From Newsgroup: alt.toys.transformers

Dave's TF Collaborative Rant: Sonic the Hedgehog X Transformers

Blue Booster (Racecar/Sonic)
Wingtail (Biplane/Tails)

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

Disclaimer, I'm not in the Sonic fandom. I've seen the first two
movies, various bits and pieces of other stuff (largely in memes), and I did once learn how to draw in the style so I could do some art for a friend (he said that he couldn't get any established Sonic fan artists to touch his
fanon, and I didn't dig any deeper because I have enough problems with internecine stuff in the fandoms I'm alread in). So, I will approach this review from the point of view of someone who is only vaguely aware of the franchise. I will not look stuff up to see how accurate it is, and if the packaging doesn't provide a name for something, I will just describe it and come up with my own term. If they wanted things to be more accessible
outside the Sonic fandom, there's plenty of blank space on the box they could've used for lore, even if they had to repeat it in four languages.
Note, this is the second Transformers Collaborative toy this year to include a multiple-tailed fox (Tails is based on a two-tail kitsune, as
opposed to the nine-tail kitsune in the Naruto set).


CAPSULE

Originally $59.99 on Target.com for pre-order, they dropped the price to $49.99 just before shipping (so I got a "your refund is on the way" ominous email before I got the "your pre-order has shipped" email).

Blue Booster: Not a bad design, looks in-theme in both modes, but a key part of the transformation seems to require much more precision in both manufacturing and user motions to work than are likely from either side. If you want it to be able to roll in vehicle mode, be prepared to do some
carving.

Wingtail: Another okay design, if a bit heavy on the shellmaster aspects and unstable as heck mid-transformation.

Set Overall: Pretty much the definition of mildly recommended. It's
okay. No dealbreaker flaws, but nothing outstanding either. Normally I'd
say it's mainly recommended for fans of the property, but I've seen a bit of Sonic fandom from the outside and they probably wouldn't like this except as
a curiosity.


PACKAGING

Yeah, I can see why they dropped the price, just looking at these guys
in the box they seem a little small even for Deluxes these days. They
might've worried that the sets would rot on the shelves at sixty bucks.
This is a wide box with a large plastic window display showing both figures in robot mode with some accessories in between them. 11" (28cm)
wide, 7" (18cm) tall, and 2.5" (6.5cm) deep. Wingtail is on the left, Blue Booster on the right. The top of the front border has their names along with Autobot symbols, rather than whatever faction symbols might be appropriate
for Tails and Sonic themselves, if any. The upper right has the usual Collaborative badge, with Sonic and Tails on the left and an Autobot symbol
on the right. The Sonic logo is on top and TF on the bottom. The Sonic logo is also on its own in the lower left corner, with the Transformers logo along the bottom. The left border has rendered art of the vehicle modes flying and driving through a typical Sonic game level (grass-topped arches and platforms with a checkerboard stone pattern under the grass). There are enough toyetic hinges and the like to clarify that these are the toys, not the vehicles from Sonic canon (I know Wings has a biplane, I haven't seen any Sonic toys that look like Blue Booster but I don't really look at the Sonic stuff that closely).
The right side has Sonic running towards the viewer, the left side continues the game world scene with more logos on the bottom. The top has
the two logos and the same shot of Sonic and Tails that is worked into the Collaborative logo. The underside is the usual legalese. The back has the logos across the upper left and upper middle, and the Sonic running seen on
the right side repeated as he runs through a golden ring in the lower left corner. The majority is dominated by renders of both modes of the two
figures, Sonic on the left and Wingtail on the right. The insets (in golden rings, of course) show the other side of Blue Booster's spinny thing, and
show Wingtail's gun attached as a rocket booster under the biplane mode's bottom.
The inner tray background is a generic white burst shading into light
and medium blues. In addition to all the ties, there's a box of tray
material taped around Blue Booster's feet for their protection, and a little blister tray at the top between the two that holds Blue's ring/shield, Wingtail's rocket booster gun and its Fire Blast. The spinny globe is in between the two robots. Six ties hold Wingtail, six hold Blue Booster, two hold the spinny globe, one holds the ring shield, one holds the booster gun, and two hold the Fire Blast. The foot box is not taped to the tray, so you
can remove the figure and leave his feet locked in what appears to be a block of ice. The instructions are, as usual, loose behind the tray.


AUTOBOT: BLUE BOOSTER
Crossover: Sonic the Hedgehog
Altmode: Race Car
Transformation Difficulty: 27 steps
Previous Name Use: None
Previous Mold Use: None

Robot Mode: Mostly a pretty standard car bot, with the front of the car being the feet and the rear fenders being shoulders. Other than the color scheme, the main things that say "Sonic" are the head and to a lesser extent the chest. The head is a roboticized version of Sonic's, although NOT the
kind of robot based on Sonic that appears in the Sonic universe. It does
have the standard Sonic deal where the eyes are connected into something like
a sideways B shape instead of being separate, although they didn't give him pupils to bounce around between the sides. The faceplate is much more Transformers style, with an expressionless mouth and a chin block, but also with a little button nose. The helmet is shaped somewhat like the spines on Sonic's head, plus a couple of small ears. The chestplate is molded to be reminiscent of the bare patch of Sonic's chest, but overall the flesh tone is replaced by gold (so the arms are are also gold). (Aside: to complete the color scheme, the insides of the ears need to be painted gold as well, I
might do at least that much touching up.) The canopy of vehicle mode is up behind the head like Stilt-Man's helmet, but if you don't like that it can always be folded down as a buttcape.
5" (12.5cm) tall in blue, white, and gold with a few accent colors.
Medium bold blue plastic is used for the head, torso, shoulder joints, shoulderpads, pelvis, ips, thighs, knees, shinpads, and feet (aside from the wheels tucked under them). The biceps, forearms, fists, and the cores of the boots are white plastic. Clear colorless plastic is used for the canopy, the bubble part of his weapon, and the ring shield. The wheels are black
plastic, while the handle and spinny part of the weapon are red plastic.
The faceplate, chestplate, biceps and most of the forearm are painted gold, which they decided was his furless-parts color. The visor and the headlight strip across the toes are painted robin's egg gloss blue. There's some white plastic on the toes and heels, although they didn't try to give
him his iconic red sneakers as that would've given the vehicle mode a red
hood and doors, but he does have his white gloves thanks to the unpainted wrists and fists. The wheel hubs and parts of the spinny thing weapon are painted red, though. No faction symbols, although there's a keystone-like
flat space on the front of each shoulderpad that would be a good place for a user-applied Autobot symbol.
The neck is a ball joint with the socket in the head, while the transformation hinge at the base of the neck lets the figure look down a little. The waist is a simple swivel. The shoulders are swivels at the ends of hinged struts, there's a swivel (and a transformation hinge) where the
short bicep meets the shoulderpad, hinge elbows, and wrists that are hinged
to swing upwards for transformation. Pinned hinge and swivel universal joint hips, upper thigh swivels, hinge knees (with transformation hinges that let them bend sideways too), and the ankles have hinges both ways but can really only wiggle a bit forwards/backwards.
Not only can the hands hold 5mm pegs, there's also 5mm sockets on the backs of the hands (for the shield and for transformation). The wheel hubs
are mushroom pegs with interiors a little less than 5mm wide, but you can
force a 5mm peg into them (so the shield can be worn on the shoulder, or used as a boogie board). This does strain the plastic, though.
The main weapon, and the only thing with an Autobot symbol in the set, looks like some sort of objective marker that makes me think of Tom Servo's head, but with a spinning disk inside of it. One side of the disk has a sticker with a big Autobot symbol, the other has a blue background and three four-pointed stars. It can just sort of sit as decoration, or a handle can
be (with great difficulty or a knife) folded out so it can be held like a
gun. The peg is kinda short, and the fists seem to be a tiny bit less than
5mm wide, so getting it in far enough for stability is difficult. It fits
more easily into one of the back-of-fist sockets, if you don't want to risk straining the plastic. The top of the dome has a "dot with fins" sort of
shape that can also fit solidly into a 5mm socket, and spinning it makes the disk inside spin. Mind doesn't reliably spin freely, though (sometimes yes, sometimes no, it's weird). There's also a 5mm socket slightly above the equator on what ends up being the underside in gun-grip mode, which is odd since the figure has no 5mm pegs. It does let you put the shield or Twintails's gun on it, I guess. Including handle, it's 2" (5cm) long, and
the globe part is 1.25" (32mm) in diameter.
Finally, it wouldn't be Sonic without rings, so they made one into an energy shield. It's a fairly simple slightly curved disk with a raised lip
and a 5mm peg on the concave side, a little under 2" (5cm) in diameter. It's made of a single piece of clear colorless plastic, with the rim painted gold and the interior painted clear blue (the peg itself fades to colorless, which is how you can tell this isn't clear blue plastic). It's meant to go on the back of either hand in robot mode, and nowhere in vehicle mode. If you plug
it into the socket on the spinny thing, it just barely touches the floor, so maybe they're intended to display together next to the vehicle mode?

Transformation: Pretty complex. Among other things, you have to not
only rotate the regular waist 180 degrees, but there's a second waist joint above it that gets unlocked when you fold both the chest and back panels out
of the way, and that needs to be rotated 180 degrees as well. The back plate snaps back on when you're done, but you can't get the chestplate to do so, it needs to wait for the legs to be transformed and swing all the way down so
the slots on the collarbone area can go onto tabs on the backs of the hips. After pointing the toes down, but before collapsing the thighs into the
shins, you need to rotate the shinpads so that they're lined up to accept the canopy tabs. There's also the usual problem with snap-on panels that snap
OFF if you don't do the steps exactly correctly, notably the heel bits that become the vehicle sides. The arms do a lot of twisting and bending to lock under the the rear end of the car (and until I discovered that second waist I was starting to wonder if mine was misassembled with the shoulders on the
wrong sides!), and you need to force two opposing tabs into place which means flexing the shoulder piece in the process.
Going back to robot mode is relatively simple, although you have to do
the leg parts in the right order and the shin pads can be difficult to get rotated.
At least on mine, the chestplate will not lock into place on the
underside of the vehicle, the tabs are not aligned correctly no matter how
much I massage the other parts. I can force it in, but it pops back out as soon as I let go. It's not that either tab or slot is mismolded or has paint getting in the way, the tabs just end up too close together compared to the spacing of the slots, and everything else being properly connected forces
them back together where they pop the chestplate out. I tried carving away excess, but the alignment was so bad that ANY amount of tab remaining just pushed the chestplate down when I let go. So I had to completely flatten the backs of the hips and trust joint friction to keep the chestplate in place.

Altmode: This is a very compact little race car with vague Sonic
stylings (the headlights and grille are kinda like stretched out versions of his eyes and mouth albeit with no pupils, the fins in back are like his stylized quills) and a clear canopy that shows robot bits inside. No real attempt at a little dashboard or seat. I think an opaque canopy might've worked better in this case. Otherwise, the only robot kibble really visible when the vehicle is on a surface is the fists which are kind of trying to
pass for exhaust pipes.
A chonky 4" (10cm) long and 2.5" (6.5cm) wide, mostly blue with bits of white, red, light blue, and the black tires. Most of the shell is blue plastic, with a few white robot bits visible on top and at the rear bumper.
The canopy is colorless clear plastic, the wheels are black plastic. There's white paint on the grille and running boards (yeah, they're not running
boards, but they look like it), light blue on the headlight strip, red
hubcaps and taillights. Despite technically being an Autobot, there is no faction symbol here either.
It rolls okay with not a lot of clearance (even if yours is not messed
up and the chestplate stays tabbed in place). The canopy can open up, but there isn't really anywhere to put a driver figure. The only connection
points are the fists visible in back, and they're no good for storing the shield or spinny thing. I suppose Twintail can carry the shield under its thruster, but the spinny thing is on its own.

Overall: Not too bad, the transformation can be a little frustrating and that chest panel issue required toy surgery on my copy...it's not impossible that I simply never found the exact right way to transform it before giving
up and starting to carve, but that just means it was a bad design in the
first place with no forgiveness in a toy that itself has indifferent tolerances. There's a couple places I can see where they could've made a slight modification and the accessories could attach in vehicle mode.


AUTOBOT: WINGTAIL
Crossover: Sonic the Hedgehog (Tails)
Altmode: Biplane
Transformation Difficulty: 32 steps
Previous Name Use: None
Previous Mold Use: None

The instructions include 8 steps for getting from "in package" mode to "correct robot mode."

Robot Mode: I said up top that this is a kitsune, but only to the extent Tails himself is. Yes, the airplane tail is split in two in back, but no effort is made to give it the appearance of fox tails, not even the interior shell molding. (I might paint the interior parts of the tail halves to match Tails's yellow fur color at some point, although there might be scraping issues.) Other than the fox-like robot head, the white gloves, and the red sneakers, there's not much tying this to Tails...a simple head swap could let it work as a generic biplane Transformer. The engine and propellor form the chest, and red is a predominant color because unlike Blue Booster the vehicle mode colors are not the same as the character colors. Also, unlike Blue Booster, the robot mode is more of a shellmaster sort, with most of the
vehicle mode being stuck onto the robot rather than being part of it (as in,
if you remove all the vehicle bits except the engine/prop, you still have a robot...if you remove all the vehicle bits from Blue Booster he has no feet
or shoulders). Like a lot of shellmasters, the vehicle kibble does get in
the way of range of motion. The head is a robotic fox with a neutral expression and a molded nose, like Blue Booster's head, although this one has
a little more character (a mecha-mohawk based on the tuft of fur on Tails's head, for instance) and a bit more paint. The figure is very top-heavy and prone to falling over sideways unless the feet are placed at least a
centimeter or so apart.
5.25" (13cm) tall at the head, about 6" (15cm) at the top of the wings sticking up from the upper arms, so Twintail is noticeably taller in robot
mode than Blue Booster is, a reversal of their character sizes. I wonder if they could've made the legs shorter without affecting transformation? I
guess they decided that keeping the general leggy proportions was more important. Mainly in red, golden yellow, white, and black. Red plastic is used for the wings, split airplane tail, back and lower abdomen, shoulder roots, shoulders, elbow joints, hips, ankle joints, and chest propeller. The head, biceps, thighs, and boots are golden yellow plastic. White for the forearm/fist pieces, pelvis, and feet. The gun, engine-chest, and the struts and landing gear on the wings are black plastic. The fire blast and a
canopy bubble on the back are colorless clear plastic. Yeah, a fire blast
not made of rubbery plastic. I guess they wanted to keep everything together on this toy rather than borrowing any rubbery mold bits from other toys.
There's white paint inside the ears, on the lower face, and the cuffs of the legs (which are meant to be the tops of sneakers, not the cuffs of pants, since Tails is naked except for his shoes and gloves, as is normal for male characters in Sonic). The nose and tail wheel are painte gloss black, the propeller blades are painted golden yellow, and the tops of the feet gloss bright red. The eyes are the same light blue as Blue Booster's eyes. Paint details specific to the vehicle shell will be discussed below.
The neck is a ball joint cut in back to theoretically allow the figure
to look up, although there isn't enough other clearance to allow much of it. Swivel waist, but so much kibble in the way. The shoulders are hinge and swivel universal joints and there's bicep swivels, but the wings pegged onto the shoulders (on the side and around back) get in the way of things. The wings are completely removable, though, if without anyplace else to put
them. Double hinge elbows, no wrists. Pinned hinge and swivel hips, upper thigh swivels that pop off easily if you try to move the hips too much (they scrape against the waist piece and are very hard to move without applying enough torque to pop the thighs off). Hinge knees that bend almost all the
way (and have to do so for transformation), ankles that have inward hinges
for staying flat as well as swivels where the strut meets the foot so they
can be turned out for a more natural stance (also they need to be spun around for transformation). The wings on the back are hinged and can fold back out
of the way, the chest propellor spins freely.
The fists can hold 5mm pegs, and there is a 5mm socket under the instep
of the right foot (the feet snap together in vehicle mode). There's 5mm pegs on the backs of the shoulders and 5mm pegs on the outer faces of the
shoulders, but those are for holding the bottom wings onto the arms. The struts on the top wings can fold out and they end in 4mm pegs, not too
useful.
The gun looks like a cartoon bomb, a rounded-tip cylinder with lots of molded panel and rivet lines and a thruster in back, since it's actually a rocket booster for vehicle mode. It's 1.75" (4cm) long made of black plastic with most of it painted gunmetal gray. There's a 5mm peg just nose-ward of
the midpoint, a 5mm socket in the thruster/barrel as well as a second 5mm socket on the side of the thrust nozzle (the top side when held as a gun, the bottom side when in vehicle mode). There's some unpainted details on the top-for-now side that looks like rack attachment points, but no such details
on the side with the grip peg.
The Fire Blast is molded to look like cartoon rocket thrust, and is 33mm long including the peg at the root. The peg is unpainted, the rest is
painted clear light blue like Blue Booster's shield.

Transformation: The bottom wings are just pegged onto the upper arms,
and they're pretty much guaranteed to pop off during transformation. It took me a while to figure out what to do with the legs, in part because some of
the joints are too stiff and it felt like I was about to break them. Just
like Blue Booster, there's some tabs that just don't want to be the right distance apart, in this case for snapping the engine onto the fuselage, but
in this case once you've exerted enough force to get the tabs into their
slots they do stay put.
Definitely rotate the waist 180 degrees very early in the process,
because once you start transforming the upper body the waist is basically locked in position by a panel that is locked in place by the arms, etc.
The horizontal tail bits are only snapped in, so when transforming back
to robot mode they are liable to pop off when you're trying to separate the tail halves. You need the tail shell pieces ALL the way out of the way
before you can unfold the legs. You might as well just remove the lower
wings entirely and put them back at the end, because the force required to unpeg the struts will almost definitely result in pulling the lower wing off anyway.

Altmode: This is a very nice biplane that matches what I remember of Tails's biplane. Very little robot kibble, as a direct consequence of the robot having so much airplane kibble...you can tell what they prioritized in the licensing here. The only robot bits visible are the feet and fists on
the underside. The top wing is laid across the top of the fuselage rather
than the more traditional position above the pilot's eye level. And as with Blue Booster, the clear canopy just shows robot bits inside rather than any sort of cockpit detailing. There are a few bits that would look better with some paint, like the top of the engine which is the underside of the red neck bit and should've been painted black, or some yellow hinge bits on the sides that would look better white, but they might be "unpaintable" plastic for all
I know. While it did take significant effort to get everything transformed properly, the result is very solid.
5.5" (14cm) long with a wingspan of 6.25" (16cm), mostly red, white, and gunmetal with some black and yellow bits. Most of the engine cowling is
black plastic, as are the struts connecting the top and bottom wings, the (non-rolling) landing gear in front and back, and the gun that is now repurposed as a rocket booster. The canopy is colorless clear plastic, some white plastic from the waist and hips is visible on the sides even with the canopy as is one bit of yellow hinge plastic, everything else is red plastic (including the top bit of the engine cowling as mentioned above). The tops
of the wings are painted mostly gunmetal, the propellor blades are painted bright yellow. The sides have a white stripe with "SONIC" printed above it, and the tail has a white stripe with a blue/red/yellow emblem of a yellow
star in a blue circle surrounded by a red circle and flanked by blue-line wings. The red paint of the shoes remains visible.
The propeller spins, but that's the only articulation. The wheels are solid-molded and do not roll (the tail wheel doesn't even touch the table if you have the booster rocket attached), and the canopy is locked in place by tabs that are covered by the tail shell. The feet combined into a plate with
a 5mm socket in the middle, which is there for the gun/booster rocket. There are technically 5mm sockets on the tops of the lower wings (the ones that go
on the shoulder pegs in robot mode), but they're pretty close to the struts
and not easy to use. They definitely don't work to hold Blue Booster's accessories. The robot fists are also accessible on the underside just
behind the engine cowling, so you could add some pistols there.

Overall: A bit fussy as is going to happen with any shellmaster, but at least I didn't need to use a Dremel to make the transformation work. I can
see the basic engineering reused to make a monoplane, just leave off the removable lower wings and tweak some details (like, replace the struts on the top wings with 5mm sockets). Not a bad design for a biplane, and it does
okay as a Tails toy, but okay is about as far as I'll go on this.


Set Overall: Be prepared for some assembly issues, but after they
knocked ten bucks off the price I'd say it's worth picking up as a curiosity
or if you're a Sonic fan (albeit not one so intense that you'd be bothered by minor off-model elements).


Dave Van Domelen, does already have a Sonic category on his deviantArt
if he decides to touch up the paint on Blue Booster....

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