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Dave's Transformers Age of the Primes Rant: Voyager wave 4

The Thirteen Amalgamous Prime ("Multi-Mode Shapeshifter")

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

Amalgamous Prime is one of the Thirteen that hasn't gotten a lot of development. Mostly deep backstory and appearances in "all the Thirteen show up in some mystic vision" sort of things. He's the patron Prime of transforming, but much like Odin's brothers largely faded into obscurity once he'd done his bit in the creation myth. This toy is basically a super Armorizer/Modulator sort, meant to reassemble into forms limited only by your imagination and willingness to say, "Yeah I guess that looks like something."


CAPSULE

$42 at Hasbro Pulse.

Amalgamous Prime: This is a pretty clever "god of the Modulators"
design, but some of the attachment pegs are too loose, particularly the head, which is prone to fly off at the slightest provocation. Insert anger management joke here. Fun play pattern, though, and if you've been going in
on Junkions he can play along with them too. Recommended, if potentially annoying.


RANT

Packaging: same design as Brawl and other recent Voyagers. The box back focuses on the four-armed robot mode and the quad walker mode, with an inset showing how some of the pieces can be used to make a tank, and the usual
inset for the Prime's Relic (in this case the Cog of Transformation, although technically this toy has two other relics not called out as such on the
box).


THE THIRTEEN: AMALGAMOUS PRIME
Assortment: G1996
Altmode: Very
Transformation Difficulty: 21 steps between humanoid and quad walker
Previous Name Use: None (Prime Master came with the Throne of the Primes) Previous Mold Use: None
Origin Universe: Aligned

Packaging: Six double-strap ties hold the robot mode to the blister,
with a folded up little block above the head to keep it from getting damaged
if something pushes down on the box top and a rubber band to keep the head
from just falling off. The scythe is held to the right side of the inner
tray by two single ties (which don't need to be cut, you can just twist it out), while a clear plastic bag taped to the right side has the shoulder
front pieces (they don't attach to the shoulders, they peg onto the body
ahead of the shoulders), the scythe's butt piece (which is another Cog), and the tiny pistol. The main Cog is stored inside the head, and forms its lightpiping.
It's packaged in "what fits" mode, the instructions have a 9-10 step section on how to get it into proper robot mode.

Before I go into the usual bits, as a sort of God of Modulators, there's
a lot of parts that are pegged together. Unfortunately, the Year of the
Tight Joints is in full force here, so when trying to bend some joints you're more likely to simply pop the limb off entirely. Also, the head is pegged on particularly loosely, so Amalgamous loses his head quite easily.

Robot Mode: This is one of those designs where they try to look as not-Transformers as possible to emphasize that Amalgamous is one of the
Primes who didn't have an aesthetic impact on later development due to his absence. Other, you know, than the obvious Shockwave head he has going on.
The four arms are also evocative of the "brute mode" Leader Class Siege Shockwave, even if none of them end in gun barrels. This makes me wonder if there was an intention at some point to make people think Shockwave was THIS Prime, rather than Onyx? Anyway, there's a certain "piloted mecha" look
going on as well, with the torso being mostly horizontal like a cockpit,
making for a serious hunchback. Each pair of arms shares a shoulder swivel.
The height depends on how much you straighten the legs, but it's
generally about 5.75" (14.5cm), which is admittedly a bit short for a
Voyager, but like Brawl they're going with part count here, and there's a LOT of parts. Mostly light and dark gray with some golden yellow, clear amber,
and pale gold. Clear amber plastic is used for the blade of the scythe, the Cog of Transformation inside the head (where it acts as lightpiping), the secondary Cog that goes on the butt end of the scythe haft, and the mecha- eyeball bits that go over the shoulders. Golden yellow plastic for the neck root, shoulder roots, the wings wrapped around two forearms, the wheels on
the other two forearms, the short digitigrade shins, and the haft of the scythe. The medium-light gray plastic is used for most of the torso, the faceplate, the forearms that have wheels, the forearms and elbows on the arms that have wings, the pelvis, the hip joints, the heels (backwards kneecaps), and the pistol. Dark slightly metallic brownish-gray plastic used for the rest: most of the head, the neck base below the little golden strut, waist hinge, biceps, elbows of the wheeled arms, hands, thighs, tarsals, tread
feet.
There's silver paint on most of each shoulder eyeball, pretty much all
of the exterior except for the pegs and the irises. Most of the scythe blade is painted silver on the outside, as is most of the Cog of Transformation. Gunmetal paint is on the faceplate, belt buckle area, bands along the edges
of the hunchback, the vent on the front of the hunchback top panel, and the toe-claws. There's a gold ring around the cyclopean eye, gold on the lower biceps on the wheeled arms (they become windshields), on disk details on
either side of the front torso, details on the lower pelvis, and if you
unfold the wings on the other forearms there's gold cockpit window halves. There's a red strip horizontal across the faceplate, and if you bend the neck down a little you can see red on a vent at the front of the hunch (it's
really more meant for altmode). The treads on the feet are painted matte black. A tiny orange Amalgamous Prime symbol is printed on the silver
housing of the Cog that forms the eye.
As a deliberate partformer (Modulator et al), a lot of the swivel joints are 5mm pegs and sockets. In every one of these cases, the peg is on the
part closer to the core of the torso, and the socket on the part farther
out. The head attachment (allows some looking side to side), all four bicep swivels, and the connection of thigh to shin. Yeah, no actual knee hinges,
the "knee" joints swivel. The neck has two more up-down hinges, the waist is
a smooth swivel, although there's a hinge in the small of the back for transformation that can let the torso tilt up a bit without looking wrong.
The shoulder roots are pinned swivels, with the two arms on hinges that let them spread out or move together, swivels just below these hinges, and a permanent 45 degree bend before the peg swivel. Hinge elbows, hinge and
swivel universal wrists. The hands at first glance look like the thumbs
move, but they don't, and the hinge part of the wrist is only for bending
down, not up. Pinned hinge and swivel hips, hinge ankles (backwards knees), hinges between the ankle and foot (tarsal) parts, tilt hinges between the tarsals and the tread feet. Additionally, the top of the head flips open on
a hinge so you can get the Cog out, and some bits on the back can turn
sideways for transformation or to let you access the connection points differently.
The hands can hold 5mm pegs, but they need to be round rather than hexagonal or rounded rectangles, because of how they're more clip than
socket. There's 5mm sockets on the sides of the hunchback where the eyeballs are supposed to go and at the back of the hunch there's bits with a 5mm peg
on top and 5mm sockets on the inner and outer faces (these are the bits that can turn sideways). There's two thruster-shaped 5mm sockets on the back of
the belt. Each arm has a 5mm socket in the bicep (when the arms are
together, these face outwards). The wheel forearms have 5mm sockets on
either side, while the wing forearms only have them on the side that can be uncovered (not the hinge side). The outer faces of the ankles have 5mm sockets, as do the inner faces of the toes. The heels have two each on the inner faces. The outer faces of the feet have 5mm pegs. There's also some nonstandard connectors on the forearms that help them connect together in Modulator combos (the wheeled ones are about 3mm), and a 3mm socket in the
back of the pelvis. If you fold away the top of the hunchback, another 5mm socket is revealed (it's used to hold the folded scythe in altmode).
Getting the main Cog out of the head requires much smaller fingers or longer nails than I have, or something to push it out from the front ("You'll put yer eye out, kid!") Good luck not having it pop out and fly off
somewhere, though. It's a single piece of clear amber plastic with a cog- detailed 1cm diameter sphere that has a short 5mm peg on the back. The peg goes into the eye socket from behind to create lightpiping, although you can
do a googly-eyed Amalgamous Prime by putting it in with the Cog part on the outside.
The second Cog, not named on the package, is more of a rough cone shape
of clear amber plastic with no paint on it, 16mm tall and 13mm wide at the base. The inside has a hexagonal 5mm socket that tapers down inside so it
can fit snugly on the pointed butt end of the scythe, but it can also stay on any 5mm peg. You can put the eyeball Cog on the cone Cog for the ice cream cone of transformation. This can't really be held securely by the figure, though. A figure with a mitten hinge hand might be able to hold it, though.
I don't recommend seating the peg all the way, it's hard to get the two Cogs apart if you do that.
http://www.dvandom.com/images/icecreamcog.JPG Poor Shockwave has no
mouth or tongue to eat this ice cream Cog.
Okay, so the big weapon is technically a scythe according to the lore,
but it looks more like a long-handled pick, with a beak-like shape and
serrated teeth on the inner face. It also has a bit of "glue some gears on
it" Steampunk aesthetic. (If I want to get picky, a proper scythe has
handles sticking out perpendicular to the main shaft, which this doesn't.)
The handle is a relatively un-detailed (just a few ring channels near the top and bottom) 5mm rod that tapers to a blunt point at the butt end. The blade/ beak is hinged near but not at the back, so it can fold down against the
handle for altmode storage. The handle is 4.25" (11cm) long, the beak is 3" (7.5cm) long. The beak has a 5mm socket on the underside of the back bit, so you can attach the pistol (again, mainly an altmode thing). With the pistol attached, the entire top bit is 3.75" (9.5cm) long. There's also a 5mm
socket on top just ahead of the hinge, and short 5mm pegs on either side of
the beak even with the top socket (used mostly for some of the Modulator assemblies). When you fold the beak against the handle, another short 5mm
peg is revealed on the handle part. If you fiddle with it a little, you can get the conical Cog onto any of the short 5mm pegs on this item. Probably
the best way to store the scythe in robot mode is to fold the beak down and
put one of the side pegs into one of the sockets on the side of the
hunchback.
The pistol is pretty small and seems to exist mostly so that the altmode can have a blaster mounted on its back. 1.5" (3.5cm) long with a rather
short 5mm peg grip at the very back and a 3mm stud barrel tip. The sides are pretty hollow, and there's an iron sight on the underside of the barrel, because that ends up on top when it's stored on the scythe. The pistol can
be stored on the scythe, on the other side of the hunch (inner or outer
face), or using the back of belt sockets...or really just about any 5mm
socket on the toy, since it's a small weapon. However, it's a bit difficult
to get it to actually stay in one of the hands because of the short peg and
the fact the hands have symmetric thumbs running down the middle of the
palm.
The final accessories are the sort of eyeball things that attach in
front of the shoulders in this mode. In altmode, they look like big
eyestalks, and some of the Modulations use them as the core of drones
slightly evocative of the Beast Machines Diagnostic Drone. Each is roughly a cylinder with an eye-like convex front, with the cylinder part alone being about 2cm across and 1.5cm deep. Three eyelash-ish fins are on the top, and
a 5mm peg sticks out either side, for a total height of 3cm and width of
2.8cm. There's a relatively shallow 5mm socket in back, the tapered end of
the scythe haft won't go in deep enough to stick.

I did try to see if there was a way to pull a General Grievous and merge the arms on each side into single arms, but even if you swap forearms around this doesn't seem to be possible. Similarly, there doesn't seem to be a good way to make the robot mode not be a hunchback...you can unbend the waist and put the head up, but the shoulders stay low and the torso front is hollow
when you do that. Transforming the front end into altmode and putting the
head on top where the scythe attaches in altmode is a little better, but the shoulders are still low, and they're pinned joints rather than pegs so they can't be moved up to other spots.

Transformation: In principle, the robot can be changed to the primary altmode without detaching anything but the weapon. In practice, the head and legs are likely to fall off along the way. The neck folds down (stiff joint,
I had to really force it the first time) which lets the rest of the hunchback fold together. A couple of tabs on the sides of the lower back fold aside so that the pelvis and legs can all fold up to tuck away as the back end. You should put the scythe in between the boots before snapping them together,
it's hard to do afterwards. Everything does tab and peg together solidly in back, but as often happens with Hasbro designs it's pretty unstable until the final steps.
Going back to robot mode, I tried to be careful, but a leg and a forearm popped off anyway, and the head came off three times before I just gave up
and set it aside until I was done with everything else.

Altmode: Kind of a four-legged robot bug, with those shoulder front
pieces becoming big eyes with eyelashes. The legs are folded up as the
beetle shell, more or less, with the straightened out scythe with pistol becoming a thorax-mounted gun and a stinger in back or something. It's not like he's trying to actually mimic an Earth bug, after all. Canonically, the wheeled forearms are the front legs and the winged forearms are the rear
legs, but they're all just pegged on so you can swap them around as you see fit. In-story, he's probably unstable enough that this sort of minor
variation happens every time he transforms.
The actual size depends on how you pose the legs, but in a pose like on the box back it's about 4.5" (11.5cm) tall. Ignoring the scythe-stinger,
it's about 4.5" (11.5cm) long, but the stinger increases total length to
6.75" (17cm). Colors are basically the same as robot mode, the only part that's really hidden is the robot head, which is tucked under the belly. The red vent on the hunchback is now more of a mouth, I guess, and is more prominent.
The legs, which were the robot arms, retain almost all of their articulation. However, the shared shoulder roots are mostly blocked by the little bits that folded out of the way of the robot legs, they can only
wiggle a little. I suppose the pegged-on eyeballs can look up and down by rotating on their sockets. While parts are prone to popping off during transformation or manipulation of stiff joints, it's very stable if you're
not trying to do either of those things. Things aren't loose enough on mine
to just fall off under the influence of gravity, at least.
The 5mm sockets on the outer faces of the feet are now in a better position to hold borrowed weapons. The scythe's bladetop socket has enough room for some things, including putting the head there if you'd rather reduce the bug motif. The eyeballs have their extra 5mm pegs available, and the
bits that folded down and now block the shoulders have 5mm pegs sticking out
to the sides and 5mm sockets on top although those are right up against the robot thighs and hard to put much into.

Modulations: The torso chunk is kind of left out of this game, but
that's not unusual for Armorizers/Junkions/etc. At best you can make it look like a bug with its legs pulled off, not a lot of demand for that look I expect. The instructions show a number of options, but the point is to let people figure out their own as well (and throwing Junkions into the mix will
go all RoboLinks here). The simplest options just involve the forearms. The two with wheels can peg together as a long car with hands at the front and back, while the other two can make something reminiscent of a Gundam Core Fighter. They also suggest attaching forearms on either side of one of the
bug eyes to make a couple of things that evoke the diagnostic drones. The
most complex design the instructions suggest uses everything but the eyeballs and torso to make a sort of tower tank with the forearm Core Fighter on top that reminds me of Earth Federation tanks from Mobile Suit Gundam. Yeah,
lots of Gundam flavor here. I did try building the Feddie tank, but too many of the connections are thin tabs and trying to get them more firmly seated tended to make the whole thing fly apart...your basic "needs Lego tolerances but gets Hasbro QC" problem.
In the instructions, the wheeled forearms are element A, the winged forearms are element B, the legs are element C, the scythe/pistol/cog piece
is element D, and the eyeballs are element E. The torso and robot head are left out of this, although the head can attach on top of the element A long car.
I like the fact the forearms can just do their own thing, without
needing other parts, because this lets Amalgamous launch a vehicle at someone without being completely dis-armed or otherwise crippled. Always fun when a toyetic feature can be used effectively in animation, even if there's no cartoon for these guys.

Overall: The majority of my annoyance with this toy centers on the
head. It falls off too easily, and the Cog inside is too hard to get out.
Just making the neck peg longer might've helped with part of this.
Otherwise, it's a fairly clever design that could almost be reused as a
Junkion (new head, maybe new weapon).


Dave Van Domelen, would've compared the robot mode to a Warjack, but the legs are too long.

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