From Newsgroup: alt.toys.transformers

Dave's Transformers Age of the Primes Rant: Deluxe Wave 1

The Thirteen Solus Prime (Cybertronian SUV)
Aerialbot Air Raid (jet)
Fugitive Waspinator (TFA Bumblebee retool)
Aerialbot Slingshot (jet)

Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/AoP/Deluxe1

Why do I have the Aerialbots split up? Because I sorted them by assortment number, and it looks like Slingshot might've been initially
planned for wave 2, given how it's assortment number is bumped up to the next decade.

https://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Legacy/Deluxe8 - TFA Bumblebee mold


CAPSULES

$25 price point.

The Thirteen Solus Prime: Decent robot mode, transformation is a bit of
a hassle in places, and the vehicle mode isn't worth any hassle. Mildly recommended, mostly worth getting to finally have a Proper Toy of the character.

Aerialbot Air Raid: Solid in both modes, transformation has some interesting bits without being frustrating. Recommended.

Fugitive Waspinator: Original mold was recommended. As I generally
think, it looks better in a color other than yellow, although the clear
purple is too dark. Recommended.

Aerialbot Slingshot: Weak robot mode, good jet mode, decent transformation. Mildly recommended.


RANTS

Packaging: Same style as the Voyagers reviewed previously. One thing I just noticed, though, is that while most of the toys have white names in various places, the Thirteen have their names in the same tan/pale gold as
the stripe along the bottom of the box front.
Air Raid and Slingshot have "1 of 5" and "2 of 5" respectively in the transformation steps cartouche on front and on the upper right of the box
back. Both have Superion instead of individual robot art on the left panel
of the box.


THE THIRTEEN: SOLUS PRIME
Assortment: G1022
Altmode: Cybertronian SUV
Transformation Difficulty: 28 steps
Previous Name Use: PotP
Previous Mold Use: None

So, she got a Prime Master toy (with Octopunch as the shell), but this
is her first "proper" toy. Of course it's the smallest available size class, but that just makes it easier to fit her in the fridge. (For any who don't know, Solus Prime has two significant roles in the mythology: 1. she forges a lot of the plot devices that later show up, and 2. she's the unwilling apex
of a love "triangle" and gets murdered by Megatronus thereby kicking off the war among the surviving Primes. The only female Prime, she dies to motivate Prima...classic fridging.)

Packaging: Five plastic ties hold the robot to the inner tray, while a tissue bundle taped in front in the lower right contains the three pieces of her weapon.
Appropriately, the gallery side of the box includes the slice with Solus Prime on it. The box back includes an inset box with her weapon, labeled "FORGE HAMMER" in Cybertronian font.

Robot Mode: Yeah, they didn't want to leave any doubt that this is a female character. Full lips that Overlord would kill for (to be fair, he'd kill for just about anything), pointy pyramid breasts, narrow but not wasp waist. At least they didn't try painting lipstick on her. She also has
super wide shoulderpads that even the 80s would cringe at, and a sort of
front skirt that goes down past her knees but doesn't have a matching rear skirt. Her helmet is kind of like an Optimus Prime helmet, but with the addition of a Prowl-ish crest with a not-quite-heart-shaped gold tablet in
the center. Surprisingly few hollow spots, as there's a panel covering the hollow forearm inner faces and an actual extra piece glued in place to cover the inner thigh gaps.
5.25" (14cm) tall in shades of purple, silver/gray, and gold. A dark purple plastic is used for the shoulderpads, inner forearm panels, pelvis, outer panels of the skirt (it's in three long strips), knees, ankles, and the butt of the hammer. A more grayish desaturated purple is used for the head, torso, the rest of each forearm, the center panel of the skirt, thighs,
centers of the feet, backplate, some transformation hinges, and hammer head. Light gray plastic is used for the neck, upper arms, fists, shoulder roots,
hip joints, mid-shins, fold out peg on the hammer head, and the hammer haft. Black plastic is found on the wheels (back of the shoulderpads and backs of
the lower legs) and the toe/heel pieces.
Silver paint is found on the face, abdomen, thighs (all the way around), and the tops of the toes. There's gold paint on the forehead "heart,"
details on the top and front of the shoulderpads, details on the center panel of the skirt, the kneecaps and upper shins, and some Kirby Lines on the
hammer head. Less obviously, there's gloss yellow in the center of the shoulderpad front bits, the skirt front, the kneecaps, and the circles on the sides of the hammer head. A yellow Solus Prime sigil is printed on top of
the hammer head, but not anywhere on the robot. The eyes are gloss slightly yellowish green.
The neck is a ball joint with the socket inside the head, the waist is a smooth swivel above the level of the skirt hinge, so the skirt moves with the legs. However, the vehicle roof backplate significantly restricts the range
of motion for the waist. Hinge and swivel universal joint shoulders, and the shoulderpads are on their own hinged struts. Swivels right above the hinge elbows, the wrists are ball joints with a cut to let them fold all the way in for transformation. The skirt is hinged in three pieces (in vehicle mode the center part needs to be raised above the other two), and the center piece
also has a swivel to let it flip over. The hips are a bit weird. There's soft-ratcheting (10 degrees per click) pinned hinges to lift the legs up to
the sides, but the swivel is several millimeters below the hinge (and
smooth). Upper thigh swivels, hinge knees, transformation hinges about
halfway down the shin, then ankle swivels just below that (they pop out
easily) and instep hinges. The toes can also point down a little, but the wheel on back blocks the heel spur from rising up much.
The fists can hold 5mm pegs, and there's enough range of motion that the figure can hold the hammer in a two-handed grip. There's very shallow hexagonal 5mm sockets on the forearms and one in the small of the back, and
5mm sockets under the toes. While there is a 3mm socket in the back of the pelvis, it's covered by the locked-down backplate.
The hammer (the Forge of Solus Prime) is made from three pieces,
although you really only need to take off the hammer head in order to fit the haft through the figure's hands. The butt of the haft is more decorative, although the instructions show it being held as a separate...mini-mace? Lantern? Not really sure. According to TFWiki it's a grenade, so nothing particularly cosmic. While most previous Forge accessories were hammers with roughly cylindrical heads on both sides like a war hammer, this has one
mostly flat side and a narrower end on the peen, as seen in the Power of the Primes cartoon. Basically a stylized version of a standard blacksmith's hammer, with some vaguely Kirbian detailing and round medallion shapes on the sides of the hammer head. All assembled it's 3.75" (9.5cm) long with most of it being a 5mm diameter haft. The 21mm long "grenade" bit has lots of
details that look like connectors aside from the 5mm peg it uses to connect
to the haft, but they're all too big or too small for 3mm or 5mm connections. The haft part has a 5mm socket at the bottom end and a 3mm peg at the top, which goes into the hammer head. There's also a short 5mm peg that folds out from the side of the bit of the hammer head that connects to the haft, used
to store the Forge on the robot's back. Vehicle mode storage uses a non-standard tab on the right side of the hammer head.

Transformation: I don't know if it's really becoming more common or if
I'm just noticing it more, but this has the seemingly popular "tab and slot need to be connected despite not being clearly visible, and there's enough
play in the joints that you can't just fold it and it Just Works" thing in several places, most notably the folding over of the legs in back. Most of
the steps overall are small movements of little struts and hinges, the sort
of fiddly stuff you'd expect from a toy trying to exactly reproduce an aggressively non-toyetic animation model, but in service of an altmode that doesn't really look like it's trying to look like anything in particular.
Part-loss warning, the panels on the shoulderpad fronts that need to be rotated are just pegged in place, and can pop off. They are small and dark other than the painted bit on front.
Note, the instructions have the middle part of the skirt flip over, but
I think it looks better if you don't.

Altmode: I get that they're trying to do alien altmodes with most of the Primes (see Prima Prime, for instance), but this feels like a kindergarten kid's design. Just sort of random elements and sharp angles. No real
attempt was made to cover the thighs, although the hammer kinda covers the
left side when stored there. The armor skirt center sticks up on the top in back as a sort of fin, the shoulder fenders stick out on either side in front while the main grill is backwards slanted (farther forwards on top). The incoherence isn't helped by the fact that the two different shades of purple plastic are really obviously different here.
4.5" (11.5cm) long in mostly purple and gold, although the silver thighs are quite visible on the sides in back. The darker purple plastic ends up as the front fenders, the sorta-doors on the sides, and the rear chunk formed by the knees, plus the center skirt panel up on top. The rest of the vehicle
mode shell is the lighter and less saturated purple, and then there's the
black wheels.
Most of the paint in this mode is gold. Windows, sorta-headlights, and the gold from the armor skirt on top (if you leave it unflipped) and kneecaps in back. The wheel hubs and thigh sides are silver (thighs perhaps a little darker than the hubs), and the front grille is more of a gunmetal. I suppose technically the yellow bits on the kneecaps could count as taillights?
A shallow 5mm socket is on the roof, and the shallow forearm sockets are accessible on the sides. The hammer attaches to the left side via a nonstandard tab and slot, and the slot is also on the right side but the
hammer doesn't really fit there in this mode. The 3mm socket from the back
of the pelvis is accessible on the underside now. The toy rolls well on
pinned wheels.

Overall: A decent enough robot, but the transformation is in the blurry boundary between challenging and annoying, with the result not being worth
the annoying aspects.


AUTOBOT: AERIALBOT AIR RAID
Assortment: G1023
SUPERION COMPONENT: 1 of 5
Altmode: Fighter Jet, Limb
Transformation Difficulty: 17 steps robot to jet
Previous Name Use: Without "Aerialbot" G1, G2, Uni, Uni2, CW, Movie1, a few
store exclusives
Previous Mold Use: None
Origin Universe: G1

Packaging: Three ties across the front, one of which is a double, and
one across the back (on the boots poking through the card) hold the robot to the inner tray. The pistols and tail fins are bound up in the little tissue bundle in the lower right in front of the tray. The figure is not in proper robot mode and the instructions include seven steps for getting it there. Mainly just folding out the feet, unpegging the arms from the sides, and
adding the tail fins.
If you number the statue gallery panels left to right, this has panel
3 of 4.

Robot Mode: Quite close to the G1 animation model with the usual modern added details, plus the backs of the boots have unavoidable airplane bits
that got elided from the cartoon. The colors don't quite match, though, as most of the torso was white in the cartoon and it's red except for the centerline in front here. Plus there's the black hip joints which don't
match the animation colors. The mostly red torso is true to the G1 toy
colors, however, and this is hardly the first time a modern G1 nostalgia-bait figure has had animation molding and toy colors. (It lets them do a later re-release in animation colors, I guess.) The pistols seem to be based on animation design as well, but paired for symmetry.
5" (12.5cm) tall at the head, 6" (15cm) to the top of the jet nose sticking up in back, mostly red, white, and black. Black plastic is used for all the jet stuff on the backpack and the backs of the boots, plus the hip joints, ankle joints, and pistols. Red plastic is used for the pelvis and
most of the torso. The sternum, collar, head, arms (all the way from
shoulder joint to fist), thighs, shins, and feet are white plastic.
The dome of the helmet and the "baseball cap brim" are painted silver, because it wouldn't be modern G1 homage without a mix of "gray for silver"
and "actual silver for silver" on the same toy. The face is light gray with bright blue eyes. There's white paint on the central abdomen, which is a decent match to the plastic for once. Little yellow details on the belt
buckle area, red rectangles on the shins, and a red Autobot symbol printed on the sternum. There's also white paint on the leading edges of the wings,
I'll cover the rest of the vehicle mode paints in the altmode section.
Ball joint neck with the socket in the head, plus the head can tilt back 90 degrees for combiner mode. Pinned universal joint shoulders, lower bicep swivels, hinge elbows, and the wrists are hinged to bend inwards for transformation. Pinned hinge and swivel hips, upper thigh swivels, hinge knees, hinged both ways ankles (although the front-back hinge is soft-ratcheting with three stable positions..flat, 45 degrees, toes pointed straight up). The wings are hinged and can get out of the way of the arms.
The fists can hold 5mm pegs, and there's 5mm sockets on the front faces
of the wings (underside in vehicle mode). There's 5mm sockets on the backs
of the boots, but they're reserved for the tail fins.
The pistols are identical, each a single piece of black plastic a little udner 1.5" (36mm) long with a 5mm peg at the back end and a 3mm stud muzzle. The general look is "carbine-length shotgun with no stock," with the second "barrel" under the first being a tube for ammo. Or just aesthetic. The
grips are actually a little under 5mm (about 4.8mm), so they're a loose fit
in most sockets. The back of the gun has a slightly conical stud which will hold a Fire Blast that's a little flexible (so not the 3-D printed ones, for the most part).

Transformation: Really the only tricky thing about this is that there's
a few joints not used for jet mode, instead being just for combiner chunk
mode. Well, and the fact that the chest panel that folds out as a landing
gear wheel is really hard to move without help from a knife or strong nails. The legs split open and the front and back independently fold up against the thighs, locking together. The head just turns around, and the backpack
swings up to make the front third. Fold the hands in and peg the arms to the sides and it's all over except for some panel folding and tail rotation.

Altmode: More or less an F-15, as was the original, although it has the vertical parts of the tail above the centers of the thrusters instead of flanking the thrusters, and the horizontal tail trailing edges are flush with the ends of the thrusters rather than sticking out behind them as in a real F-15. The thruster nozzles themselves were cleverly buried inside the boots, rather than being the heels. There is the usual amount of Obvious Robot Junk on the underside, of course.
Just a little over 6" (about 15.5cm) long with a wingspan of 4.25"
(11cm), mostly black with some white and silver. It's roughly 1:120 scale (don't expect the others to be the same scale, naturally). Other than the white plastic of the thrusters and the front landing gear strut, all the jet bits are black plastic. There's also hints of rear landing gear wheels
molded onto the robot feet, but looking at them requires acknowledging the chunks of red and white plastic stuck on the underside.
The leading edges of the wings are painte white, the cockpit window
panels are painted silver, and the maneuvering flaps on the vertical tail
bits (yes, I know the technical names, but at this point I've stopped
assuming most people do) are paitned gray. Red with no outline Autobot
symbols are on the tops of the wings.
For connectors, the 5mm sockets on the wings are now on the undersides
and are meant to hold the pistols. The sockets are hexagonal and I think the pistol pegs are slightly oval, because if you turn one a little it tends to keep going until it hits a new facing. There's 5mm sockets in the rear
corners of the underside which aren't particularly useful in this mode, probably meant for connecting to Superion's boots. The thrusters each have a 3mm stud in the center so you can apply thruster Fire Blasts. As noted earlier, there's 5mm sockets that are just the dedicated locations for the vertical tail fins. The only real articulation is that the nose wheel can be folded back up, and the center of mass is far enough back that you don't need the front wheel to keep the jet stable on a flat surface.

Combiner Mode: As has been the standard of late, all the combination instructions come with the core (Commander class) set, which I happen to own but haven't opened yet. Still, from just the box back renders, it's easy enough to figure out the shinpad mode. Like with Legacy Menasor, Defensor is basically "Silverbolt plus kibble that comes with him forms a skeletal combiner, then slot the other Aerialbots onto the shins or arms." Air Raid forms the right shin.
Starting with vehicle mode, fold the nose end back to its robot mode position, then fold the nose again to put it further down. This is where the weird head hinge comes in, folding the head down and out of the way. The
wings peg against the sides, the tail assembly goes back to robot mode. Fold the landing gear back in, probably (assuming the legs work like Menasor's,
you can probably leave the landing gear down).
The resulting block is 3.75" (9.5cm) tall and 2.75" (7cm) wide, plus 3" (7.5cm) deep.

Overall: A decent mold, which is a good thing since Skydive uses the
same core design (if with a lot of retooling to become a different sort of jet). Recommended.


DECEPTICON: FUGITIVE WASPINATOR
Assortment: G1025
Altmode: Compact Car
Transformation Difficulty: 22 steps
Previous Name Use: None with the "Fugitive"
Previous Mold Use: Legacy
Origin Universe: TF:Animated

Now, technically when he was using the same altmode as TFA Bumblebee, he was still named Wasp, he didn't become Waspinator until Blackarachnia mutated him. However, I can see "Fugitive Wasp" being a little harder to trademark, not to mention not helping maintain the Waspinator mark.

Packaging: Five ties hold the robot to the inner tray, while the tissue bundle taped to the lower right of the tray front holds the boosters and stinger halves.
Has the leftmost panel of the Primes gallery on the left side (panel 1).

Color Swaps: All the clear colorless plastic becomes clear purple,
yellow becomes dark green. The black gets split up. The wheels, heels,
soles of the feet, kneepads, and boot interiors stay black. The rest becomes
a yellowish green.

Paint Applications: A light green paint that's a little darker than the light green plastic is used for the face and the not-quite-antennae on the head. Everywhere that Bumblebee is painted yellow, this is painted dark
green. The black stripes are the same, and there's some black lining on the face. The eyes are bright purple. The fins on the boosters are silver, and the parts that are silver on BB's stingers are silver here. However, the non-silver parts of the stingers are painted metallic purple rather than leaving them clear purple. There's a hard to see no-outline purple
Decepticon symbol on the center of the chest.
In vehicle mode, there's the single stripe up the hood and along the
roof, with the red police flasher (it was painted clear red on BB, but clear red over clear purple doesn't really work, so they painted it opaque red). Yellow-gold headlights, unpainted upper grille but lower grille painted
black, silver wheel hubs. The fact that the shoulder roots are yellow-green instead of black makes them stand out above the rear fenders in this mode.
The boosters kind of cover that, at least when viewed from slightly above level.

Mold Changes: Just a new head, which is kinda the point...Wasp was
trying to imitate Bumblebee (and make people think Bumblebee was him). The head is definitely correct, I still have mental burn-in from when I
resculpted an Activator Bumbleee as Wasp many years ago. :)

Other Notes: None.

Overall: I think the mold looks a little better in these colors, but yellow is one of the worst colors in terms of seam visibility and poor paint match, so that's not too surprising.


AUTOBOT: AERIALBOT SLINGSHOT
Assortment: G1032
SUPERION COMPONENT: 2 of 5
Altmode: Harrier-like jet
Transformation Difficulty: 17 steps
Previous Name Use: G1 and G2 without "Aerialbot," none with.
Previous Mold Use: None
Origin Universe: G1

Slingshot was one of those trademarks they lost. Quickslinger was the Combiner Wars name (and that was only a headswap redeco to let people replace Alpha Bravo), and apparently Airazor (Universe set redeco of Energon
Treadshot and Windrazor) was supposed to be Slingshot. Slingshot was the
only G1 Aerialbot I had for a long time, when Transformers first came out
most of my spending money was going to TTRPG stuff.
Ironically, I'm reasonably sure that Combaticon Vortex will get a redeco and maybe head swap as Alpha Bravo in case people whose first Superion was Combiner Wars want to make "their" Superion.

Packaging: Severely mistransformed to fit in the box, although the instructions only need three steps to show how to get it in proper robot
mode. Five ties hold the splayed out robot mode to the tray, and the tissue bundle taped in the lower right of the tray front has the two pistols.

Robot Mode: Not very impressive at first glance. Huge boots with really long feet (2.5"/6.5cm long from toe to heel), scrawny arms, and going with
the animation colors of "brownish yellow head with orange goggles" just kinda blends together except under strong light to make the entire head look like
one color. From exactly head-on the figure does a decent job of looking like the animation model, but from the side...not even close. Also, as seems to
be the usual case for the arm-decoration team members, the snap-together
waist is a bit rattly and loose.
5.25" (13cm) tall at the top of the head, 5.5" (14cm) to the top of the nosecone on the backpack. A mix of white, red, and black, with the
obtrusively yellow-brown head sandwiched between white slabs. A face
sandwich. White plastic is used for the head, backpack, back, arms,
connector tab inside the abdomen, and all of the legs below the hips except
for the toes. The toes are black plastic, as are the hips, shoulder joints (which extend into the upper torso for transformation hinges), and guns. The front of the torso and all of the pelvis are bright red plastic.
As noted, the head is painted a sort of brownish yellow with the visor being almost indistinguishable orange. The center third of the torso and pelvis front are painted gloss black, as are the fists and the backpack nosecone.
The neck is a ball joint with the socket in the head, which allows some forwards/backwards rocking in addition to turning. The waist is a smooth swivel. Shoulders are hinge-swivel combos, there's bicep swivels and double hinge elbows that can fold all the way to have the fists touch the
shoulders. No wrists. Pinned hinge and swivel hips, upper thigh swivels, hinge knees that can almost make it to 90 degrees despite all the boot
kibble. Instep hinges, and the toes and heels can fold down on
transformation joints.
The fists can hold 5mm pegs, and there's 5mm sockets on the outer faces
of the forearms (which are badly hollow, so I suggest putting the guns there instead of in the hands), and on the outer faces of the boot-wings. There's short 5mm pegs on either side of the backpack, used for transformation. No sockets on the undersides of the feet. There's almost-square 5mm sockets in the lower shins, which seem to be intended for attachment to Superion's forearm. There's a 3mm socket in the back of the pelvis.
While the G1 character is generally shown with only one gun, they went with two for symmetry in vehicle mode. The double-barrelled guns are based closely on those seen in the Transformers Universe entry (Marvel Comics
roster book). The barrels are slightly tapered, but some Fire Blasts can be fitted securely to the tips (only one per gun though). The guns are
identical and a bit over 1.5" (4cm) long, single pieces of black plastic with 5mm pegs at the back end to hold in the hand or go on the forearms (or under the wings in vehicle mode).

Transformation: Turn the head around, shrug the arms up to either side
of it and fold them over with the forearm sockets grabbing the short pegs on the sides of the backpack. The backpack folds up over the head and in
between the arms. The legs open up so the thighs can collapse down inside them, then snap closed around the thighs. Point the toes and heels down to make the tail, fold the wings down, adjust the tail vertical fin and pull
down the nose wheel.

Altmode: Okay, as underwhelming as the robot mode is, the vehicle mode Gets It. Yeah, it deliberately changes some things to avoid trademark issues with Hawker, but this is recognizably a Harrier VTOL jet. Additionally, it's significantly bigger than the G1 toy. There's a common theory that one of
the reasons G1-homage toys are bigger than the originals is so that adult collectors get the right feel, lining up with memories of smaller hands
holding smaller toys. Now, I got my G1 Slingshot when I was already 14 or
15, and I was already pretty close to full size, so this definitely feels oversized to me. (I expect stricter drop tests are more of why they went bigger, so they could get better details without having bits that would
shatter like a G1 toy.) Anyway, a nice hefty jet. I particularly like how
the nose wheel folds down from the back of the robot head, although they
didn't go full Harrier and put fold-down landing year on the wingtips. The Harrier was already somewhat chunkier than most fighter jets, so the robot
junk on the underside isn't as jarring.
6" (15cm) long with a 4.25" (11cm) wingspan, close to 1:90 scale, not to scale with Air Raid as warned. Mostly white with red, white, black, and
orange bits. From above, it's all white plastic in this mode except for the guns, the red and black plastics are otherwise on the underside. The wings have red and white stripes that spread out towards the outer edge before turning towards the back, blue with red on either side. The nosecone
continues to be painted black, and there's an interrupted black line painted along the centerline on top. These lines are a reference to how the original toy had black plastic struts in those locations. The vertical tail part has quarter circle thick blue stripes. Interestingly, this matches neither the
G1 toy nor the Universe entry. This seems to be based on the animation
model, but it's not quite the same. There's red Autobot symbols on the tops
of the wings, and the cockpit is orange. There's no paint on the molded non-rolling wheels, you can paint them black if you want to match the
animation model better.
The nose wheel can be folded back into the head, the rear wheels are
just part of the shin details. The guns are supposed to go on the undersides of the wings, but can also go on the shin sockets. The shin sockets are as good as it gets for a flight base.

Combiner Mode: This is an arm decoration, so the jet mode splits at the waist and then you adjust some panels and stuff. The wing roots clamp onto
the sides of the fuselage where the parts meet, so it's hard to get the parts to split unless you bend the waist a little bit to unlock the sides.

Overall: Weak robot mode, good vehicle mode, I hope the retool improves the robot mode.


Dave Van Domelen, would've finished this review earlier but ended up spending most of the week writing a TTRPG.




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