From Newsgroup: alt.toys.transformers

Dave's Transformers Collaborative Rant: NFL wave 1

Tundra Prime (Packers helmet)

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

I didn't get the other three in this wave, and if there's future waves I'll probably skip them as well. I grew up a Packers fan and a lot of my family now lives in the Green Bay area, so I'm glad the Packers got representation in the first wave. It was inevitable that I'd get one for the novelty, at least I got a good one. :) KC-59 (Chiefs) is a redeco of Tundra Prime, while Starblitz (Cowboys) and Steelsmash (Steelers) both have an alternate head mold in addition to being redecos. Early pictures of
Starblitz had him with a Decepticon symbol (appropriately), but they wimped
out and made all four Autobots. It'd be amusing if any of the teams with animal mascots got Maximal symbols, though. And as with most other external license Collaboratives, these are all new characters to keep the trademarks completely separable. You're not going to find a Bumblebee here.
There's been no word as of December 2025 of a second wave, but I expect
if these sell well enough every team will want one if only as a merch store exclusive, like how they had the little Fox Sports robot figures (which I
have for the Packers, of course).
ObPackers joke: Nemesis Tundra Prime is just a redeco in Vikings or Jets colors (seriously, the team does NOT have a good track record for QBs turning out to be garbage people lately).


CAPSULE

$25 at Amazon, although likely to go up in the new year.

Tundra Prime: Yes, it's a shellmaster, and some of the panels do get in the way. But it's about as good otherwise as you can expect from something that turns into a replical football helmet. If you have affection for any of the four teams currently represented, I'd say this is a "recommended" situation. Otherwise, just mildly recommended for the novelty value, and
only pick up one.


RANTS

Just wanna say, none of the others in this wave are Primes.

The Football: Okay, I'll go into the actual mechanics in the usual spot
in the review, but I gotta say that if you're committed to fists that can
hold 5mm pegs, there's not a lot of GOOD ways to have a figure hold a
football. They seemed to prioritize the football looking as correct as possible, though, which nixed the idea of having it fit entirely over the
fist or just leave the back of the fist visible. Instead, we get something like an early generation football computer game, with the ball sort of next
to the hand rather than in it. Both hands can hold the ball this way, but
not both at the same time...the two-handed catch pose from the toy in the package is really just one-handed with the other hand nearby. I suppose I could drill two more sockets (the existing one is opposite the laces, I don't want to drill through those) to allow a two-handed hold. A passing pose
looks pretty bad, though, even ignoring how the shoulderpad takes up space against the torso. Too bad the football can't attach to a toe for a punting pose, since the figure can actually stand without external support in a one-legged kicking pose. http://www.dvandom.com/images/TundraPunt.JPG

Packaging: A blister card with a card border around the sides and front, with the blister being partially shaped as a football, the pointy ends being
at the upper right and lower left. The card is 10" (25cm) tall, 7.5" (19cm) wide, and the border tray is 3" (7.5cm) deep. The border averages about 2.5" (6cm) tall on the left side, and around 5" (12-13cm) on the right. Significantly bigger than Deluxe boxes, and a bit bigger than most Deluxe blister cards have been.
The stitches are along the upper curve of the blister, and the figure inside (at least for TP, if not the others) is in a "leaping to catch the
ball" pose. Unlike most Transformers toys, the Transformers logo itself is only along the bottom front part, with the top of the card having the NFL
logo in the upper right and the NFL official merch hologram sticker in the upper right. The main background pattern is a sort of reticulated football skin pattern, with light brown "netting" on a more or less black surface, the brown fading to black in a gradient. The card behind the figure has the team logo fading into a blurry stadium-lights-at-night effect. The front border
has the team logo hidden behind a << sort of window (art only, not a physical window) with the Transformers logo and the character name to the right of it. Above the TF logo is a render of helmet mode and the "2 in/en/em 1"
sorta-logo thing on TF toys these days. The taller right side of the border has art of the robot mode without its own helmet, chest and head only. The lower left side border has the team logo against a faux brushed metal gray background.
The back is dominated by a render of the robot mode on a football field with blurry stadium lights in the background, from which the front's bit
comes, plus a somewhat odd-looking solid white goalpost angled so that it doesn't share any vanishing points with the field. The NFL logo is in the upper left, the Transformers logo and character name in the upper right, the Collaborative logo in the lower left, and helmet mode in the lower right. Unlike some Collaborative toys, the Collaborative logo doesn't have any thematic tweaks to it, just a black and gray X behind the Autobot symbol.
The underside has most of the legalese.
The card itself is corrugated cardboard, so thicker than usual for
blister cards, and I do not recommend trying to tear it open with bare hands unless you want to experience the dreaded cardboard paper cut. Three pieces
of tape need to be cut to expose the full blister (and show the pieces not attached to the robot in-package), two more to unfold the back and let you untape the sides of the blister. The top and bottom edges of the blister are glued, so some cutting will be needed regardless of how neat you want to be about it. Flashback to cutting open Beast Wars blisters, eh? The
instructions are folded up between the bottom of the inner tray and the outer bubble, they're grayscale with yellowish-orange (not exactly Packers yellow)
as the accent color. About a third of the space on the instructions is dedicated to accessories and attaching the faceguard/chinstrap parts that are separate in the tray. The figure has the helmet on in-package.


AUTOBOT: TUNDRA PRIME
Crossover: NFL
Altmode: Green Bay Packers Helmet
Transformation Difficulty: 23 steps
Previous Name Use: None
Previous Mold Use: None (shared with entire wave and likely any future
waves, though)

Packaging: Five ties hold the robot into the inner blister, including
one that goes through both fists and over the football held between them.
Two more ties secure the chinstrap/faceguard piece in the lower right. The football is not actually securely attached to either hand, and is held in
place by the blister shape. A rubberband wrapped around the head keeps the helmet from opening up. In fact, the band goes around the backplate, so I guess it keeps the head from rocking forwards as well.
The instructions don't have a separate step for this, but the outer backplate needs to be raised up on its strut for the figure to be properly in robot mode. In package, mine was further down, perhaps to make the depth of the torso a couple of millimeters less. The chinstrap and faceguard piece
are tabbed together in-package, but the instructions do have steps for attaching them to each other before going onto the slot on the backpack.

Robot Mode: It's a shellformer and it owns that, with big curved slabs
of helmet on the back and the sides of the boots, shoulderpads holding chunks of face mask, forearm shields, and the like. A bit more of the facemask is like a bumper at the bottom of the torso plate, and the rest is part of the backpack kibble. The head is encased in a removable football helmet that has roughly the same colors as the helmet the figure turns into, but without the printed stripe or team logos (the logos would be split across a seam
anyway, but I think the lack of a stripe was just budgetary). The head underneath vaguely recalls Rhinox (your mileage will vary on that comparison) and has molded but not separately painted tape under the eyes. If you want
to do any customizing on this at all, paint the tape black. Anyway, the head is a little tiny, since the helmet thickness has to answer to safety concerns and can't just be scaled down directly.
The official position for the shoulderpads reminds me a little of Unicron's wings, but there's enough range of motion on the transformation struts that you could get all four figures in this wave and give each a distinctive silhouette. Regardless of how they're positioned, their bulk
tends to draw extra attention to how the arms are kinda short for the rest of the figure, especially the very short upper arms, which are more like the length you'd find on a Core class figure.
5.5" (14cm) tall at the helmet, total height depends on how you position the shoulderpads, but usually around 6" (15cm). Overwhelmingly in the team colors of golden yellow, very dark green, and white, with a few accent
colors. Golden yellow plastic (a slightly more orange-shifted hue than
usually used on Bumblebee) is used for the forearms, chestplate, shoulderpad cores, dual backplates, big horkin' plates on the sides of the boots, and the backs of the boots. In short, every piece that becomes the shell of the
helmet and none of the pieces that don't. This makes sense, as it makes it easier to redeco the mold to other helmet main colors without having to worry about incongruous colors purely in robot mode. A very dark green matte
plastic (probably of the "unpaintable" variety) is used for all the face mask parts, the robot's helmet's faceplate, torso core, shoulder struts, upper
arms, fists, pelvis back, hips, ankles, heel spurs, various struts that hold shell parts, and a sort of gasket between the boots and the big shell pieces attached to the boots. White plastic is used for the head, the figure's helmet, pelvis front, thighs, boots, feet, football, and the chinstrap on the back.
The inner head is painted gloss dark green (much darker than the
plastic) with a silver face (chin is still dark green), bright green eyes,
and some yellow bits on the "scalp". The helmet outside is painted golden yellow but lacking in printed details. Oddly, there's a white bit painted
over the yellow paint on the back of the helmet, a detail not present on the helmet mode of the main toy. The shin fronts and toe tops are mostly painted gloss dark green, and there's dark green stripes on the outer faces of the thighs. Main helmet details are printed in appropriate locations, putting
most of the team logo on the outer faces of the forearms, and the helmet
stripe (white between dark green) down the center of the chest. An Autobot symbol is printed in red on a white field around the belly, just above the
face mask "bumper" piece. The football is painted brown with white laces (pretty sure it's white painted over brown painted over white plastic).
The neck is a restricted ball joint, even with the helmet removed it can only wiggle a little to the sides. The waist is a smooth swivel plus a transformation hinge that I guess would let the figure do sit-ups if the boot helmet panels weren't so big. Ball joint shoulders, swivels just above the hinge elbows, and the wrists bend inwards on transformation hinges. Pinned hinge and swivel hips, upper thigh swivels, hinge knees (blocked to about 90 degrees bend), ball joint ankles (socket in the foot) at the end of transformation hinged struts that bend forwards. The ankle joints are stiff enough to support one-legged poses, such as the punting picture back in the
top part of the Rant section. There's hinges on the chinstrap piece, but they're just for making transformation easier, and are blocked by the
facemask piece in back-storage mode. If you remove the facemask piece, they can spread kind of like skeletal wings, but there's nowhere else to store the face mask chunk if you do that.
The fists can hold 5mm pegs even though there is no accessory included that uses them. There's 3mm pegs on the inner faces of the fists, like
strange extra joints on the thumbs or something. They're meant for the football, but can also hold any other 3mm socket accessory, such as the squib explosion pieces that came with some of the shield-style Battle Masters in Earthrise...for when they play the old exploding football trick. Otherwise,
no standard connectors. There's a bunch of shallow sockets on the boot
panels for attaching the chinstraps, but they're 4mm in diameter with a notch to accomodate the tabs on the sides of the chinstrap attachment pegs.
The helmet is hinged at the top to let it fold around the head. There's no socket on the back of the head to let it connect securely, but there's a + shaped short peg inside the back panel of the helmet that's supposed to help stabilize the helmet. Aside from the hinge, the shape of the helmet part is the same as the helmet that Tundra Prime turns into, but the facemask is not quite the same...the smaller size means they had to lose some of the detail. You can store the helmet inside the chest where the whole head goes in
altmode, but you need to position it so that the opening of the underside points forwards, so that the hexagonal rim around a 5mm socket can go
inside. It's less "attachment" like TFWiki says, and more that it stabilizes the helmet so it doesn't rattle around inside the chest. I suspect that this is not the main purpose of that hexagonal feature, see below.
Finally, the football is almost exactly an inch long (2.54cm), properly textured and with molded laces. The only interruption of the form is a 3mm socket in the middle of the side opposite the laces. It's plausibley 1:12
(6" action figure) scale, but unless Tundra Prime is meant to be human-sized this is a giant football. Amusingly, because they put the socket on the football, it can attach to any 3mm peg or stud, including the blast points on Siege-style toys, or the barrels of rifles for that Rocket Propelled Grenade long bomb of a pass. There is no football storage in this mode, the helmet mode storage point inside the chinstrap doesn't have room when attached to
the robot back for the football to fit on its peg.

Transformation: It should come as absolutely no surprise that this is a panel-massaging ordeal that left my hands sore from both exertion and being poked with angular bits of plastic. The basics are fairly clear from the
shape of the pieces that need to connect, especially once you see that the helmet shell pieces on the backs of the boots fold down on struts to let the knees bend almost double so the legs can tuck inside. There are definitely steps that need to be done in a particular order (the head folds back very early in the process or you're not getting it stowed at all, for instance),
but it is possible to just squeeze really hard to get slightly misaligned
bits to go into the right places. It does feel like having an extra few fingers per hand and maybe a third hand entirely would be useful in getting this to work. It was hard getting everything to stay connected when I went
to connect another part, but once I finally had everything together it just took a few strong squeezes to firmly seat all the tabs in their slots.
Trying the transformation by following the instructions, it was a little easier, but I still had to do some massaging to get all the panels to mesh. (The key difference in the instructions version is to leave the outer
backpack panel against the inner one until almost the end, so you don't have
to get the boots lined up against everything at once.)
Unlike some shellformers, it wasn't particularly difficult to get things back apart to start the transformation back to robot mode, in large part because you can just put your fingers inside the helmet and pull it apart. There's still some issues with very stuff joints, and I ended up pulling the right arm off at the shoulder while trying to get the shoulder strut to fold out, but it wasn't too bad.

Altmode: Well, it's a scale model football helmet with robot body parts crammed inside like the result of a particularly weird Cybertronian mob hit. It's not really exactly a specific scale, being about 1:3.5 or so instead of
a 1:4 or 1:6 scale. It has all the proper details of a modern helmet, including various intentional gaps for better ventilation and hearing. Those gaps did briefly throw me, because I was expecting a smooth surface and wondered why the shell pieces didn't fit together "right." Amusingly, two of the screws holding the facemask on are real, but two are molded fakes (which could stand some paint, as could the buckles of the chinstrap, but they seem
to be trying to minimize actual paint apps as opposed to printed colors).
3" (7.5cm) tall in golden yellow, dark green, and white. The helmet
shell is all golden yellow plastic, the facemask bars are all dark green plastic, the chinstrap piece is all white plastic. Not counting the football stored inside the chin cup, the only paint in this mode is actually printing, the white G in dark green oval team logo on each side, and the white stripe flanked by dark green stripes across the top. The flat space between the screws where the facemask attaches to the forehead is white with a red
Autobot symbol (this part is the robot chestplate).
There is a 5mm socket just behind where the forehead padding would be in
a real helmet, which (while it does stabilize the helmet when stored in the chest in robot mode) is most likely there to allow the use of a display stand that ends in a 5mm peg (which some Tamashii-style stands can do). It doesn't point straight down, instead it's angled a bit backwards of that, so your
stand would need a hinge at the top or a slight bend unless you can have the post leaning forwards about 30 degrees. There's no other connection points
in this mode, and the facemask bars are 4mm in diameter so you can't clip old C-clips onto it. I suppose you could open up a seam and slide part into another robot's fist, for a face-masking penalty pose.
The feet can't be folded down enough for a silly "helmet with feet"
mode, but they can be folded down enough to let it display with the helmet leaning forwards a bit, or just fold the heel spurs out. I wonder if you
could make an adapter to let it replace Cerebros as Fort Max's head.

3P soft craft idea: an anti-concussion padding layer which can unfold
into a cape or something for robot mode.

Overall: It has the usual problems of a shellformer, and I don't quite agree with the solution to letting it hold a football, but they otherwise did
a good job with their task of turning a football helmet into a robot. Not
sure how big the market is for these, particularly if they actually plan to issue helmets for all 24 teams, but they did a decent job for the people in that market.


Dave Van Domelen, actually got the Hot Wheels Collaboratives in the mail first, but "robots into cars" isn't as compelling as "robots into football helmets" as something that demands examination.


--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2