The "Transformer Incident of Aught Eight"
With the addition of my 6" Titaniums to my cubicle o' doom at work, my plastic crack fetish has become completely obvious and it is impossible to deny or to really excuse.
I basically outted myself as one of these sick adults who collects toys.
People walk by and stare. Some occasionally make comments. Others look bewildered.
Quite frankly, I don't see much difference between this shit and the people here who have M&M toy shit or other stuff.
Now recently, one of my coworkers, we'll call him Wilhelm Niebieski, finally found his daughter the 2008 Bumblebee.
I've yet to open it so I really don't know how the plastic feels or how the thing moves but man oh man does Mr. Niebieski have a total mad on this this figure.
Apparently it keeps falling apart and won't lock quite back together in car mode.
I recently received this email...
I'm tellin ya man.... toys just aren't made like they used to be. I'm gonna buy my daughter the "ultimate" bumble bee and then have my film maker son do a movie of me going postal on that piece of shit we bought last weekend. It will forever be known as the "Transformer Incident of aught eight" I'm serious, I may go buy some ammo for my Thompson and run a clip through that abasement of a fucking toy. ;-)
Personally, since his son wants to be a film maker, I'd shoot an entire reenactment of Bumblebee getting his legs blown off by that rocket Starscream hit him with.
At least I think it was Starscream. That fucking battle was such a confusing mess I really don't know who hit who or what with how.
Any of you crack geeks have any problems with your Bumblebees?
I haven't had any problems with mine. They are still securely set in their nice plastic prisons. \(^o^)/
Holy crap man! How ya been?
Yeah mine has a floppy waist and a few other joints are just loose.
My son opened his for Christmas and sure as shit his is perfectly fine.
BB in general is kinda a pain in the ass to realign back into car mode.
My son has gotten rather frustrated with the whole thing and said to me "Daddy when are they going to make better Transformers?"
All I could do was laugh and say "well let's see how the animated ones turn out."
Movie toys really weren't for kids, just ended up being too complex and lower quality to stand up to regular play. Just another movie tie in action figure line that just happens to transform.
I should also mention my 6 year old can't wait to see the new classics, he's convinced "Daddy those are the good ones, why don't they make them like that anymore". Ah the attitude of a Geewunner and he didn't even get to see the old days.
No problem here just that the Katar/gun is a pain to open
The only problem I've had was due to user error. My son, not quite the patient man his daddy is, was trying to transform it and when he got to the "automorph" feature, tried to force the front of the chest down. The gears got out of sequence and I had to do some mighty fine delicate work (read, use just enough force to move it but not break it) get it back into sequence. I ended up stripping the very last little tooth on one of the gears, so now the chest is kind of flimshy in bot mode.
Oh, and those damn yellow bits on the upper arm keep falling off, so I glued them in place.
There is a panel on the upper arms that pops off on just about everybodys '08 figure. Once it pops off, it is very difficult to get it back on and stay on. That was the only problem I experienced. He's a fairly intricate figure considering his small class size. He's been on my video to-do list for a while, but still is no closer to the top.
I sat out the 2007 line until I got that Bumblebee for Christmas. I found it a total pain in the arse, along the lines of Alternators Grimlock. These are toys, they shouldn't be all that difficult.
2008 Bumblebee? No, I haven't had any issues with that. I bought it for my nephew a couple of months ago and ended up transforming it for him a couple of times because he couldn't figure it out.
The 70s Bumblebee though? My friend/roommate owns it and it's a piece of crap. The headlights don't lock into place when you want to transform it into a car so it's stuck in the ugly and inaccurate (inaccurate to the movie design) robot mode.
Personally I'm happy to have skipped both those guys so I could get Ultimate Bumblebee. Sure it pretty much has NO ARTICULATION but the transformation is fun and it really looks as good as the Masterpieces and statues in terms of the details.
The chest/front hood gets jammed on mine when I'm trying to transform him back into car mode and vice versa at times. I have problems with the peices on the arms falling off as well.
I've heard from many of friends who bought them for themselves or thier kids that the quality has gone downhill.
I've only had one problem with mine and it was the same as Heavyarms with the small yellow bits on the arms, i used superglue on mine as well...
Maldroth, to fix the floppy waist, just press the middle of the hood so that it's pressing on the black bits either side of the head and that should fix the floppy waist issue...
My '08 Bumblebee is fine. Even though some parts seem to pop off at times, they just pop right back on - It's no big deal at all.
My '74 Bumblebee is a POS. Due to the fact that the front of the car won't close up properly, I actually bought a 2nd one - one for bot mode & one for car mode. F#ck Hasbro & their cheap materials/labor. Atleast Takara's one (blue bullets) isn't a flawed mold.
I can't for the life of me get the driver's side rear quarter panel to align correctly. It always sticks out. I'm so confused. I wish I could remember if it was always that way or if I bought it like that. It's from the Target Evolution of a Hero set so maybe that's part of the battle damage. I should have done an inspection on it before I opened it, like I have to do on a rental car.
I hope your coworker gets some anger management counseling. I don't think reenacting the JFK assassination with a Bumblebee figure is a healthy way of dealing with Hasbro customer service issues.
Nala: Been doing well. Very busy with new jobs. I got signed on to work with Dance Trance Fitness which I may end up leaving Delta for. It's been very hard juggling the two jobs. But I'm having fun and thats the important thing. ^^
How have you guys been? I have missed my Plastic Crack Wacky Herald Of Robot Eccentricities
or P.C. W.H.O.R.E. for short
You guys are weird. I've had no problems whatsoever with 08 Bumblebee. In fact, he's one of my favorite molds in the history of the line. Go figz.
"F#ck Hasbro & their cheap materials/labor. Atleast Takara's one (blue bullets) isn't a flawed mold."
You... DO... realize that they're made from the same molds, at the same factories, right?
Just picked up the '08 version recently, and fiddled with it a bit. It's definitely a pain in the arse to align properly, but as a plus point, the legs are a shining example of what all automorph features should aspire to be be.
We've also had the same problem with the shoulder sections coming off, but it seems to be a universal issue with the movie figures - HasTak seems to be doing it intentionally as part of their 'bend-not-break' approach to toy-ruggedness issues.
(Understandable, but it wouldn't hurt them to use some glue also... it stops being a useful feature of the parts in question detach whenever someone so much as looks at them. I'm lookin' at you, Payload - uh-oh, his grill just fell off again.)
I'm definitely thinking that the movie aesthetic - with all the spikey bits hanging off of it, and the irregular shapes - rather lends itself to these sorts of problems.
Hooper: I agree that the toys all come from the same place; and I'm thinking a lot of it is cultural, but still - is it possible that the Takara versions are actually held to a higher quality standard? (Or maybe have lower production runs, assuming Takara get their own copy of each mold instead of just re-using the US ones...)
It just seems that with a history of TQM etc. they would be a great deal less forgiving of the sort of problems that plagued the US toy industry last year, even when sharing the same manufacturing source.
Then how come just about every '74 Bumblebee you hear about has been broken the first time it's been Tfed - but you don't hear any bad stories about the Takara one at all?
Even if it wasn't F#cken broken, The '74 Bumblebee toy is a 100% guaranteed Piece of Shit!
F#cking Bureaucrats/Suits taking shortcuts wherever they can just to save a couple of lousy bucks
I have no issues with the 08 Bumblebee. He works just fine. The 74 version doesn't really close up in car mode very well.
We don't hear about the Takara one much since a much smaller percentage of them are imported and and even smaller group of that open the imports for play or display purposes.
So if there was a way to watch Japanese message boards perhaps we'd see about a similar problem.
The few imports I've had don't really seem all that different to me in quality aside from paint applications and compliance with local toy laws.
What Mal said. Also, I dunno if it's considered particularly polite/appropriate for Japanese fans to bitch in the fashion American ones do. I've seen some translations of Japanese fan posts and the level of ...respectfulness (for lack of a better term) is considerably high towards Takaratomy. You don't find much DUDE TAK SUCKS HASBRO RULEZ type shenanigans. (Much. As I understand it, their biggest complaints are not getting everything we get and that the tie-in media there is ridiculous.)
As far as the QC goes, I seem to remember that it was almost the opposite during the CR/RiD days - my friend imported a JRX and the paint apps were so sloppy that one of the trains had a giant green stripe down one side, instead of a thin blue one and a thin yellow one.
I've no issues with either of my Deluxe Bumblebees - but I do agree that the '74 version was pretty LAME.