Bumblebee with Blazemaster
OK.... Pairing Optimus Prime with Roller is an obvious choice. But new versions of 1984's Minibot Bumblebee with 1990's gold & blue Micromaster Blazemaster? Less obvious..... until you look at 1990's Action Master Bumblebee which pairs him with a blue helipack/gun. Simply change Blazemaster's major colour to blue and he becomes a partner for Bumblebee which manages to homage (so far) 3 toys....... but you can quickly throw a fourth one in because the shape of Bumblebee's robot mode is clearly inspired by Generations War For Cybertron Bumblebee which you may remember me having trouble transforming a few years ago. Fortunately there's no issues turning this toy from it's packaged robot mode into vehicle mode: On each arm, straighten the arm, fold the hands inwards into the lower arm and fold the outside panel of the lower arm down. Straighten the legs, peg them together and fold the feet up. Fold the back, which id the roof of the car mode, up over the head. Fold the upper chest and roof of the car back then push the waist and upper legs into the roof of the car until the car windscreen clicks into place on the back of the legs. Fold the arms into place as the sides of the car.
Bumblebee's car mode looks vaguely credible as an earth vehicle but you can see the influences of the WFC version in the shape with a very high bulging top. It can roll along ok most of the time on a flat surface but there's zero clearance above the ground on it. The back looks a little odd, with the robot chest sticking out of it, but somehow it works ok. On the top of the car is a 5mm peg hole and that can be used for mounting Blazemaster's weapon mode.....
Blazemaster comes in a helicopter mode: A blue attack helicopter with a chin gun. 4 bladed rotor spins so job done there. Yes Blazemaster was more gold originally but a gold helicopter wouldn't have gone so well with a yellow robot so the more suitable blue from the actionmaster back pack becomes his primary colour and we can't really moan that much because that was already used on Blazemaster's robot mode. If you can find the right 3mm peg weapon then that can be attached to the helicopter mode because the sides of the helicopter, the robot's arms, have 3mm pegs on them. In turn the chin gun, which is in fact a 5mm peg, can be used to attach Arms Microns to Blazemaster. If you bend the chin gun down then it can be used as a handle for larger TFs to hold the helicopter mode albeit at the cost of disrupting the shape of the front of the vehicle mode.
To transform Blazemaster to robot mode, fold the chin gun and tail up then stand on the front of the helicopter. That's it. Here the original Blazemaster's colours are completely inverted with the chest and head, previously blue, becoming gold while the rest of the figure, which was gold, becomes blue. The robot just looks a bit odd with the head set back from the chest and the barrel of Blazemaster's gun mode sticking up beneath and in front of it/ The only articulation here comes from the shoulders which allow th arms to raise and, as we've already said, the arms have 3mm page holes in his hands to allow him to hold weapons.
From robot mode slide the feet up, causing the back of the robot/top of the helicopter to move down forming the weapons mode, then fold the helicopter's chin gun down to form the gun's handle. The gun itself is oddly shaped, with a humped back, so actually resembles Bumblebee's vehicle mode. The gun barrel here, unlike on Legends Optimus' gun, will allow you to plug a 3mm peg into it which is good and you can also mount 5mm weapons on Blazemaster by removing the rotor blades, which are mounted on a 5mm peg, and placing weapons pegs into the hole.
So let's get back to Bumblebee: pop the sides of the car off and fold the panels with the front wheels on back against the doors to form the lower arms and revealing the hands. Fold the feet down, then pull the legs and lower robot chest down which locks into the underside of the back of the car. Fold the top of the car down onto the robot's back.
For a small toy Bumblebee is packed with articulation: He's got ball joints on his inner shoulders, elbows & hips, bending knees & ankles, an outer shoulder joint that lets the arm raise to the sides and the shoulders can move forwards slightly round his body. You can get some really quite decent poses out of him. Like Optimus he has 5mm peg hole hands but these are fully closed. As well as holding Blazemaster as a gun he can be used as a helipack for Bumblebee. If you don't like the rotors on top of the gun mode then pull them off and they'll peg into the wheel on either side of the forearm. Logic suggests the wheels, even though they have shallow peg holes, should also take other 5mm pegs but for some reason they don't!
*VERY* good as a small Bumblebee toy, well worth getting.
For More pictures see: http://www.tfw2005.com/transformers-news/generations-classics-44/transformers-generations-toy-fair-2013-legends-official-images-176851/
http://tmukhub.proboards.com/thread/7206/transformers-generations-legends
