Prototype Watch: Wonder Festival Febuary 2016

So, it was just Wonder Festival, a Japanese convention, and TakaraTomy attended, so its time for another episode of Prototype Watch! Yet more opinions, speculation, and premature evaluation based on pictures other people took. Let's start off with the Optimus Primal prototypes.

The buzz on this is pretty good. Fidelity to the animation is desirably high, and the gimmickry fits the on-screen action, with the possible exception of the light up eyes. I think they put that sort of thing in because they feel they need it to justify the price, not because the character really demands it. Anyway, the only cause for concern here seems to be that the Gorilla mode may not have articulation in the knee, but this is more immediately appealing than Ironhide was. One hopes for a Megatron sooner rather than never. The meat of TakaraTomy's display was however dedicated to the Unite Warriors Combaticons, and therefore giving us our first proper look at Blast Off. A.K.A the toy that inspired this series and I didn't like the look of.

Yeah.......

I'm not seeing a vast amount of improvement here. He looks okay as a limb, but has the proportions of Eggman in robot mode. Its a shame the shuttle mode wasn't on display, or the leg mode. We also got to see Vortex with his retooled rotor blades, which is nice I suppose, but exacerbates the kibble problems of the base mould.

We also found out that these will be in G1 cartoon colours, which was obvious, but not so much in how far they've gone to do it. The combiner guns for Brawl and Swindle are painted to match their bodies, to better replicate the cartoon model of Bruticus. Blast Off also looks a bit off in shuttle mode, colours favouring the robot mode.

It gets odder if you zoom in on the robot modes and look at Brawl. A big chunk of his head seems to have been painted yellow/orange, as he did appear in the cartoon, although he was inconsistent in his regard. Sometimes its his whole forehead that's orange, others its a Gundam style sensor.  Its worth pointing out that there is a bit of detailing on the sculpt that would have done for the latter, but doesn't really allow for the former. Combiner Wars moulds are just are likely to be based off comics and the actual toys as the cartoon, and Brawl is not strongly cartoon. This was so baffling to me, not having seen the show for a while, I thought they'd deliberately invoked a colouring mistake, until someone corrected me.

To each their own, I suppose.

Image Source: Type-R of TFW2005.