TRANSFORMERS PRIME TOYS TV

Blaster beats Fist, Fist beats Sword and Sword beats Blaster. On each robot's chest is a little icon, which can be rotated to show a fist, sword or gun. When you crash them together, the spring-loaded bumper gets triggered and they pop up into robot mode. The transformation on these is simple and is the same for all of them: fold up the feet, fold down the arms, and pop the 'hood' down over the head - that turns them into a vehicle. These are little tiny pop-up Transformers that you can use to play a sort of rock-paper-scissors sort of game. The Voyager Class models run closer to $20 apiece, and some of the characters only come in one line or the other. This one didn't have the gear-driven changes that I liked in the Deluxe line, but it is pretty cool how close he looks to both his robot and vehicle mode from the cartoon. He's also one of the most complicated to change (18 steps compared to 10 for Bumblebee) and I could never quite get the truck's grill to close all the way against the hood. I was pretty impressed with how he actually goes from a robot to the truck there are some pretty crazy tricks they pull with the arms to make that happen. This one didn't have any cheating - the windshields on his chest turn into the actual windshields on the truck, and so on. You pull back on part of it, and it unfolds and extends the translucent blue gun barrel, and a red light flicks on inside. In Optimus' case, it's a fold-out cannon that can attach to his arm. Each of these has some battery-powered feature that lights up to simulate the Energon. The Optimus Prime model I got was from the 'Voyager Class' line. Cliffjumper's isn't quite as impressive, but you fold the arms down at the shoulders and his head pops up from his chest area. The first time I did that was a 'whoa!' moment. For instance, the last step of Bumblebee's car-to-robot change involves rotating the arms back: when you do that, his head pops up from the hood of the car, and the two headlights separate and angle up. One cool thing about the Bumblebee and Cliffjumper (both in the 'Deluxe' line of figurines) is that there's a sort of gear-driven piece of the transformation that makes a little bit of it feel automatic. For you adults, you'll be happy to note that they still include stats for each bot - though without that cool red lens you used to get to read them. They do seem more fragile than old-school Transformers because there are so many more moving parts. The boxes say ages five and up, but I'd probably worry about letting a five-year-old do the transformations on their own, because there are a lot of little parts that could break if you force them. Of the three Autobots I played with, Bumblebee is the easiest to transform, and probably the one that I'll most likely be able to teach to my kids. Well, it turns out they did a pretty good job, though there are a few instances of what I consider 'cheating.' In general, the robot forms don't look like straightforward transformations from the vehicles - they share colors and some features, but otherwise it doesn't look feasible. After watching the Season One DVD (particularly the featurette about the toys), I was really curious about how the toys would turn out. Hasbro provided a few samples of the Transformers Prime line for me to try out, so here's a closer look at Bumblebee and Cliffjumper from the Deluxe line, Optimus Prime from the Voyager Class line, and then two of the Bot Shots mini-Transformers. Now, the toy designers have a much bigger challenge: making both the robot and vehicle forms match their on-screen counterparts, and figuring a way to change from one to the other. In the old cartoons, the toys worked pretty much exactly as they appeared on screen. Watching the CGI robots of Transformers Prime, you can tell that they look really cool but it's not always clear exactly how the transformation would work. What's more, the logistics have changed: the toys now have to be designed based on the cartoon, and not the other way around. But the funny thing is, the cartoons are now being made by people grew up playing with Transformers, and they really love the story. Certainly the cartoon is still made in part to sell toys to our kids. The Transformers started as toys, and became a story after the fact.Д«ut nearly thirty years later, the lines are blurred.

TRANSFORMERS PRIME TOYS TV

(Well, there's some complicated history involving the differences between the TV show and the comic books, but the essentially that's the idea.) This is unlike, say, Star Wars action figures, which were a way to profit even more from a successful movie. Everyone knows now that the Transformers cartoon was based on the toys, not the other way around.

Transformers prime toys