From Newsgroup: alt.toys.transformers

Dave's Transformers Retro Rant: Wave 9

Wheelie (futuristic car, new mold)
Outback (retool of Studio Series TFtM Brawn)

Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Artifacts/Retro9

https://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Studio/Deluxe21 for the Brawn mold, which got a new head and redeco for Retro wave 8. There's still plenty of
that Brawn on shelves around here if I wanted one, but I prefer the animation head anyway (Retro Brawn is toy-head).


CAPSULES

$28 each.

Wheelie: On the plus side, leaving some hassles in transformation aside, this is a good representation of the character in both modes. On the minus side, the character it represents is Wheelie. Make of that what you will.

Outback: Original mold was somewhere between mildly recommended and regular recommended. This is a good update to the character, although there seems to be something akin to mold rot setting in already. Again, between mildly recommended and recommended.


RANTS

Packaging: Same as for wave 8, although I just noticed that Tracks has Road Rage colors in the mural on back. That was also the case for wave 8, I just didn't comment on it in my review of Seaspray so I might not have
noticed it. https://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Artifacts/Retro8


AUTOBOT: WHEELIE
Assortment: G2258 (it's in the lower left corner on front)
Altmode: Futuristic car
Transformation Difficulty: 23 steps
Previous Name Use: G1, Universe2, Gen (store exclusive), Gen:TR, RotF
Previous Mold Use: None
Origin Universe: G1
Function: Survivalist
Motto: "Only the fierce shall live."

Cunning and stealthy, Wheelie is known for his fearlessness and his rhyming sentences.

STR 5 INT 6 SPD 8 FRB 7

I guess he didn't feel like rhyming his motto. Maybe add, "is advice
I'll give" to complete the couplet?

Packaging: Rather than use sandwich blisters, there's two plastic ties that hold the robot into the inner tray. The slingshot is held (very firmly) just by the blister shape.

Robot Mode: Note, while the Retro line lately has been focusing on toy-accurate heads more often than animation-accurate, they largely went with the animation model here because the toy model kinda bites. Now, there's a design vibe that has (rightly or wrongly) become associated with Flory Dery,
in which there's lots of curved and almost organic lines on robots,
relatively few sharp edges or rectangles, plus lots of ellipsoidal bulges on arms or legs. This design is classic Floro Dery in that respect, at least to the extent it's possible in a toy that has to actually transform instead of using the usual sort of cheats G1 animation indulged in. There is one place they tried to hit the mark on the toy design, and that's the head, which has
a very shrunken folded up panel as the visor over the face rather than the rectangular-slot design and flat top head from the animation. The head is
also more egg-shaped on top, a sort of homage to the hunchback shape of the
G1 toy. And yes, this does mean that they probably have an animation-style head available in the mold design so they could release a head swap version
for Studio Series or something. The colors are also very much toy-style,
with a lot of slightly orangey yellow instead of the light orange of the animation model. (This toy has more gray than the G1 toy does, which is to
say it has any non-wheel gray plastic at all. My guess is they didn't want
to have a gray sprue for just the wheels, so they added more gray bits to
bring in a little of the animation colors, particularly the hands and
pelvis.)
A short Deluxe, as is the case with most of the Minibot updates,
standing 4.5" (11.5cm) tall in a mix of deep orange, orangey-yellow, and a couple shades of light gray. Light gray plastic is used for the collar area, inner layer of the backpack, shoulder roots, inner parts of the shoulder joints, elbow joints, hands, abdomen side panels, inner abdomen, most of the pelvis, hips, feet (other than the toes), slingshot weapon, and wheels (on
the inner faces of the forearms and on the backs of the boots). An orange-tinged yellow plastic is used for the head, torso front, pelvis front, inner backpack shell, and upper arms. Deep orange plastic is used for the outer backpack shell, forearms, thighs, boots, and toes.
While the difference is really obvious under blacklight, they did a good job matching the orange and orangey-yellow colors with paints. Orange paint
is used on the face and details on the outer faces of the shoulders. Orangey-yellow pint is on most of the top of each forearm (a sort of taillight-ish feature is left unpainted), the fenders on the boots, and the outer shell of the backpack. The top bit of the outer backpack is painted light gray (which is lighter than the plastic, this may be intentional but it also might be just a poor matching job), which is also used for much of the chest. The visor is a mix of light gray and medium gray paint (the medium
gray paint shows up in vehicle mode on the canopy). The eyes are silver,
which is more than a little creepy, especially given that the G1 toy just had eyes painted the same as the rest of the face. A large-ish red Autobot
symbol is printed on the center of the torso front.
The neck is a pretty stiff swivel, while the waist is a swivel that has
a small internal notch so it soft-snaps into "straight ahead" position. The shoulders are hinge and swivel joints with the hinges a few millimeters above the axis of the swivel. There's swivels right above the hinge elbows, and
the wrists are swivels. Pinned hinge and swivel hips of the variety where a third of the pelvis moves with the hip, upper thigh swivels between the gray and orange plastics, hinge knees that can bend a tiny bit more than 90
degrees. The instep hinges on the ankles only have about 10-15 degrees of range, just enough to let the figure stand flat-footed with the feet below
the shoulders. The toes fold down for transformation, but this isn't too useful for articulation purposes. I suppose if you have his legs dangling
over the edge of the table, letting the toes point down helps with that.
The fists can hold 5mm pegs, there's 5mm sockets in the outer faces of
the forearms, on the soles of the feet in the outstep (the other side from
the instep), and a single 5mm socket in the upper centerline of the
backpack. There's no slingshot storage tabs mentioned in the instructions,
but you can use the transformation tabs on the sides of the backpack to store the weapon.
The slingshot itself is his weapon, a Y-shape about an inch (2.5cm) tall with a 5mm peg at the bottom. The upper limbs of the Y narrow down a bit but are slightly more than 1/8" so you can't use 3mm C-clips on them. Because of the big chest, it's hard to get the figure into a pose that looks like he's pulling back an invisible sling band, but not impossible.

Transformation: This is your basic "explode all the stacked pieces outwards and then tab them together" design, although one slightly tricky bit involves having to rotate the forearms and then re-rotate the fists. The panels on the sides of the abdomen can get in the way if you don't fold them
at the correct times, and you need to move the arms and fists in the right order at the end to avoid the need for serious part-bending (in the bad way)
to get all the tabs into slots.
Getting it back into robot mode with all the stuff tucked back into the torso correctly was more challenging, and it wasn't helped by the fact that part of the vehicle nose end is just a snap-in joint and might come apart during the fiddling about to get everything tucked in exactly.

Altmode: This has the general proportions of the original toy, but where that had almost no sharp edges (all blobby roundness), this is a more angular take on the concept. While not exactly the same as the animation model (I checked my copy of The Ark guide to be sure), it's a lot closer to animation than to the toy, which suggests this might be the "retool" with toy-style
head and one with an animation head and colors later. Whether the colors
match the toy depends on what picture I look at, and if I own a G1 Wheelie I don't know where it is (if I got it after 2000 it wouldn't be as fully documented in my storage boxes). The light gray part around the canopy lid doesn't have the right shape, but that might be an artifact of trying to look more like the animation model in robot mode. Anyway, it's...Wheelie. A weird "futuristic" car with an almost spaceship-like nose poking out way ahead of
the front wheels. I'm reminded of the "Valkyrie Car" from the Robotech TTRPG of the 1980s (Palladium system), where they took the wings off a Valkyrie (Jetfire) and added too-small wheels.
A bit over 4" (10cm) long in pretty much the same colors as robot mode, although they're a little more clumped together. Most of the orange is on
the front end and along the sides, the (non-opening) canopy is medium-light gray with a light gray border, the rear bumper area is made of the gray plastic. The nose bits, which were inside the torso, are orange plastic,
while the center slice of canopy is the orangey-yellow plastic but painted
over entirely. Those gray abdomen flank bits cover up the undersides of the fists, so they only look fist-like from behind and beneath (both angles traditionally getting the short straw when it comes to looks).
The central canopy slice has medium-light gray paint on the actual
window part and light gray on the sides, which sort of links up with the
light gray from the torso in front of the canopy and the backpack stripe
behind it. There's orangey-yellow paint on the center of the second segment
of the hood, where it's more obvious that it doesn't quite match the
plastic. The painted bits of the front fenders and the orange painted bits
of the upper arms line up nicely.
There's a tab under the nose where the slingshot stores, and it looks
like an under-nose cannon when you do that. The backpack socket is now on
top of the roof, for when he borrows a gun or if he wants to have the
slingshot on his roof where it looks very dumb even by the standards of
already looking like Wheelie. The fist sockets are accessible on the
underside in the rear, if you want to use a 5mm flight base.
There is no articulation other than the wheels spinning. They're all pinned rather than snap-on, so they roll very well.

Overall: Getting the nose end of vehicle mode back inside the torso for robot mode is fiddly, otherwise it's a decent transformation. While the mold definitely seems to be aiming at a headswap for the animation model, they did
a pretty good job of making this look like an update of the original toy.
Too bad the original toy was this one.


AUTOBOT: OUTBACK
Assortment: G2259
Altmode: Land Rover-ish jeep
Transformation Difficulty: 22 steps (Brawn had 23 listed)
Previous Name Use: G1, PotP (other versions of the character are Fallback) Previous Mold Use: Studio, Retro
Origin Universe: G1
Function: Gunner
Motto: "Rules are detours on the road of life."

Thinks going by the book is going the long way. Doesn't follow plans -
or roads.

STR 6 INT 5 SPD 6 FRB 5

Pretty low Fireblast given his function....

Outback impressed me back in the day because it was the only Minibot to come with a weapon. All the rest would have to do the Gobots "zappy from fists" thing, but Outback had a gun. Mind you, he couldn't actually hold it
in robot mode because of the cruddy little fists, but he HAD it. The
trademark got lost (presumably to the Outback restaurant chain, which grabbed it for possible merchandising purposes since normally a toy and a restaurant would not be in conflict), resulting in some Fallback toys as Brawn retools,
or Outbacks who were in sets and the name wasn't trademarked on the box, but they did get it back in time for the Power of the Primes retool. Outback did show up briefly in the cartoon, but other than the color of the visor the
face model was basically the same in both toy and cartoon form.

Packaging: Two ties hold the robot mode into the inner blister, one tie holds the pistol in place. (On the G1 toy it was more cannon scale, but it's more of a pistol now.)
The package art shows that the toy didn't have a blue visor originally, that was something added for the animation model, but they went ahead and
gave this new toy a blue visor. If you really want toy-accuracy, I guess you can paint over the visor or use a sticker.

Color Swaps: Black stays black on the repeated pieces, yellow becomes a warm brown, olive green becomes a light grayish tan. All of the new pieces (head, chest, gun) are warm brown plastic. Note, all of the replaced yellow pieces on Brawn were softer joint-type plastic (those brown parts on Outback look a little duller and glow differently under UV than the new pieces),
which is probably why they didn't mold Brawn's chest out of yellow plastic,
as it'd have to be on its own in a special sprue.

Paint Apps: Silver is the main paint in robot mode, being used for the head, two of the chest squares, forearms, and fists. Unlike Brawn, the
silver paint doesn't go inside the inner hollow of the forearm where the
fists fold inward. The other two chest squares are bright gloss blue, which
is also used for the visor. There's no front-facing Autobot symbol, nor a
good place to add one. Most, but not all, of the vehicle-specific paint is covered up in this mode.
In vehicle mode, the rear side windows are unpainted except or the big
red on silver Autobot symbols in them, but the other windows are painted
gloss black. The center hood chunk is black with thin silver zigzags making
an M shape. The wheel hubs are silver, as is most of the grille/headlight area. The front bumper is painted brown, about the only brown visible in
this mode aside from the hinges on the back corners. The headlights on the fenders are unpainted, same as on Brawn.

Mold Changes: The head is new, matching the toy/animation style of a
more traditional helmet and visor combo with open face, but framed by a sort
of mecha-mane. The torso front/top piece is also new, reflecting how to
change the head in G1 they had to change the entire vehicle underside. The center of the chest has a 2x2 molded decal, although the details don't match the G1 decals.
The gun is new, bigger than Brawl's pistol but not the absolute cannon (proportionally speaking) that the G1 toy had. 1.75" (4.5cm) long made from
a single piece of brown plastic and painted gloss black except for the grip
peg near the back end. The barrel tip ends in a 3mm stud.
While G1 Outback had different hands than G1 Brawn, they didn't (intentionally, see below) change the forearms and hands this time.

Other Notes: The new gun is an insanely tight fit in either fist. I checked with a caliper, and its grup peg is 4.9mm in diameter, so the problem is the fists. My first thought was that silver paint got inside, but the
left fist is a better fit and has more paint slop. Once I scraped out the paint, the left fist was fine but the right fist was still bad. Nor was it a bit of flash, or that'd have been removed pretty quickly. I had to spend a
few minutes carefully using a grinder head on my Dremel before the fit was acceptable, so we're probably talking a flaw in the mold itself. This is the sort of thing quality control is supposed to catch. (Ha.) I've talked to another Outback owner, they also have problems with the fist, so it isn't
just me, even if it isn't in every copy.

Overall: Other than the bad right fist this is a good update of a moderately obscure character. Otherwise, not really better or worse than the original mold.


Dave Van Domelen, getting really close to having to move another pile
out of active display and into storage.
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