From Newsgroup: alt.toys.transformers

Dave's Transformers Studio Series Deluxe A-Levels 2026

Bumblebee (compact car, Devastation game)
Orion Pax (Cybertronian truck)

Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Studio/DeluxeA26

And the "A-Levels" are back, pseudo-waves that theoretically ship all
year to help fill out the pegs and let them not have to put Optimus and Bee
in the regular waves. Last year, it was Optimus Prime from the Devastation computer game (which is practically nostalgia-aged by now) and B-127 from Transformers One, so of course this year they switch it up and give us TF
One's Orion Pax (not listed as "Orion Pax/Optimus Prime" this time) and Devastation's Bumblebee (which is based loosely on the Classics version but without the white stripes or ski-doo trailer). Note that Orion is an
entirely new mold, not just a headswap of the previous Studio Series version, and they also made a new Bumblebee for this rather than just a deco tweak on one of the many other recent neo-G1 Bumblebees.
WIRNIR, or Worked In Renders Not In Reality, continues to plague modern Transformers designs.


CAPSULES

$28 price point.

Bumblebee: Okay robot mode, mediocre vehicle mode, and the
transformation is really badly thought out given the usual joint tolerances
on Hasbro products. Functionally a partformer. Skippable (Neutral).

Orion Pax: A design with some interesting elements which was then apparently manufactured using dollar store knockoff materials and
tolerances. Not many toys break in a way I can't fix them before I finish
the review, but this one did. Avoid this piece of trash.


RANTS

Packaging: Standard 2025-6 Studio Series Deluxe boxes.


AUTOBOT: BUMBLEBEE
Assortment: G1925
Altmode: Compact Car
Transformation Difficulty: 24 steps
Previous Name Use: Yes
Previous Mold Use: None
Game: Transformers Devastation

BUMBLEBEE is ready to take down the DECEPTICONS.

Packaging: Five plastic ties hold the robot into the inner tray, and one holds the roof cannon in the upper left edge. A plastic bag containing the pistols is taped to the right flap of the inner tray.
The screenshot on back is of Bumblebee punching someone, I think it's a generic Decepticon car-mode trooper of the sort they put out in a two-pack
last year (and I did not get). The scenery that wraps around to the right
side is the game's generic city, but fading into night.

Robot Mode: Bumblebee is the starting character you play in the game,
and the only one I've actually played as since once I beat the first stage I wasn't all that interested in more of the same. The game uses cel-shaded designs, which this toy copies in exactly one place, the windshield on his abdomen. Otherwise, the robot mode is a pretty faithful reproduction of the "G1 cartoon but can't exactly turn into a VW Beetle because we didn't want to deal with licensing that" design used in the game. The feet are clearly inspired more by the Classics version rather than being kindasorta Beetle
hood pieces or even generic geometric shapes. That said, it's been long
enough since I played that I don't remember the roof cannon, but that
might've been something that showed up later...I'm pretty sure all I could do when playing in vehicle mode was ram stuff.
Anyway, other than the feet being more clearly based on the front end of Classics Bumblebee, it's pretty much a generic G1-ish animation model robot mode, complete with the horned head, although it has a big hollow backpack
made from the rear third of vehicle mode. Unlike some models, it has yellow shins thanks to the hood halves being connected to them, and the taillights below the backpack make it looks vaguely jetpack-ish. All of the wheels are tucked inside the robot mode.
4.25" (10.5cm) tall at the head, although the backpack cannon pokes up higher than that bu a bit, in the usual Bumblebee colors. Black plastic is used for the upper arms, fists, thighs, the lower legs except for the shinguards, and all of the guns. Everything else is bright yellow plastic.
The windows on the sides and bottom of the chest and backpack are painted
gloss medium blue, with the belly windshield having white paint for a sort of cel-style glare. The face is pearly white with medium blue eyes. The headlights on the toes are a sort of very slightly metallic light gray, kind
of the color you get from aluminum with a patina. There's a bright red borderless Autobot symbol on the chest.
The neck is a ball joint with the socket in the head and a cut in back
so the head can tilt back (which it has to do for transformation), the waist
is a smooth swivel. Ball joint shoulders, bicep swivels, hinge elbows, and
the wrists can bend inwards on transformation hinges. Pinned hinge and
swivel hips of the variety where a chunk of the pelvis moves with the thigh, upper thigh swivels, hinge knees (which are a bit tricky since there's a
bunch of transformation hinges below the knee), hinges between lower leg and foot that let the feet stay flat.
The fists can hold 5mm pegs, there's a 5mm socket in the upper center of the backpack, and that's basically it. The front wheels are folded under the feet, which are otherwise too hollow to put 5mm sockets anywhere else.
There's two "generic" animation style pistols which are mirror images of each other, each hollow on the inner face where big vehicle mode connection tabs stick out. 34mm (about 1.25") long made of black plastic and painted
that dully metallic light gray everywhere except the grip peg near the back
and the last few millimeters of the side tabs. The barrel tips are painted, and they're intentional 3mm studs. The details on the back also function as 3mm studs, if not intentionally. There's nowhere good to put the pistols except in his hands, the vehicle mode slots are on the backs of the heels and it looks pretty stupid in this mode. You can sort of jam them both into his hollow backpack, but they'll rattle around. If the big cannon is in one
hand, that pistol can store on the backpack 5mm socket.
The back cannon looks like a tiny anti-tank gun, with the flanges
flanking the end of the barrel often seen on "this gun shoots through Bolos
the long way" rifles in anime. 42mm (a little over 1.5") long and made of black plastic with dull metallic light gray paint except on the grip peg
(which is mounted pretty close to the midpoint). There's a little collar thickening the peg up above the first few millimeters, which makes it hard to get this into either fist without feeling like I'm going to stress the wrist joint. The barrel opening is slightly more than 1/8", so both 3mm pegs and Lego rods are loose in it. The back end is more of a truncated cone, but flexible Fire Blasts can be attached to it.

Transformation: Ugh. The legs are straightforwards enough, but the backpack pops off so easily that it's almost impossible to figure out how
it's SUPPOSED to move. Combine this with the common modern problem of super stiff joints next to loose joints or loose connections and the first time through I just gave up and removed the backpack until I was done with everything else. Going back to robot mode, not only did I have to remove the backpack again, I needed a knife to pry the torso and head apart, plus
several other parts popped off partially or fully along the way, notably the shin pads/hood halves. The second try going back to robot mode didn't
require a knife, but that's because I ended up launching the head across the room and that made it easier to get the neck piece out.
Maybe I just got the crappiest copy to slip past Quality Control,
because others have been praising this toy. Maybe other people just have a higher tolerance for "take apart and reassemble" transformations than I do.
To me, though, this seems like a nigh-fatal case of WIRNIR, to the point they might have allowed some clipping during the transformation renders.
I tried transforming this back and forth several times, but I could
never manage to keep the back window piece from popping off while getting the head tucked away, if it doesn't get ripped off by straight line force it gets popped by the shoulderpads that have to be moved together at the same time as other pieces have to move JUST RIGHT. I've given up and just remove it
first, then snap it back in nearer the end. It's a defacto partformer.
In desperation, I even looked at the instructions in case I'd found some uniquely wrong order to do things, but nope. I was transforming it
correctly, it was just being badly behaved in multiple places.

Vehicle Mode: This is clearly based on the shape of Classics Bumblebee, back when a Minibot-sized Deluxe got a big accessory in the form of a jetski trailer, instead of...well, an extra gun that doesn't work in robot mode.
It's a compact car with a spoiler in back and an airdam-style bumper. Oddly, there's a window under the spoiler, meaning it doesn't have air flowing
through and is just decorative or something.
3.25" (8cm) long and mostly yellow with most of the colors of robot mode but a lot less black (just the wheels and the bits of fist visible inside the rear bumper). All of the vehicle shell is yellow plastic. The windows are
all painted medium blue, but only the windshield adds the cel-shaded shimmer
in white. The dull almost-metallic gray from the guns and toe headlights is also used on the wheel hubs, but the grille and bits of rear bumper are more
of a proper silver. The tailights and the no-border Autobot symbol on the
roof are bright red.
Not a lot of clearance, but it rolls okay if you get it transformed
close enough to correctly. The backpack 5mm socket is now on top of the
roof, and the pistols store using slots on the lower quarters of the doors.

Overall: Leaving out the transformation hassles, it's still pretty mediocre, and it's not like there aren't dozens of other Bumblebee toys out there in this general size. Very skippable unless you have a lot of
nostalgic good feelings about the computer game.


CYBERTRONIAN: ORION PAX
Assortment: G1926
Altmode: Cybertronian truck
Transformation Difficulty: 20 steps
Previous Name Use: GenT30, TFOne (and various exclusives)
Previous Mold Use: None
Movie: TFOne
Scene: The Map

ORION PAX works in the Energon mines with his best friend, D-16.

Packaging: Five ties hold the robot to the tray, two more hold the
mining saw in the lower left. A comically-oversized-for-the-job plastic
baggie taped to the lower right holds the holo-map and the smokestacks.
Oddly, mine came with three smokestacks. I guess he can use one as a pistol without messing up shoulder symmetry. The robot toes are all folded down, it was a little tricky getting the ankles bent at the right angle to avoid the figure falling over.
The screenshot shows Orion looking at the holographic map he found, and the box boack shows that there's an included accessory that lets the toy reproduce this scene. The scenery on the right side is from the interior of the Energon mines, mostly rocks plus a mine cart full of glowing ore. He
does not yearn for the mines.

Robot Mode: So, this is Orion as he looks after he gets his T-cog but before he levels up into the Optimus Prime-style body seen at the very end
and modeled by the previous Studio Series Deluxe. As such, he's a lot
shorter than that toy, coming up to about mid-chest and looking very much
like the "before" picture in a bodybuilding course ad (if bodybuilding could make you 20% taller in addition to bulking out). As such, there's not even a point in checking for reused parts, at most they might've taken some of the render files and shrunk them down as a first step in modifying them to fit
the new design. While it's about the same height as the Prime Changer ("Warrior"-like class) version, they don't appear to share any parts, the details are more different than comparing the two Studio Series toys.
Anyway, enough about what it isn't. This has the friendly open
faceplate Orion Pax wore for almost the entire movie, but has the closed
chest he picked up after getting his T-cog. As the rest of this review will make clear, transforming this toy is a bad idea anyway. This entire figure seems to be built around having enough parts budget to give him the mining
saw as well as the range of motion to hold it. Well, and the ability to do
the holomap on the forearm.
At 5" (12.5cm) tall it's almost exactly the same height as the Prime Changer version, but with different proportions and details pretty much everywhere. A bit more screen-accurate, though, and it gets to have clear plastic for the windows and eyes. Specifically, clear medium blue plastic, although the red plastic behind the windshield makes it look darker. The
eyes have molded irises which show up clearly when the lightpiping is used.
The rest of the head, the fists, and most of the toy below the knees are made of darkish blue plastic. The upper torso shell and the shoulderpad shells
are bright red plastic. Wheels embedded in the outer forearms and the backs
of the boots are a somewhat duller red plastic. Everything else (except
maybe the fully painted over saw blades) is made of a slightly silvery light gray plastic.
The face, forehead tablet, details on the shoulderpads mostly covered by the smokestacks, truck grille, some panels on the outer faces of the boots,
and alternating slats on the shins are painted a light gray that is probably supposed to match the light gray plastic, but isn't quite shiny enough.
Darker gunmetal paint is on the upper torso roof lights, tech greeble details inside the upper forearms, on the shoulder fronts under the pads, and the
tech greebles on the shins in between the slats. There's gold paint strips
on the undersides of the pecs and wrapping up around to the sides of the cab,
a yellow line at the top of the grille (maybe meant to be a headlight?) and also yellow in the tips of the toes.
The neck is a ball joint with the socket in the torso, so you can't swap it and the Prime Changer head (which has the socket in the head). There's a swivel in the torso for transformation, but it's back at the spine and
doesn't really work for waist articulation to any extent. Hinge and swivel shoulders, bicep swivels, and weird double-hinge elbows that can't bend much farther than 90 degrees because of blockage, but which are needed for
massaging the arms into place in vehicle mode. The wrists are swivels on the end of hinged struts to give them enough range of motion to hold the mining saw. The hips are ball joints and there's swivels just above the knees. The knees are hinged, but have two stable snap-in locations: straight for robot mode, and slightly bent for vehicle mode. Beyond that they bend smoothly.
The ankles have tilt hinges that are smooth, hinges that are only stable in "flat feet" and "truck mode" positions, and toes that bend down for transformation but only have three stable positions (flat feet, fully folded for truck mode, and halfway between pleasing no one and useful for nothing).
The hands can hold 5mm pegs, and there's 5mm sockets in the outer shoulders which are dedicated to the smokestacks. There's a 3mm stud on top
of each forearm (for the holomap) and two of them pointed down at the corners of the backpack (for storing the holomap), plus a 3mm socket in the back of
the pelvis. The feet are hollow on the underside, no sockets. The mining
saw stores via nonstandard (and not great) tabs and slots, so there's no
other 5mm-compatible locations, and thus nowhere for me to store the third smokestack (but I might just be salvaging this for parts anyway).
The smokestacks (yeah, I know, no actual smoke here, but they gave him
the detail for iconographic reasons, not practical ones) are identical and shorter than the ones on either other Deluxe toy of the character, but they still attach to the shoulderpads via 5mm pegs. Each is a 2cm long piece of light gray plastic, with the last 6mm of length being a smooth 3mm rod. They can be held as pistols, not that the instructions suggest it. The lack of other 5mm sockets means they can't really be stored anywhere else, and annoyingly the big screw hole on the side of the mining saw housing is
slightly less than 5mm.
The holomap is made of the same clear blue plastic as the eyes, and is 12mm diameter globe (no recognizable details, just sort of random tech
display stuff) on a narrow base that ends in a 5mm diameter peg with a 3mm diameter inner socket, so it can be held in one of the fists or attached to
the forearm 3mm pegs where it's supposed to go. No paint. The instructions don't offer a storage location in this mode, but the vehicle mode storage
pegs on the back work just fine. You could also put it on the tip of a smokestack if you wanted, I suppose.
Okay, now the mining saw, which to be honest is the only reason I pre-ordered this toy (since it's not like I'm hurting for TFOne Orion Pax/Optimus Prime toys in this size). It's a big two-handed rig with a pair
of coaxial rock saws, which can either be used to cut a thick line through rock, or swept sideways to just chew up the stone. Now, if this had been a 2011 MechTech Deluxe-Class toy, pulling back on the top handle would've made the saw blades spin, but we've long since lost that level of technology in
our first party under-$100 toys. At least the blades do spin independently
and freely. The whole thing is 3.75" (9.5cm) long and probably made entirely of light gray plastic. Most of the housing is painted somewhat dull gold
(same as on the robot chest), while the blades are entirely coated in
gunmetal paint. There's a strut on the right side that ends in a horizontal handle on top, and a vertical peg handle on a strut that sticks out at the back. There's a pair of rectangular tabs on the underside, meant for storage on the robot back or the vehicle rear. Between the extra-bendy wrists and
the extra elbow joints, the figure can hold this pretty well in both hands at once, although some poses make the wrists appear broken (the instructions
show a bad case of this on the right wrist).

Transformation: The first hint that this was going to be weird was the angled wheels on the forearms. And yeah, this suffers BADLY from WIRNIR.
The tabs on the upper arms are supposed to go into slots on the butt, but things refuse to fit properly no matter how much I fiddle with it or look at the instructions with a magnifying glass trying to tease out the secret orientation required for all the parts. Nothing goes popping off (well, the pelvis front slides off occasionally, and see below for its final fate), the problem here is getting things to connect in the first place. The tabs on
the arms need to be exactly the right thickness and level of friction to lock in place rather than forcing themselves back out, and mine do not even come close to that Lego-like level of precision. The cab is kinda a mess in general, with many parts that absolutely depend on the stability of those
upper arm tabs to hold the whole mess together. On the second time through looking at the instructions, I finally deciphered an unclear step (carefully looking at the box render was actually more help, since I could see there was
a piece not in the right place, after which I figured out what the step was), and stability improved a little, but on the other hand it gave me yet another set of tabs and slots that didn't want to stay together. I suspect that if I spent an hour with a Dremel and some files I might manage to fix this...but
I'm not going to. I shouldn't NEED to. (Oh, and the mining saw doesn't
really want to stay in place even though the legs DO peg together properly.)
Going back to robot mode, I had to use a knife to open up the roof panel and then also to pull the head out...and oh look, I guess I transformed this toy too many times, because the entire pelvis front CRACKED IN TWO. For
bonus points on this disappointing toy, the plastic seems to be one of the varieties that superglue won't stick to, not that the crack was in a place where glue ever holds well. I am starting to suspect that not only was this never actually tested in meatspace for the transformation working, it
might've gotten its safety pass from a purely virtual drop test, because this is a choking hazard. I finally got it kind of glued together and glued down onto the robot, preventing further transformation, so it's a good thing I finished the vehicle reviewing before this happened.

Vehicle Mode: At least after all the hassle, Bumblebee looked finished. This is a mess that's vaguely shaped like a truck, as long as you don't look
at it too carefully from any angle more than 30 degrees away from head-on.
The sides of the cab feel like I must've lost several pieces without noticing it, and suggest that this might have started life as the transformation
scheme for a Leader-class toy before being massively economized. I do appreciate that they put wheels on the underside in such a way as to make it maybe look like a hover-effect truck, but this is an awful mess otherwise.
So many more joints and pieces than the Prime Changer version and somehow so much worse in vehicle mode...and I didn't really LIKE the Prime Changer's vehicle mode!
4.75" (12cm) long in the same colors as the robot, with way too much visible gray plastic on the sides. If you can get the saw to stay on, it increases the total lengthy by about a centimeter. Frankly, the saw stays on the roof a lot better than on the shins. I did finally get the say to peg solidly to the shins, but only by turning it around and having the blades shoved up against the back of the cab, which is backwards, and also doesn't
let you store the map on the back of the cab. Anyway, the only new plastic
is the grille/bumper section between the shoulderpads, which is light gray plastic. The front window is opened up more by means of the pecs sliding
down a few millimeters.
On the off chance you get everything properly aligned and it stays
there, the toy rolls okay on its hidden wheels. The fists are tucked away
and the 3mm butt socket is inaccessible, but if you put the saw on backwards its 5mm grip peg in back is accessible for dragging B-127 behind him or something.
Now I'm going to transform this back to robot mode and never put it in this sorry excuse for a vehicle mode again. Even if it HADN'T broken right after I typed this, I wouldn't have bothered.

Overall: If they'd given the head and forearms/fists of this to the
Prime Changer version, along with the saw and map, it would've been a much better toy. This makes for an okay pre-Cog toy, since if it can't transform
it can't transform BADLY. And at least it has the Orion Pax head, unlike the Prime Changer. If you buy it, never ever transform it, and leave the pelvis armor firmly pegged down so it won't shatter as if it were made of 1990s gold plastic.


Dave Van Domelen, kind of afraid to open the Takara Leader/Commander
Orion Pax now, in case it's also Cursed like this assortment.

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