Honestly, taking out the springs and just letting the drone limbs be articulated would go a long way.
The Repaint Concept Thread
- Thread starter LiamA
- Start date
Very much.
After some thought, I've realized that Wildking is basically the same play pattern as Power Core, just with all the limbs being (somewhat) articulated and having robot modes. Now Hasbro just needs to make a bunch of upsized Powercore torsos that trade in the blue cubes for Wildking connectors and a bunch of vehicle limbs and we can merge the two!
Archer: "But, but, muh gimmicks!"
The gimmick didn't even make sense. They were spring-loaded to put "oomph" into separating, instead of into combining. Why? Were springs somehow cheaper than having a tab to hold the vehicle modes together?
Between PCC, DotM Mechtech, and the weapons on Voyagers in Prime, this whole era of Transformers toy design seemd to have some weird mentality that springs existed to make deploying a gimmick inherently temporary rather than to do the actual deploying of the gimmick.
Between PCC, DotM Mechtech, and the weapons on Voyagers in Prime, this whole era of Transformers toy design seemd to have some weird mentality that springs existed to make deploying a gimmick inherently temporary rather than to do the actual deploying of the gimmick.
During the Archer era, the most widely gimmicks were the ones that used springs. Before coming to the Transformers brand, Archer had been involved in both the 90's Ghostbusters and Kenner's Batman toylines, which relied heavily on gimmicks like spring-loaded pop-outs and projectiles. Spring-loaded gimmicks were his bread and butter.
Put the spring mechanism down, Aaron!
Exactly; spring-loaded pop-out.
Like was common in Transformers from Beast Wars through at least Animated, and especially in Armada and Cybertron where it was essentially the default implementation of the line-wide gimmicks.
But DotM and Prime had weapons that were "pop-in as soon as you let go", which makes a lot less sense.
I mean, in THEORY, vehicle drones that automatically turn into limbs when you attach them to the robot and automatically turn back into vehicles when removed from said robot is a very cool concept. In execution, though, it meant that the limbs had no articulation, connections were tenuous, and the plastic was in a constant war for it's life against the spring tension.
And for this assignment, they chose plastic that feels like I could it scratch apart with a fingernail if I really tried.
Yeah, a lot of my Power Core combiners didn't age very well. Only ones I have left are Grimstone, boat guy, Steamhammer and not-Brawl. The Decepticon plane guy, Leadfoot, Bombshock, 5-pack car guy and 5-pack monster truck guy didn't make it.
I still have all my PCCs, and they all appear to be in good condition. Hopefully, I'll be giving them the weapons I got for them from Shapeways before it went kaput. If only Andrusi could get back in touch so that I had a better chance of figuring out which weapon goes with which guy...
I don't begrudge the Archer era its gimmicks. These were kind of the done thing, and they were part of what made the toylines work as well as they did. And part of me does sometimes miss a toy feeling like a "proper" toy.
I didn't agree with a lot of the choices of gimmicks and also didn't mind seeing them slowly get priced out of production. Sound boxes, lights, spring-loaded head reveals. But they were there for a reason beyond frustrating people who'd aged out of that target audience.
That said, so many of the issues with gimmicks of that era seem like they could've been solved with a locking notch or ehatever that meant you could take your finger off the Mechtech or PRID weapon. Temporarily, at least, until the plastic would wear down. But the PCC limbs didn't need automorph; that was a gimmick on top of the combining gimmick and the budget could've gone elsewhere.
I've mostly kept all these in storage (along with 98% of my stuff), so they're all Schrodinger's Broken Toy right now. What are all the breakage issues and how inevitable are they? I've never combined these after the first couple of times (most I acquired without their drones).
I didn't agree with a lot of the choices of gimmicks and also didn't mind seeing them slowly get priced out of production. Sound boxes, lights, spring-loaded head reveals. But they were there for a reason beyond frustrating people who'd aged out of that target audience.
That said, so many of the issues with gimmicks of that era seem like they could've been solved with a locking notch or ehatever that meant you could take your finger off the Mechtech or PRID weapon. Temporarily, at least, until the plastic would wear down. But the PCC limbs didn't need automorph; that was a gimmick on top of the combining gimmick and the budget could've gone elsewhere.
I've mostly kept all these in storage (along with 98% of my stuff), so they're all Schrodinger's Broken Toy right now. What are all the breakage issues and how inevitable are they? I've never combined these after the first couple of times (most I acquired without their drones).
Sad that the Smolder/Stakeout mold was the only PCC mold (along with the Leadfoot/Over-Run mold) that Takara never used for United EX.
The last time I handled one of mine (probably the year they came out) I found black plastic crumbs in my hands.
I have a PCC Huffer on the shelf next to me and he's perfectly intact, but has never combined (I never got any of the drones, I just wanted an upgraded Huffer).
wonder what the story behind the super mode head being straight up Menasor was.
I always assumed they planned on doing a Motormaster repaint from him.
Is that not what Crankcase was homaging?
Has anyone done up AOTP Alpha Trion as a Matrix-deformed Blobby Scourge?