Plamo: The 30 Minutes Missions bEXM-33QB Volpanova (Quad Bike Version)

For me, a 30 Minutes Missions kit is becoming like a nice chocolate bar. Pleasurable, if predictable, not hugely deep material for a blog entry, and you shouldn't have one too often, lest it become routine. The Volpanova is one such indulgence. I more or less inhaled this one with a "mmmm" noise and a chef's kiss. Then I applied my assorted weathering techniques because that's part of my process. As such I would recommend it, as I tend to do with 30MM kits, but the reasons are slightly more involved than usual.

With the Volpanova, they seem to have finally figured out how to do a transformation with the same elegant simplicities as everything else 30MM does. As you may recall, the Espossito α attempted something similar, but suffered for a lack of locking tabs. This chap here however has plenty, so once you get it there, it's as solid as you could wish for. It's also got three modes, robot, quad bike and hybrid, all working in a borderline realistic way. It's not a perfect transformation in that it's easier, and encouraged, to disconnect the wheel bits so you can fold up the legs, but that's not actually mandatory. I'm watching further innovations with intense interest, as I feel there are now great things within reach of the design team.

Now, that praise above is earnest, but I want to take a moment to avoid over-hyping the thing. First off, the wheelie bits don't actually integrate with the robot mode that well. These are large and connect at the waist in ports more typically used for weapon storage or armour plates. This presents something of a balance concern along with the bazooka. Said bazooka is pretty awesome, it's got two flexible handles, which are great for quad mode, and looks the business. It just looks like it came off a larger machine as well, so your mileage may vary. As a kit, it feels a bit thrown together too, despite the excellent end result. It uses the 1st generation joint sprue, which is fine, but you aren't getting extra hands with this. Unlike a 1st generation kit though we get a lot of small duplicate sprues rather a few unified ones. Again, that's not actually problem, but perhaps suggests a change in approach, as this has happened a lot of late.

 

All-in-all? Rather nice.

Transformers: Legacy Evolution Armada Universe Megatron is Something That Exists

The 2002/2003 Transformers Armada Megatron toy

 

Armada Megatron is, of course, the version of Megatron from Transformers: Armada, part one of the Unicron Trilogy. AKA Armada Megs. It even calls him that on the shipping boxes, and while that’s a perfectly fine as shorthand, maybe its selling him short. While voiced by a returning David Kaye, he wasn’t really a criminal mastermind with theatrical tendencies. No, this Megatron was more of the classical despot. While his relationship with his Starscream is the stuff of Limpkin Park vocals, and the writing wasn’t good, Armada Megs does have nuance if you go looking. He is, to the best of my knowledge, the only Megatron to gain a willing turncoat from the Autobots, and in what could only be described as a heroic manner, rescuing someone from a fire. This Megs was a harsh authoritarian in addition to being a well-spoken despot, but tending towards competency, with an unexpected streak of self-sacrifice. This version of Megs has received an update before, as a head-swapped recolour of Combiner Wars Megatron, but as part of Legacy’s Armada binge, we see him here today as a totally new mould. It is also the purest example of Legacy and its design approach I’ve handled so far. Peak Legacy, if you will. Read on to find out why.

Now, I like the tank mode. I like it a lot. It's got that platonic scifi H-tank thing going on. It's not going for military realism, not with the head upfront, but there is a nicely detailed sculpt and effective use of colour. It rolls, the turret turns but I'll come back to that shortly, and the plentiful 5mm ports are an acceptable substitute for mini-con functionality. The thing is though, the main thing the sculpt does is evoke play features that aren't there. And let's not kid around here, the Armada original had a lot going on. Granted, a lot of it was just places to stick on mini-cons that just sat there, but we also had firing missiles, flip-out panels and electronics. Probably more than any of the other Armada remakes we've had, this mode feels like it lost something in the process, because the original tank mode was extra. This new tank is fine to look at, and does the basics, but lacks that flair. That’s peak Legacy, that is. What does take the shine off though are two odd design choices. First off, only half of mechanism on the front-right is painted, which is supposedly due to the plastics used. At that point, it would have been better to leave it blank. The second, and this is if anything even more baffling, the turret can't do a 360 spin, seemingly for the benefit of the robot mode. So, overall its fine, but its not setting the world alight, and there’s a few things that seem odd choices. Oh yeah, and the head antlers are a rubbery plastic and not especially well-tabbed.

Engineering and transformation has a similar fine if maybe odd around the edges feel. The broad strokes are of course similar to the original toy, with additional steps and sub-assemblies that help with the proportions of its modes. This does however make things a bit unusual with respects to the shoulders. The arms don’t connect to the torso directly, instead connecting to the shoulder pylons. Functionally nothing major is lost, but its a little weird, and probably needed a locking tab somewhere. Meanwhile, the “face slider” from the original toy is replicated in visual appearance, but not in function. So, instead of pushing up a panel to conceal the face in tank mode, you open the entire chest and flip out a panel. That’s peak Legacy, that is.

 

Those criticisms having been made in the paragraphs above, the robot mode is quite lovely and has some welcome improvements. The original toy was infamous for having no knees. The Combiner Wars version did have have knees, but not great ones, or indeed especially great articulation in general. This new toy has fine knees. And ankle tilts. In fact, the posability is largely ideal for something this blocky and tall, to do better you'd need to substantially increase the parts count. So, with that decades-old fandom desire having been finally met, what else does the robot mode offer? Well, it's kinda gorgeous, you know? The head is extremely on point, with the general appearance of things only marred by the hollow forearms. Something that this toy does very well is a subtle asymmetry in its sculpt. The forearms, chestplate, hands, lower legs, and back of the thighs, the list goes on. If you look at him straight on, you don’t immediately notice. The head and shoulder pylons are symmetrical and mirrored, with the abs, upper thighs and feet continuing that trend. But then you give it a harder look, and realise every area that could have its own unique greebling does. We don’t really get designs like this very often, and even within Armada it wasn’t common among the bigger toys. A vast majority of Transformers toys are symmetrical where-ever possible, especially as CAD exists, and its beneficial for engineering. They could so easily smoothed out the details, made everything symmetrical, and I don’t think anyone would have minded. It would probably have aided the future retooling options they were, no doubt, considering. But no, they committed to the look. That’s peak Legacy, that is.

So, what play feature’s does the robot mode have? Is it just a pretty face? If that term that can be applied to a brick shithouse like this? Well, it does have some. Less than the original toy, but still more than the Legacy average. He doesn’t have any accessories as such, but he does have three party tricks, which by the standards of Evo Fusion are fricking legendary. The first thing, and a completely new thing, is that you can pop the end off the tank barrel to give him a gun arm which is nice, if unexpected. If you leave it on, you can easily swing it under either arm to fire. Yes, that’s a touch basic, but if Twincast gets to count weapon storage in boombox mode, I get to count something actually useful. And finally, he can do this. 

 

That’s peak Legacy, that is.

My point? Only that Armada Universe Megatron is something that exists. And that he’s peak Legacy. This is not same as saying he’s the best thing in Legacy, although he is good, rather that he’s great example of Legacy tends to modernise stuff. Armada Megs evokes the original toy in terms of transformation, but not the play pattern, while inheriting cartoon elements. I have nitpicked a lot, but that’s because I care, and I acknowledge that this toy may well be outside of your nostalgia window, and that won’t do the tank mode any favours. But, all that having been said, this is a most satisfactory update.

 

Some Arguments Against G.I Joe as a Shared Universe Property

I recently went to see the new Transformers film, Rise of the Beasts. I'm not going to write a review of it, as I'm struggling to find a vein. It's a very adequate movie, that does everything it chooses to do in a mediocre and inoffensive manner. One thing it did do though was tease a shared universe with G.I. Joe, Hasbro's toy soldier brand. That's had a few movies too, but those didn't gain traction like the Transformers have. Say want you want about the Transformers films, but everybody has heard of them. G.I. Joe is also going to be part of the new Transformers comic series by Skybound, echoing the Revolutionaries thing of 2017 and the much more obscure Unit: E of circa 2013. Hasbro seems to want G.I. Joe to be a thing. They seem to want it very badly. More generally, they want to have a shared universe with all their properties, but they seem to see G.I Joe as the key part of those plans. So, the Joes are set to piggyback off the success of Transformers. Speaking purely as a Transformers fan this always bemused me, as Transformers fans are a group famous for not liking the human characters that convention demands be there. I'd imagine fans of Kaiju movies have similar feelings. But, let's put Transformers aside, let's try and separate that as much as possible from the discussion. Instead, let me discuss the reasons why G.I. Joe may not be able to be a worldwide success.

G.I. Joe has actually been around for a very long time, the first prototype being made in 1963. It started out as an attempt to make dolls for boys, by adopting a military theme and using the somewhat euphemistic term “action figures”. Yeah, we don’t have time to unpack that just now, but if you’re getting a vaguely, shall we say, conservative angle? Well, you’re not actually wrong, war toys generally aren’t left wing. G.I. Joe gained significant-if-cyclic success, including international licensees such as Action Man, but it wasn’t until 1982 we got what is largely considered to be the definitive iteration, G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero. This reworked the concept from doll-sized toy to a 3.75 inch scale in imitation of Kenner’s Star Wars toys, something that lowered costs and allowed for easier implementation of vehicles. They also took the opportunity to add fiction to the toyline, but of a kind that stepped away from specific, real world organisations. Even in the early days, war toys had periods of being unfashionable or politically unpopular. This gave us G.I. Joe as an organisation, rather than simply an individual, versus the terrorist organisation Cobra, and endless toyetic war materiel. That toyline ran for 12 consecutive years, and has had several revivals since.

With the historical place of G.I. Joe established, I feel that there are two massive and unavoidable barriers to the franchise being a global brand, the inescapable real-world connection and the ubiquity of the “toy soldier” concept. Basically, if you don’t know the fiction, G.I. Joe struggles to have a unique selling point versus any of number military-themed toys. And if you do? G.I. Joe looks like a tone-deaf recruitment ad, something of intense interest to stereotypically patriotic Americans and ageing 80’s kids, but of lesser interest to the world at large. Please, don't anybody yell at me about putting politics in your toys, it's baked in. G.I. Joe is patriotic military fiction made by the USA. Such things do not travel well. If country Y makes something that casts it's military in a positive light, the rest of the alphabet are not gonna be predisposed to like such things, and may very well look to their military for such needs. Perhaps the only kind of patriotic military fiction with multinational appeal is one where you are slaughtering Nazis. This is because the primary function of a military is to, well, kill people on the other side of a border. I shouldn't need to give examples, this is a self-evident truth of human history. And Hasbro knows this. It is why G.I. Joe was rebranded into Action Force, and other names for foreign markets. It is also an implicit reason why G.I. Joe got reworked in the 80's with a He-Man style naming scheme. They needed a bunch of baddies to fight whom weren't obviously another nation. So they made a home-grown terrorist organisation called Cobra. It worked, for a time. We largely would not be talking about G.I. Joe if it hadn't found a niche. It had found a way to do military toys without the baggage of real world groups, and real world bloodshed. Then the War on Terror happened. I will not be flippant or otherwise downplay those events, but I will gesture towards the tragedy associated with that time, the scar it left on the American national character, the effect it had on international politics, and its substantial body-count. With that in mind, the idea of a toyline about an American special forces group hunting terrorists seems in poor taste. It also seems a bad thing to try to work into a cinematic universe which is trying to be an international success.

 

 

At this point, a disagreeing reader might ask why it matters what foreigners think? Perhaps you feel that I’m overthinking it, you’re cool with G.I. Joe's overall vibe, and think its fine for your children. Maybe you used the term “snowflake”? You do you. But it matters if you want G.I. Joe to be some kind of big international cultural touchstone, as Hasbro so clearly does. G.I. Joe is unavoidably tied to the reputation of the USA. That is a highly variable factor. It's brand name is no more than a term for a US infantryman, followed by the phrase “A Real American Hero”. You look at its contemporaries and you realise how weird that is. Everything else was a step or two removed from real life, still products of their time, but not bound to it. This is why they've been so open to reboots. GI Joe? Not so much. Its not impossible to do patriotic American stuff that sells elsewhere, see Captain America for example, but he benefited from being a time-displaced Nazi-puncher. Everybody loves a Nazi-puncher. Top Gun maybe? NCIS? But otherwise examples are few. If you take out American militarism, what's left? And what goes in the hole left behind? According to Hasbro & Skybound, the answer to the latter is "be a human response to Transformers", akin to Sector Seven and NEST from the Bay Films, at which point you' d be asking why they'd call it G.I. Joe? And yes, I am aware of G.I Joe: Renegades, not a bad of way doing it, I acknowledge, but that didn’t stick, did it? Not all things can be timeless successes, and G.I .Joe could very well be fated to be a mainly American thing. And there's nowt wrong with that. America is a big market, and people do like tanks and army men. Although, that’s also part of the problem.

 

 

Having dealt with my more inflammatory takes on the G.I. Joe, and resisted the temptation to reference Team America: World Police, and I’m now going to talk about the other barrier, its issues with a Unique Selling Point. It comes down to the fundamentals of a toy based property, the actual toys and their issues with ubiquity. Let us consider the humble ball. Its a classic feature of play and sport. The concept is thousands of years old, and while there are variations and reinventions, were talking about something fundamental to culture at this point. A ball is something you can pretty much get anywhere and is made by any number of companies. Logically, there should be a premier ball brand, like whatever the World Cup uses, but would people the wider population give such a thing any thought at all? Its everywhere, and therefore not acknowledged or considered in any depth. The play pattern of G.I. Joe is in a similar position. While the concept of “action figure + vehicle” is a relatively recent one, toy soldiers have a history going back to at least the 18th century, and even as far back as 2500BC if we consider “tiny representation of a warrior” to be the same thing. Not only has this sort of thing been around for an almost geographical timescale, there’s a great many companies doing pretty much the same thing as G.I. Joe at various prices. What innovations G.I. Joe brought are now the standard. Military-looking action figures are an established thing. They seem to sell without a cartoon. And if you like military-looking stuff, there’s plenty of it that’s based on actual militaries. And if you want military stuff that isn’t based on real stuff, you can go to Star Wars or Warhammer 40K. I mean, there’s some nasty stuff in those two if you look seriously at ‘em, but they aren’t hobbled in the first place by their own names. If you are not already invested in G.I. Joe as a concept, what are the toys bringing to the table? Does G.I. Joe have a unique selling point? I find myself wondering if it does.

None of the above is me suggesting G.I Joe is somehow bad. There’s positives to be found most things, and its entirely possible for talented creatives to make G.I. Joe a success in modern times. But what’s going to get in the way of G.I. Joe, is, frankly, G.I. Joe. And Hasbro asking £105 for this.

 

Transformers: Legacy Evolution Skyquake is Something That Exists

 

 

The 2012 Transformers: Prime Robots in Disguise Skyquake toy

If I was to nitpick the Legacy line, and I wasn't complaining about bone-headed cartoon accuracy, I'd be making criticisms of how the Transformers: Prime characters were executed. To paraphrase/misquote Thew, Prime was a middle ground between the early bay verse films and Transformers: Animated, but lacking the flair of both. It has its followers though, and the cartoon got a Daytime Emmy award, so it clearly found it's place. The toyline however suffered badly from budget cuts at the time, so you'd think a few do-overs wouldn't hurt? I mean, it's only been a decade, so the difference might not be spectacular, but the Studio Series is a thing, and that started out as a line of do-overs. Instead, what characters we've had from that bit of the brand seem to exist only as repaint fodder. 

 

The 1992 Transformers Skyquake Toy

I will admit to being modestly surprised when I looked Skyquake up, or at least the Prime iteration thereof. I'd had this guy pegged as a melange of influences and a pretool to something more famous, and that's actually not wrong. Skyquake has a twin brother, Dreadwing, whom has just been leaked at time of writing, while this toy shares a lot visually with the G1 Skyquake. The Prime iteration though, against expectations, had managed to have a lasting effect on his cartoon, even/especially posthumously. G1 Skyquake meanwhile is super obscure, and is best known for being an oddly coloured chap whom was shot in the back several pages into the (highly recommended) comic series The Last Stand of The Wreckers. So… why mix both together? Its clear which is the interesting one. It is akin to creating a James Bond tier list, and putting George Lazenby on the same level as Timothy Dalton. For the purposes of this metaphor, Dreadwing would be Roger Moore. As such, it's a little weird for them to take such obviously divergent characters and blend them together like this. The closest thing I can think of is when they put an IDW style head on something, or tried to up a bayformer in G1 colours. And given Shadow Striker, it seems be a new trend.

 

The merger of the two Skyquakes is most evident and most schizophrenic in jet mode. The front end is the Prime version, with it's distinctive nosecose and cockpit design. It's backend and wings are however the G1 iteration. The overall effect therefore becomes like something out of your average spaceship shooter video game from three decades ago, like R-Type, Thunderforce, Raiden and so on. It's got a very chunky, stubby winged look, but there is a definite appeal to that. The green with metallic highlights is a great colour scheme. What elevates it however a number of nice features often committed from modern toys. Yes, this has both the luxury of an opening cockpit AND foldaway landing gear. It makes the plane just that bit more compelling. The underside area isn't too bad either, it's got it's share of seams, don't get me wrong, but compared to your average modern seeker? Its trying harder. Much harder. On the downside however, placing the minigun in its dedicated spot on the underside blocks the flight stand port, and interferes with the landing gear. Boo. Play features and/or Evo Fusion? Well, in what's almost certainly functionality for a later release, you can attach Needlenose on top. It's nothing special. If anything, it highlights the difference between an imperfect but actually pretty clean jet, and one that's naff from all but one angle. Pretty much everything Needlenose got wrong, Skyquake gets right.

 

Putting things into robot mode is a non-trivial process. That's both a positive and a negative. A lot of modern leaders tend to be a bit simple, often voyagers with extra accessories, or have a toy with simple conversion as source material. Skyquake really isn't like that, he's possibly something closer to a Studio Series leader, as there's a lot of moving parts. This relative complexity is gonna be a plus for people whom like bigger toys to have more involved engineering, although a word of caution is advised. The instructions refer to a different version of the toy, which has confused the hell out of everyone. In order to get the backpack flush and tabbed in, you have to collapse the nosecone in a specific order, and feed the cockpit glass through the backpack. See this video for a demonstration. This is very much an "exactly this order" problem, with the wrong order being more intuitive. Fucksake Hasbro. In other news, I did notice with my example that the ratcheting joints alternated between "OK" and "tight to the point of concern". On the plus side however there is some welcome touches like panels to conceal gaps on the limbs, which add to the generally premium vibe the toy has. As for the resulting robot mode? Well... 

 

Oh, yeah. That's the stuff.

Skyquake's robot continues the melange of visual elements and pleasing bulk. For the most part, he leans towards the pseudo-G1 style that Bulkhead and such had, by going somewhat more boxy than the Prime iteration and having a nose. Elements inherited from the G1 version are mostly focused on the torso and backpack areas, and look like bits easily retooled for other characters. Which, TBH, was a disappointment I had with Dreadwing when he was leaked, as none of those bits had been changed. I’d been half-expecting them to mix things up a bit, before going full G1 for an exclusive of some sort. You know, Skyquake being the pretool to a more interesting release? Still, they are twins. Its not a problem as such, but there’s definitely competing elements at play here, with the overall form and play pattern being that of the Prime iteration, only for the centre mass to be very G1. That's also where some visual flaws creep in, the torso having a certain hollowness resulting from the transformation, and a big translucent chest plate doesn't help with that. This is however balanced out by the aforementioned limb panels and a general impression of mass. Skyquake is a big dude, not merely chonky like the jet mode, but thick of proportion like a bodybuilder. One imagines he has a rivalry with Jhiaxus at the Decepticon Gym, and is comfortably in the lead. The articulation supports that look quite well, he's got notably good shoulder and knee joints, if being a touch limited in the ankle. He's in high heels and doesn't have much of an ankle rocker, so there's certain poses he struggles with. What he does excel at is two-handed chaingun pose with a side order of swordplay. Few Transformers toys even attempt a two-handed pose, but they made the effort here, and if that gets boring, he's definitely got the joints to swing a sword. If, for some reason, the sword is only moulded to fit the right hand...

My point? Only that Legacy Evolution Skyquake is something that exists. And that his instructions are hot garbage. Its looking like he’s heading towards the discount rack, but I don’t think you’ll regret grabbing him there.

Plamo: Mule Transport (Mantic Games)

OK, here's the deal. Sometimes you pick up something not because you have something specific in mind, but because you know you'll find a use for it. The logic here was that it was a tenner, would lend itself well to any number of projects, but it fell by the wayside. Then Xenos Rampant happened, and my experiments in human infantry. So this instead became a straight build, or in XR terms a Softskin Transport.

As model kits go the Mule seems pretty decent, although it lacked instructions. That didn't slow me down, but it could have been a real nuisance. The axles and shock absorbers are all separate parts, which is great for kitbashing, but not ideal for structural stability. The gun shield was kind of an annoying piece too, so I only did half of it. On the plus side, this was the "plague" version, which meant it came with some nasty looking spikes and damaged parts. I'll use those in a future project. The tailgate also opens, if you don’t glue it.

 

I painted this in much the same way as my Iron Brothers, spraying in Color Forge Desert Sand, but the wheels were sprayed in Trench Brown to be added later. I sponged the Death Guard green on top on that with a, um, sponge, to create a camouflage effect. I then applied assorted weathering techniques and liberal applications of my homemade mud paint, the latter helping with the camouflage effect. It all worked out pretty well although I probably wouldn’t do the windows in black again.

 

I’ve not got a huge amount to say about this one, I admit. This was a quick project I was doing inbetween stuff I was struggling with, Its a perfectly adequate kit, and I painted it in a way that was more efficient than especially interesting. Maybe this is why Astra Militarium players are treadheads? Its not just that the tanks are cool, its far less of a ball-ache to paint tanks than infantry? That said, if you’re doing humies or orks, the Mule seems well-worth getting when its on sale.