From Newsgroup: alt.toys.transformers

I had a feeling that today was going to be a Horri-Bull day. And, sure
enough, it was. And you know something? I don't think I've quite been
so terrified to transform a toy in my entire life!

So I've been looking for a good Horri-Bull, on and off, for several
years now. Unbroken samples are absurdly expensive (they often go for $200-$300) so I thought I'd probably end up buying two broken ones and
cobbling them together somehow to build one that was at least
functional. (I've got one broken one already. Haven't gotten the other
yet.) A month or two ago I let an unbroken one slip out of my grasp
that sold for $175 and I was really upset at myself for letting it
happen. I don't know how many unbroken Horri-Bulls there are in the
world, but I can't imagine it's a huge quantity. Maybe there are a
couple hundred. Maybe there are only a few dozen. There's no way to
know.

So then this one showed up on eBay, with no robot mode pictures, but the
seller said it was unbroken. Missing out on the one for $175 still
stung a bit, so I was determined not to let this one get past me. I
know, that's a dangerous mentality. I had to talk with an AI chatbot
about it to help me stay level-headed. We decided I would put in an
absolute maximum offer of $260 and then if it sold for any more than
that, it just wasn't meant to be. In the final seconds before the
auction, the price jumped up dramatically, as I expected it to, but the competing bids suddenly stopped at $193. I'm very okay with that. If
the toy was indeed unbroken as the seller claimed, then I got exactly
what I wanted.

So, yay! Sometimes the Universe likes me and wants good things to
happen to me. Almost makes up for all the other ridiculous stuff I deal
with on a regular basis!

Let's talk about the actual toy itself first, and then get into the
reason he's so fragile and so damn expensive. If you bought this toy in
1988 at retail, you got him in creature mode. Officially, he's
designated as a bull (and his name reinforces this idea just in case you weren't sure), but due to the way he stands so low to the ground, and
coupled with the distinctly non-bull like design elements (claws instead
of hooves, and razor sharp teeth) a lot of people in the fandom seem to
agree that he was modeled, at least loosely, on the Terror Dogs from the Ghostbusters films. The extremely popular Real Ghostbusters was in full
swing by 1988 (it was honestly the best cartoon on TV that year), so
that could have been an influence, too. The fact that Fangry and
Squeezeplay are also both monster-like creatures that don't conform to
the design of a normal Earth animal also lend credence to the idea that Horri-Bull isn't just a regular bull.

So in creature mode, he's about seven inches long, though his detachable
tail provides fully two of those inches. A properly-colored toy is a
deep blue that exhibits a slightly greenish tint (bull head, rump, and
front legs) while his secondary color is a medium grey that edges
towards the yellow end of the spectrum (the bull's back, rear legs, and
belly). He also has magenta highlights for his bull horns and front
toes. A toy that's spent too much time in the sunlight tends to exhibit
a much more greenish/yellowish tint. I read somewhere that the
Transformers wiki used photos of a really badly-yellowed toy, which
resulted in some comic book artist coloring him that way, but I don't
know the whole story. My point is that he's gained something of a
reputation for having a really ugly color scheme.

What did Horri-Bull say to his articulation as it walked out the door? "Bison."
That's a joke that works better when spoken out loud. Anyway, his
buffalo mode can't do much. His rear legs are locked in place (you can
loosen them with a screwdriver to allow some movement, I've discovered)
and the front legs will rotate on a spring-loaded clicky ratchet, but
that's about it. The tail is adjustable to some extent. The bull head
does not move and the jaw does not open. (The plastic block to which
the horns are attached is visible through the mouth, though, so it
create sort of a makeshift tongue.)

His Headmaster partner is Kreb, which I think might be a naming error.
"Kreb" sounds a little like "crab" so this makes me think he was meant
to be the Nebulan partner for Squeezeplay, who turns into a crab-like
creature. ("Lokos" would certainly not be out of place as the name for
a Headmaster partner of a raging bull who has gone loco!) Kreb is only
about 1.25" tall, with blue legs and a grey body and a purple-painted
face. His helmet has always reminded me of those hawk mouth things from
Super Mario Bros. 2 that gobble up Mario at the end of each level.

Kreb is meant to fit inside the cockpit revealed when you swing up the
hinged piece on the bull's back. There are two plastic tabs that
prevent you from opening it very wide, though. He can't sit with his
legs facing forward; either you fold him up into a head, or you stand
him up in the cockpit. The pronounced hump on the bull's back suggests
he was always designed to simply stand.

To transform him to robot mode, he borrows ideas from the Dinobots. The
tail gun detaches and the rear of the beast unfolds into the robot legs,
just like Slag or Sludge. The front animal legs become the robot arms.
The bull's head folds back and just sort of hangs uselessly off the
robot's back. Like the other Decepticon Headmasters from this product
year, he has no panel to cover up the tech specs meter on his chest, so
it's visible at all times. Weirdly, his front claws (zoologist's note:
buffalo do not have claws) can fold down, but there's zero reason to do
this because it covers up the peg-holes in his fists and prevents him
from carrying his guns.

As a robot, he's only about 4.5" in height. The Decepticon Headmasters
of 1988 really got the shaft compared to their Autobot counterparts...
besides lacking the cool helmet pieces and helmet-guns, they were also a
lot smaller overall. He has no visible Decepticon symbols in this mode,
which has always bothered me. It's an unspoken rule that you need to be
able to tell at a glance what faction each of these guys is supposed to
be. His tech specs appear to be about a 5 rating for Speed, a 9 rating
for Strength, and around a 7 rating for Intelligence, which is more or
less accurate to his printed tech specs.

Like Siren, he stands with his knees slightly overextended so that he
leans forward a bit. I imagine this was done to allow him to
counterbalance the bull's head, which becomes a very large and ungainly backpack. But, the rear bull legs can't move so they act as heel
struts, providing additional stability and eliminating the need for him
to tip forwards at all.

Weirdly, all Horri-Bull toys appear to exhibit an asymmetrical robot arm design. There is a pink retainer ring that's visible on the inside of
his wrists, and it's there to allow the joint to soft-ratchet when you transform his hands. For some reason, the left hand has an open
U-shaped piece so that it can flex slightly, but the right hand has a
closed D-shaped piece so it doesn't have any give. I have no idea why
they would design the toy this way, but both toys I own, plus nearly all
the toy photography I see on the Internet, follows this pattern. (I'm
not couting sites like unicron.com since they are notorious for painting
the eyes red on all their Decepticon toys and probably do other
customizations as well.)

So Horri-Bull has got two weapons, a concussion blaster (grey) and a double-barreled flamethrower made from the bull's tail (blue). The flamethrower cannot fit into the fist of a correctly-transformed toy,
and you actually have to fold his robot fist back down a bit to create
enough clearance for the gun. I have always loved his robot head
design, which includes Optimus Prime style eyes and nose and a Goldbug
style mask, all of which are painted this very pretty copper color that
really pops against the dark blue plastic of the helmet. (Also, this is
a weird experience for me, because years ago I ended up with a lone Kreb
but with no Horri-Bull body to go with it. So this toy at once feels
foreign but also familiar.) As a robot, the only articulation available
to him is the heavy ratcheting click-click-click of his shoulders, and
that's it.

So, the hinge for the buffalo head suffers from an exceptionally poor
and problematic design. The idea, I suppose, was for the extra plastic
added to the bull head piece to serve as a soft ratchet of sorts, so
that the bull's head didn't just flop around loosely when Horri-Bull is
in robot mode. Unfortunately, the bull head puts tremendous pressure on
the hinge assembly as a whole, and usually seems to result in the hinge breaking at its weakest point, which just happens to be one of the
closed loops on the robot's back, the only such thing holding in place
both the bull's head and the cockpit piece. The opening cockpit is
another matter entirely, since the function of those extra plastic
bumps, which are meant as a soft-lock so that you can't or won't open
the cockpit too wide, is not immediately obvious. It's easy, and almost intuitive, to want to go "why can't I open this enough to stuff Kreb in
there properly?" and before you know it, you've got shattered Headmaster plastic in your hands. Trying to wrench the cockpit open, as it appears designed to do, also puts pressure on the hinge assembly, and that weak
spot. All Horri-Bull toys are almost destined to break unless you're
aware of this problem and take steps specifically to mitigate this.

When mine arrived in the mail, I realized that I could break him just by attempting to transform him, but I also wanted him in robot mode for
display. So, I popped the pin out of the hinge, which meant I could
simply remove the bull's head and cockpit cover completely instead of
stressing out the hinge. I'm thinking about buying yet another broken
toy and taking the extra bull's head and whittling the plastic down, so
I can have a toy that's transformable without damaging it. But, I
haven't gotten that far yet. I guess it might be smarter in some ways
to just get a second unbroken toy and leave it in buffalo mode forever,
but I wasn't looking forward to spending $200ish on Horri-Bull once, let
alone twice.

In the meantime, I've replaced the original metal pin with a toothpick,
which is the right diameter to provide the necessary tightness, but the
wood has a lot less tensile strength than the metal pin and so the
toothpick will flex long before the plastic breaks. I've gently tested
it and it functions to my satisfaction. (Ironically, the color of the toothpick would blend in a lot better if my Horri-Bull toy had some of
that horribly yellowed plastic!)

A neo-G1 Horri-Bull was only recently announced as part of an upcoming
4-pack, so I arguably picked a bad time to go after him (announcements
of new updated toys invariably results in a lot of interest in the
vintage versions on the secondary market). But, maybe people with an
only casual interest in picking up the G1 version were priced out, so it
didn't matter as much this time. Regardless, this is a toy in my
collection that I'm always going to handle with kid gloves, assuming I
ever choose to handle him at all.


Zob (really needs to do some selling on eBay or something now so I don't
feel so guilty about this)

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