessary, but it kinda drags the set down.

Set Overall: If you can find it for $40 or less on clearance, it's worth picking up for some of the novelty value. But with Transformers prices on their steep upwards curve, they need to be more than decent to be worth the price, and this is merely decent.


RANTS

Packaging: They didn't go for any high concept stuff here, just a fairly standard window box using the classic cartoon's opening credits background as the interior backdrop and line art of various monsters hither and yon. The four robot heads are featured in a 2x2 grid on the left upper foner of the interior, visible through cut-outs in the background art, vehicle mode is strapped into th upper right, Automutt in dog mode in the lower left, and the accessories behind a blister in the lower right (instead of in a bag or
wrapped in tissue). The color scheme is mostly light blue and white,
although the back of the box adds shades of orange.
The box is 11" (28cm) wide, 7" (18cm) tall, and 3.25" (8cm) deep. The plastic window takes up most of the front, with space covered up in the upper right by the Collaborative logo (Scooby himself on the left of the X, the
left half of the X being filled with green eyes on purple background, and the year shown is 2026), while the lower right corner has airbrush-style shaded
art of the gang in their impossible positions in the Mystery Machine as seen from the front. (That uncanny valley sort of 3-D shading applied to
characters who are flat cel art otherwise.) The bottom edge has the Scooby Doo! (exclamation point is part of it) and Transformers logos, the top border has some monsters and the character names...they're Autobots, but their names are in purple, so does that mean they're Shattered Glass Autobots? The top
has the monsters again in gray lines on white with the two logos also larger, the right and left sides have the same art of Scooby Doo's bust in mostly mirror-flopped art (they didn't mirror the SD tag, so it's correct), and the bottom is light blue with the legalese. The box back mostly has the same layout as the front, but instead of a window there's an orange and yellow-orange background of repeating Autobot symbols in different sizes, and no Collaborative logo. The main renders of Mysterious Prime on the left side of the back use the Fred head, with the other three heads in hexagonal insets on the right. Automutt's two modes are center lower half. Along the bottom
in orange text are more legalese and the Warner Brothers/Hanna-Barbera trademarks.
Note, the blister shell holding the robot heads is NOT taped or
otherwise secured to the inner tray, so it'll just fall out when you pull the tray out. The instructions are, as usual, loose behind the tray, and their accent color is orange. They do not say how to get the heads installed (assuming they were already attached in-package), and offer no guidance regarding what to do with the ascot or neck scarf pieces when not in use by
the appropriate head. The bit of blister that holds the accessories in place is taped down from behind, unlike the blister of heads. The van is held to
the tray by two double ties, and Automutt in dog mode is held by two single ties. If you're patient, you can get both out without cutting any ties.
The instructions also don't say where to put the camera and flashlight
in vehicle mode, but I was able to figure that out, there's slots on the
backs of the rear wheel hubs that fit tabs on the accessories. My fingers
are too small to let me put both in while in vehicle mode unless I pop the
rear halves apart a bit.


AUTOBOT: MYSTERIOUS PRIME
Crossover: Scooby Doo
Altmode: The Mystery Machine
Transformation Difficulty: 19 steps
Previous Name Use: None
Previous Mold Use: None

Vehicle Mode: It is a pretty good representation of the Mystery Machine, although it suffers the common unpainted taillights problem that plagues Transformers toys. I wonder if the license included a stipulation that this mode NOT have any standard connectors visible? I mean, there's a 3mm socket
on the underside, and most of the shell is literally a shell with walls too thin for good 5mm sockets, but they didn't even use a 5mm peg for the spare tire (which makes it REALLY hard to remove when transforming, either way).
Even including the spare tire it's barely 4.25" (11cm) long, and 2.75" (7cm) tall and definitely looks pretty small in-package for something that's almost at the Leader pricepoint. Hard to get a read on the scale given how chibified it is, but assuming the height is true to a VW Microbus it's trying to be about 1:28 scale. Mostly colored turquoise, yellow-green, and mustard yellow with black tires and light blue windshield and windows. The spare
tire is yellow-green plastic, the tires are black plastic, and the rest of
the vehicle body is turquoise plastic. The boundaries between unpainted
parts of the van and the yellow-green painted parts are all molded, not that there's any chance they'd be trying to reuse this mold for anything else.
With "groovy" borders left unpainted on the side panels and front end, there's yellowish green paint (a little duller than the plastic) filling in
the sides and lower front, plus a simple stripe along the bottom of the back end. There is no other paint on the back end, not the molded windows nor the bumper. However, since the back end becomes the soles of the feet, that was probably a prudent move. The Mystery Machine name is printed on either side
in back in mustard yellow with a thin black outline, and the flowers on
either side and on the spare tire are also mustard yellow with black lines around the outside and around the center. The hubcaps are also painted
mustard yellow, although it's a little more vibrant than the printed flowers. The windshield and front side windows are painted light blue, as are the headlights. The foglamps under the headlights are painted bright yellow,
while the windshield wipers and front bumper are painted silver. The license plate just has a red Autobot symbol printed on it. (The rear license plate
is unpainted/unprinted.) Note, the animation model of the Mystery Machine
only has a rear license plate, which is apparently AC-712. I guess they
added the front plate to make sure this would be street legal in all 50
states. :)
It rolls okay on the four pinned wheels. The ground clearance isn't great, and it gets worse if you store the flashlight inside, but it's not
like pseudo-VW-minibus vehicles are meant to be offroad (for all that they
took it off the road in the cartoon). As noted, there are no standard connectors other than the pelvis 3mm socket accessible on the underside. The accessories store using nonstandard tabs and slots. There is definitely no solid place to store both the ascot and Daphne's scarf, although I suppose
you could put one of them in its robot mode slot and have cloth dangling in
the windshield.

Transformation: The rear half mostly folds up into boots, with the rear wall becoming the feet. Heel spurs fold out from the bumpers, and pop off pretty easily if you're not careful. Once the rear shell is gone, the robot arms just fold around so that the shoulders lock over the side windows, and
the lower front quarter swings around on a strut to become the backpack. If you have the camera and flashlight stored, they'll fall out almost
immediately if you don't remove them intentionally first. Also, while two of the hinges for the side panels are held together with long metal pins, the higne between the rear fenders and the upper side panels are snap-on, which means they're also pop-off during transformation if you don't move things
just right. They don't really snap into place on the sides of the boots either, so they come loose pretty easily.
The heads are all attached to a carousel sort of thing inside the torso, which you access by pulling the backpack of the lower front quarter away, pulling the assembly out, then rotating to the preferred head and pushing it back in so you can fold the desired head up through the gap in the roof.
Note, the panel bits that cover that gap are part of the boots, so you can't
do the GoBot-style no-head altmode convincingly, there's going to be one of
the four robot heads looking up through the hole.
When going back to vehicle mode, getting all the panels in place is a MASSIVE hassle, not helped by the fact that the lowest side panels (with the rear wheels) keep collapsing inwards, or by the nearly zero forgiveness in getting the arms in place. It helps a little to switch to Velma as the head first, since that gives a fraction of a millimeter more room for the
shoulders than the other two heads, but I ended up having to just wrap my
hands around the almost-complete vehicle and squeeze in all directions inward to get things to line up. While I tried storing the camera and flashlight before the Big Squeeze, they kept being popped out by my attempts at aligning the panels. It's probably easier to transform without them, then gently pry the back end apart enough to have room to put the accessories in their
slots.

Robot Mode: Well, being a van with a windshield chest, it's obviously going to evoke Ironhide at least a little. And the fiddly panels on the
sides of the boots specifically evoke the Prime Wars design. I wonder if the awkward size of the boot panels is a result of licensor insistence that the Mystery Machine logos not be split up in robot mode. Because of the somewhat limited space inside the rotary head thing in the torso, the heads are all on the small side, although the hair helmet makes Daphne a little better proportioned than the others. I'll cover the heads in more detail later.
At 6" (15cm) tall, it's about normal for a modern Voyager. To the
vehicle mode's colors is added a medium-light gray with a slight metallic sheen, and of course the heads try to look more or less like the colors of their respective human characters. In addition to the vehicle shell bits, turquoise plastic is used for the shoulders, forearms/fists, abdomen (which
is on the same piece as the upper torso vehicle cabin), pelvis front, boot shells, and struts inside the backpack. Inside the torso, the head carousel has a turquoise strut and turquoise hinges for the head platforms, the rest
is the slightly silvery light gray plastic. All of the heads, as well as the ascot and scarf, are made from the warm brown plastic that makes up all of Automutt. The light silvery-gray plastic is also used for the shoulder
joints, biceps, thighs, pelvis back, shin vents, ankle joints, and the camera and flashlight accessories.
There's only a little robot-specific paint not tied to the heads. Some yellow-green on the shoulder fronts, orange on the forearm cuffs and pelvis details. The ascot is painted that orange over all of it except the
attachment tab, and Daphne's scarf is painted all yellow-orange. There's no paint on the flashlight or camera accessories, I guess they're "unpaintable" plastic.
No neck articulation, because the heads are solid with no joints, but
the waist turns smoothly and can go almost 90 degrees either way before the pelvis front runs into the hinge that holds the backpack. Pinned hinge and swivel universal joint shoulders, bicep swivels, hinge elbows, no wrists. Pinner hinge and swivel hips, upper thigh swivels, hinge knees that snap into straight-leg position. The ankles are hinged in both directions, plus the transformation hinge that lets them get far enough from the lower leg to let the joints have some room to move.
The fists can hold 5mm pegs, and there's a 3mm socket on the back of the pelvis, and that's it. You know, 5mm sockets on the soles of the feet
would've been nice, and would have let you store the camera and flashlight on the outside rather than the awkward interior storage (and maybe then they could've put ascot and scarf storage inside). There's a thin slot at the top center of the windshield for attaching neckwear, but nowhere to store the neckwear otherwise.
The flashlight accessory is very hollow on both sides, and is held via a 5mm peg perpendicular to the end, so it looks like a weird gun or bullhorn. It's an inch (2.5cm) long with a wide (1.5cm) lens in front. It's very difficult to get it into the figure's fist, but checking with calipers the problem is that the fist sockets are too narrow, not that the accessory pegs are too wide.
The camera is only hollow from behind, it has a big flash unit on top,
and the 5mm peg is under the left end of the bottom, meaning it's meant to be held by the left hand...too bad it can't really be gotten up to the face. If the wrists had swivels, you could sort of get close, but the whole Ironhide Chest makes it hard to get the arms in front in any way. A single piece of light gray plastic, the camera is 17mm wide and 18mm tall not counting the
peg. A 5mm socket on the roof to the right of the head would have made for a nice camera mount.
Neither accessory can be stored in robot mode, as their connection slots are inside the boots without enough clearance to store anything.

The heads are Titan Master compatible, although they're unarticulated as previously mentioned. And yes, that means that if you have the old Titanmaster-wearing Megatron (the Blitzwing moldmate one) you can put Fred's head on Megatron for an alternate Frank Welker voice. They take a lot of
force to snap in or remove, probably so that they don't pop out when you bend the hinges on the carousel.
Going in alphabetical order, Daphne has a helmet vaguely Ironhide-like
to represent her longer hair, but with a silver mohawk that has a sort of miner's lamp on the front. Her face and the mohawk are painted silver, eyes and lamp lens bright blue. The hair-helmet is painted a sort of orange-brown to try to match her hair color in the cartoon. Her neck scarf is painted
gloss yellow-green except for the thin tab on back, and the sides are wide enough to accomodate her head, any of the other Meddling Kids heads, or
really most Titan Master heads. 16mm tall not counting the neck peg, 13mm
wide at the bottom, she has a neutral facial expression.
Fred's also got a neutral expression, and his hair helmet has the
expected pompadour shape. The overall head shape narrows from top down to bottom, so it's only 9mm wide at the bottom of the hair helmet but 12mm tall
at the top. The height of the head is 16mm. The hair is light yellow, the face is silver and the eyes bright blue. His ascot has a narrower profile,
so only Fred and Shaggy can wear it easily, Velma with a little wiggling.
It's painted the same orange as the robot cuffs, if a bit more glossy and vibrant.
Shaggy is smiling, and has a full soul patch rather than a few lines of scruff as he's usually shown in animation. The hair helmet is narrower at
the top (10mm) than the bottom (12mm), but the neck is bare to a slightly higher level, so he can still wear the ascot easily. The head is 16mm tall, with silver face, bright blue eyes, and light yellow-brown hair.
Velma's head looks the least like the character, in large part because
her hair helmet narrows at the bottom rather than fluffing out into an approximation of her hairdo. She also has a Transformers-style visor rather than glasses, making it look like she put on some old-people wraparound sunglasses over her glasses. The shortest head at about 15.5mm (yeah, not
much shorter) and almost 14mm wide at the widest, which looks more like an Arcee helmet than Velma's hair.

Overall: Well, the head swapping gimmick is clever and avoids a repeat
of the Turtles sete, the figure is overly bulky as a result and has a lot of panels that don't really stay put. Despite barely being a shellmaster, it
has all the unpleasant transformation elements of the most severe
shellmasters. Additionally, they really dropped the ball on accessory
storage.


AUTOBOT: AUTOMUTT
Crossover: Scooby Doo
Altmode: Box of Scooby Snacks
Transformation Difficulty: 6 steps
Previous Name Use: None
Previous Mold Use: None

Beast Mode: Well, it looks like a robotic Scooby Doo with pieces of a giant Scooby Snacks box draped over him like armor, or as if he'd eaten his
way through the box and burst through. It has the vibe of a G1 cassette
beast, with feet very close together and negligible useful articulation.
Okay, a bad G1 cassette beast, at least Ravage and Steeljaw have legs with
some joints in them. The head has a bit more chin to it than Scooby himself does, partly because it's squared off and partly because Scooby tends to bave
a little of an overbite, with the slope from nose to chin being inwards even when he's not sniveling in fear, this has more of a flat front. Perhaps they were shooting for the kind of hinged jaw robot motif seen in some Hanna- Barbera bots (if not as pronounced as Frankenstein Junior's chin).
3.25" (8.5cm) long from snout to tail tip, in a mix of warm brown, yellow-green, and light blue. All of the plastic is warm brown. The sides
are printed with Scooby Snacks box deco split in the middle and with a corner folded up along with the head, I'll cover that in box mode below. The four- sided robot eyes are the same light blue as the Mystery Machine's windshield, the nose is a black triangle, and the collar and dogtag are the same blue as Velma's visor. While the Scooby Doo dogtag logo is printed on the sides (looking like a cutie mark on the left side), the actual dogtag is blank
blue. I suppose a tiny Autobot symbol sticker could go there, since
Mysterious Prime already has an Autobot symbol on the bumper.
No meaningful articulation. The spine can unbend on the transformation joint, but the legs can't move to compensate. The tail can wag a bit, and
the head can look down on its transformation hinge, but move too far and it looks like he had a bad encounter with a headman's axe. No connectors, the open mouth is too wide for 3mm and too narrow for 5mm. I suppose you could make a sandwich to put in there or look for other dollhouse-scale food. If
you get the right angle, you can kinda get the scarf or ascot to stay in the mouth as if he's fetching it.
Speaking of scale, if Automutt was supposed to be as big as Scooby Doo, he'd be about 1:24 scale, which isn't too far off from the Mystery Machine's scale.

Transformation: It took me several tries before I could reliably get
this transformed (either direction) without popping the left torso piece off
in the process. It's an annoying dance of needing the spine either bent or unbent at various steps. So, here's the proper order, any other order will cause problems:
1. Fold the spine straight.
2. Pull open the left side, both pieces.
3. Fold the tail in as far as it'll go.
4. Fold rear legs in clockwise as far as they'll go.
5. Fold front legs clockwise as far as they'll go.
6. Fold in the head as far as it'll go.
7. Shut the left side all at once, making sure the pegs line up.

Reverse the steps to go back to beast mode, although opening up the left side can be a little more difficult without strong fingernails. Not impossible, though. And when I say "left side," that's referring to beast mode, it's the side that the front legs go with. Clockwise is while looking
at it with the head to the left and tail to the right.
Trying to do things in any other order will either result in impassable blockage or parts popping off entirely.

Altmode: I suppose this mode makes Automutt...a BeastBox? Other than
the neck transformation hinge on top, which is a half-cylinder with a
diameter of 8mm, the box is 2" (5cm) tall, 1.25" (3.2cm) wide, and 0.75"
(2cm) thick. The largest faces are by default the front and back, and they have identical printed deco of a yellow-green box with a light blue diagonal stripe angled from about the 2 o'clock position to the 8 o'clock position.
On top of that is the Scooby Snacks logo in mustard yellow with black
outline. There's a rectangle 8.5mm wide and 3.5mm tall in the upper left,
pale yellow with a thin black line outline. In the lower right is the Scooby Doo "SD" dog tag logo diamong 6.5mm tall with yellow border and SD and light blue background, plus thin black lines separating colors. The other four
sides have no paint, and are just blank warm brown plastic.
There is no articulation, this is a box. Weirdly, the hinge on top has
a 3mm peg sticking out, so some Fire Blasts (notably the ones that have the "3mm socket in a 5mm peg" style) can be attached. This is part of the "snap the panel closed" peg and socket arrangement, and a second one rotates into visibility in beast mode, but it's amusing that they picked 3mm rather than 1/8" or some other size. There is NOT enough clearance on either the peg or the socket to attach the box to the back of Mysterious Prime's pelvis. There is not enough room in the big backpack to store the box either. The countersunk hole at the other end of the hinge is too narrow for 5mm pegs
(it's pretty close to 4mm).
http://www.dvandom.com/images/ScoobsBeenHit.JPG

Overall: Once I got the hang of transforming it without popping panels off, it was okay. Like I said earlier, it's like an inferior version of a Cassette Beast, and the jaw is a bit weird, but it does the job of providing
a Scooby acceptably.


Set Overall: Sadly, the price of a Voyager and a simplified Core these days would probably be pretty close to the list price for this set, so while it's overpriced it's only about as overpriced as other Transformers in this Year of Our Tariffs 2026.


Dave Van Domelen, NOW it's Mysterious Prime: http://www.dvandom.com/images/MysteriousPrime.JPG (although the Prime head is too wide for Fred's ascot, hence wearing Daphne's scarf)
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