Negotiator

On 3/22/2024 at 12:16 PM, mikeszekely said:

After DK-43 comes DK-44, so... here's DK-44, the DNA upgrade kit for Studio Series Rise of the Beasts Optimus Prime.

I mentioned yesterday that the kit for Gamer Edition Optimus was mostly filler parts not replacement parts, and that was unusual for DNA.  Well, we're back to form with this kit.  Nothing is filler, really, and we're going to need our screwdrivers for this.  But before we go replacing parts, let's take a look at some of the stuff we don't need a screwdriver for.

Up first we have new swords and axes.  They're pretty close in design to the sword that came with Prime and the axe that came with Primal, but they have a nice coat of gunmetal paint with exposed translucent orange edges.  You also get two of each.  They don't feel super necessary, but they're nice to have if you wanted Prime dual-wielding, especially if you skipped Primal but still wanted Prime to have an axe (or two).  One thing to note, all four weapons don't have tabs.  Rather, they have a hole, and there are two long tabs that are separate pieces that can be used with either an axe or a sword.

The new weapons work pretty much exactly like the old ones.  Prime can hold the swords in his hands or use the small pegs on the bottoms to plug into his wrists.  The axes are only slightly different in that they have pommels on the bottom, and you have to remove them to slide the handle into Prime's hands.  The tabs that hold the pommels on aren't the same shape as the peg on the bottom of the Hasbro axe, so the DNA axes do not peg into Prime's wrists.  Using the included tab you can store the DNA weapons on Prime's back, either separately or by running the tab through the hole on two weapons at a time.

The replacement guns are a major upgrade over the dinky original (which was so small that I can't even find it right now).  Where the original was just the barrel and plugged into a peg on Prime's wrist, the DNA guns are molded more-accurately and cover over Prime's whole forearm.  They're not without faults, though.  If you looked carefully you might notice that they're not mirrored, there isn't a dedicated left arm cannon and right arm cannon.  There's simply two of the same cannon.  There are differences on the sides, and it really looks like it was designed for his right arm.  That said, I looked at the cannons for the ThreeZero DLX figure, and they're more symmetric.  Ultimately I think the DNA cannons are passable enough on either arm and you're unlikely to really notice unless he's dual wielding and you're really paying attention.  And the included blast effect parts fit into the barrels, although their small relative size and blue color makes it look like he's wearing squirt guns.

Like the melee weapons, the DNA cannon can be stored on Prime's back using a peg on the underside.  The thing is, even though Prime's back has two holes it can fit it the cannons are too big and the holes too close together for both cannons to fit on Prime's back at a time.

Alright, now it's time for surgery.  Begin by taking the flaps with the Autobot insignias and pulling them off Prime's shoulders.  Set them aside, you'll need them later.  Turn him over, remove the pair of screws on the back of the shoulders, and carefully pry them apart.

You're going to separate the arm into four parts- the front of the shoulder with the smokestack still attached, the back of the shoulder, the gray trapezoid, and the rest of the arm.  Keep the trapezoid and the rest of the arm, but you can ditch the front and back of the shoulder.

Open the DNA shoulders by removing the pair of screws on the back.  You'll find this red part in the front half; take it out and fit it onto the mushroom peg sticking out of Prime's torso as shown.

Now, you can fit the front half of the shoulder back over the red part.  Take Prime's arm and the gray trapezoid and fit it into the back half of the shoulder, then fit the two halves of the shoulder together and replace the screws.  Be sure to make sure the screws are nice and tight.  Take the flap with the Autobot insignia from the original shoulder and snap it into place on the front of the new shoulder.

Let's take a moment to figure out what we've accomplished here.  For starters, the new shoulders have painted smokestacks with rotating tips, so they can angle backwards like they do in the movie (although the rotation is a bit loose).  More importantly, though, we added a joint.  This gives Prime's shoulder lateral movement outside of the rotation, where the originals only had lateral movement inside of the rotation.  In other words, with the DNA shoulders Prime can now raise and spread his arms at the same time, addressing one of my biggest complaints with the figure.  DNA's red plastic is an excellent match for Hasbro's, and you'll notice that they used red plastic for the part on top of Prime's shoulder instead of gray, which is actually more movie accurate.

Moving down to the legs, lift Prime's shins so you have access to the blue calf parts.  Yank them off the pegs, and replace them with the DNA parts.

The immediate robot mode-benefit of doing this is pretty simple.  We replaced the stock tab and slot that hold his legs together for alt mode, because the original ones stuck out pretty far from the insides of his legs.  DNA's parts have hinges, allowing them to fold flat into the legs.  It's a minor aesthetic upgrade, and it does come at the cost of making his calves flat and taking away that more organic (and movie accurate) curve.  There's a reason for that, though, that we'll get to in a minute.

One last thing to replace here.  Pop his stock feet off the ball joints, and replace them with the feet in the kit.  The immediate benefit here is that instead of being a single solid part there are a pair of hinges in the DNA feet, allowing Prime to bend his toes up and down.  But there's an alt-mode reason for doing this.  It's probably worth noting here that unlike the GE Prime kit, this time the blue plastic is an excellent match for the stock plastic.

About that alt mode... from the front there's not a lot of difference.  The DNA shoulders transform basically the same as the stock ones.  The only differences is that you can swivel the tips of the smokestacks so that they're still correctly angled backward.  Plus, the red tops make for red roof.  Too bad we still have the stock gray flap Prime's head is on, eh?  The big difference is in the back.   Instead of folding Prime's shins up and leaving a huge honking mess stuffed against the back of the cab, DNA asks, "what if we just folded up his feet, like most other Prime toys?"  And so we tab his legs together using the new fold out tab and slot, we spin his feet around 180 degrees, and we use the double hinges to fold his toes flat against his heels.  And... yeah, the back of the truck is super obviously robot legs that don't look like the actual back of a truck... just like almost every other Optimus.  And it still looks a lot better than stock alt mode.  But this is also why the new calf parts are flat.  The stock ones spun around, but without moving Prime's shins there's no room for the DNA parts to rotate.  So they need to be flat to give him the clearance to still roll.

Now, you could simply stop there.  It's a bit gappy, but again no worse than the original.  But DNA did include a pair of these parts, which provide a few uses.  We can attach them by using the smaller inner slots and sticking them onto the tabs on Prime's shins.  Right away, it secures his legs a bit tighter and fills in the gap between his shins a bit.  But there's more!

This part provides storage for the DNA weapons in alt mode, using the tabs through a pair of weapons into the larger slots, and the peg on the cannon into the 5mm port closer to the cab.  The instructions even suggest that you can plug one cannon into the other, but I can't figure out how to do it securely.  But the fun doesn't stop there!

The other 5mm port on the blue part allows you to connect Prime to a trailer!  This is a feature that Earthrise, Volvo, Laser, and previous Studio Series Primes (including Bumblebee Optimus) had, but was sorely lacking from this figure as he came stock.  While you're technically free to use the Earthrise trailer, Laser Optimus' trailer, or Studio Series Dark of the Moon Prime's trailer, I'd argue he looks the most correct with an Earthrise trailer.  Besides, if you use the Earthrise trailer the use for the spare blue part comes into play.  You can attach it to a peg inside the trailer, allowing his new DNA weapons to ride inside.  With the upcoming Studio Series 86 Optimus potentially replacing Earthrise for a lot of people this could leave the old Earthrise trailer free to be reclaimed by ROTB Optimus anyway.

I guess there's one last part in the kit, but it's almost not worth mentioning.  There's a slug figure of Noah Diaz.  Sure, it's got more accurate proportions and better scale than the Studio Series Core-class figure, but it has zero articulation.  He's permanently stuck in the three-point Iron Man pose.  And for what?  You can stick one of the included effect parts into his back.  he can sort of ride on the back of Prime like that, but he doesn't actually lock into place anywhere.  Frankly, he's a waist of plastic.

I wouldn't say that this kit is perfect... like I said, Noah's a waste of plastic.  It'd have been nice if Prime's cannons were mirrored instead of duplicated.  Or, maybe just include one blaster, one axe, and one sword.  Ditch the blast effects.  Because this kit actually runs a bit more than the figure it upgrades.

That said, I'd highly recommend this kit anyway.  It addresses as best as could be the three main complaints I had with this figure.  The shoulders fix Prime's lateral articulation.  By moving the transformation from the shins to the feet they've cleaned up the absolute mess that was the stock alt mode.  And they made the figure compatible with trailers.  The fact that they also included a much better cannon, melee weapons with minor improvements (included an axe you had to buy a whole different figure to get stock), added toe articulation, and cleaned up the inner legs a bit is all icing on an already excellent cake.  Without the kit, ROTB Optimus was a good but seriously flawed figure.  With the kit, he's probably the best live-action movie Optimus Prime that Hasbro's released.

Somebody needs to mix all the different upgrades to make the perfect prime.  Still waiting for TW-1030 to arrive.  It’s too bad the shoulders weren’t fixed on that one.

My immediate reaction was WTF Is this generic trailer and song?  BB is basically Toad from Mario bros movie and something about Megatron I don’t like.  Maybe it’s his face, lips, attitude but his voice doesn’t match in my head even for a younger version.  I realize this is not G1 continuity.  It’s bumblebee movie continuity which we know there is no real continuity in these movies.  They want that Mario bros money, fair enough, but I don’t think this will get it there.  We’ll see.

Anyway my 5 yr old daughter was laughing with it. She is probably still too young for the intended audience, but she’s seen some G1, prime, BW, and watches rescue bots so she knows who’s who.  She wanted to watch the trailer multiple times.

My wife is not a big TF fan, but she knows I am and thought the trailer was great in that you can finally see a more relatable side to Optimus.  As she put it, Optimus is always out of reach. He is an authority figure that you looked up to, but you never really knew him.. he’s the boss you don’t know how far you can tell dirty jokes before he fires you.  Which I’d argue is a good thing.  Anyway I don’t want to get deep into how he’s millions of (now) men’s robot dad. 
 

I already accepted that everything I loved growing up will be destroyed or $ht on.  I feel like Danny Glover “I’m too old for this $ht” I don’t like, but I don’t want to spend time and energy hating it. I wont spend money or time on it.  That’s my general attitude towards current media.

Finally a wolverine with the articulation I want but not the wolverine I really wanted. 

Since I don't have this iteration, I guess I'll pick it up and have to wait

until they get around to brown and tiger stripe with this articulation.  

Ooohh tumbler

I was more of a Blue Thunder guy , but anyway, back to KITT....$50 for a deluxe???

Amazon links

Ecto TF 

https://a.co/d/2Y7HQf6

Turtle TF

https://a.co/d/6E8hz3h

I've always loved Dragonball and have been binge rewatching everything this past   

month.  Even fell down the shf money pIt of figures.   I think he was involved with the upcoming Dragonball  daima anime.

This really sucks.  RIP.

I just painted detritis and calling it a day.  ya the paint chipped transforming it,  I'll touch it up when I get a star on right side with maybe some more details and never transform again.  The mold is kinda meh anyway. 

2 minutes ago, davidwhangchoi said:

that's about 323 usd (or more if using paypal's conversion rate)

prob saving about 30 buck and tax vs. USA sites

well, at paypals conversion it was coming out to $340+ so just set it to pay in yen and let CC bank convert it.  bank says $327.31 instead.

got one at nin nin.  total ¥46,940... ouch.

hlj site stalled while trying to place order....then gone.   oh well

39 minutes ago, MacrossJunkie said:

I'm surprised they didn't include some sort of little swing over heatshield cover on the inside of the cockpit given that they like doing little gimmicks like that. 

 

Also, it's clear they were trying to duplicate this

but they somehow really interpreted the canopy shape wrong and made it way rounded off. In the illustration, you can still see that the canopy should still end up having two points to match the frame.

The Hasegawa model also has that highlighted detail, but the canopy shape is correct there. This annoys me that this got past everyone involved in designing this toy despite going to the lengths of looking at illustrations like the above...

ya it's gonna bug me, i'll probably end up painting it.

She said nemesis immortal.  Did his name change?

Got muh hisstank today wont really have time to mess with it for awhile.  

3 hours ago, mikeszekely said:

Courtesy of a very reliable source, 2024 will see a Commander-class Studio Series 86 Optimus Prime.😮

this prime will interesting. sure it will come with trailer and roller, but how different will prime be from earthrise?  think theyre going to hide the leg wheels in bot mode?  

thank you!

too bad they didn't include 2 chairs for the batmobile.  ok so is there a direct link to order the canopy set from?  

Any word on the price of the vamp? I no longer have pulse premium.

Edit:  oh it's up on PO.   it's $100

Hmm wonder if they'll release a beefed up cavil superman from black adam.

Regarding the nose.  I think the pics are bad.

8 hours ago, Spark-O-Matic said:

I would buy a Sonic Video game with Arcee as the star. that's what that video made me imagine I think the video really highlighted her true personality and timeless G1 styling.

What's funny I just watched another video shorty before with Arcee & a Beachball, but it was just a cameo of her and not well done .

 

Lol i remember this.

are doc and goblin going to be a wide release or exclusive?

Did they say retro duke. Scarlett would be up for PO today?

i want a black series poodle girl

I wish the articulation on these were as good as jada toy's street fighter figs.