Bot Reviews: Fans Hobby MB-19C Huntsman

In the style of long-departed Official Transformers Conventions, it’s a tradition every TFCon for there to be a small group of exclusive figures only available at the show (and occasionally at future shows if they don’t sell through). Of course, since TFCon is not an official convention itself, these exclusives are actually a selection of unlicensed “Third Party” Transforming robots, which are a thing I don’t often buy, due to them generally being a) fabulously expensive, b) at either Masterpiece or Core scale, when I don’t collect the former, and the latter feels like bad value at those prices, and c) extremely hit-and-miss quality wise, more so than anything HasTak puts out. But it’s hard to resist the siren song of TFCon exclusives, since they often get obscure and oddball with their offerings, plus I like souvenirs, and it’s unlikely I’ll get a shot at grabbing them once the con’s over. In fact, nearly all of the Third Party stuff I have is from one TFCon or another, including off-brand renditions of Arcee in her G1 prototype colors (Azalea Protoform), Mirage in his unproduced G2 colors long before the Legacy one that just came out (Sphinx Regenesis), Shattered Glass Ravage (Doccat), and two different repaints of Huffer into the unfortunately-named Micromaster, Erector (Shafter and Masterpiece Shafter).

For 2023’s TFCon, there were four exclusive offerings, whose fake lawsuit-dodging names I can’t recall. They were offbrand imitations of a Masterpiece G2 Ramjet (I already have the Generations Selects one), a retool of a lady version of Tarn into a lady version of Armada Megatron (I’m not an Armada Guy), an entirely normal Masterpiece Eject (I have no idea why this was an exclusive), and this guy, Huntsman, by Third Party company Fans Hobby.

Huntsman’s a repaint and retool of Fans Hobby’s previous figure, Double Agent, a Masterpiece-scale take on the 1988 faction-swapping Powermaster, Doubledealer.

What this extensive reworking changes him into, though, is the obscure Decepticon Predator, Stalker.

Released in 1992, Stalker came out after the original Transformers toyline had ended in America, and only reached shelves in Europe and Canada. Stalker’s stayed obscure since then, only getting minor roles in IDW’s comics (being characterized as a sadistic torturer, which feels like a waste of a great character design to me), and is perhaps better known for being repainted into Machine Wars Soundwave, which was released stateside. But as for the original Stalker, you can tell that he came out in 1992 by taking one look at his extremely bright color scheme, which is why I, a lover of that G2-style 90’s gaudiness, was drawn to this unofficial update.

That and the fact that I’d already made enough cash as a vendor to cover the $210 (Canadian) price tag, and the small manufacturing run of 600 gave me FOMO. Speaking of that, each one of these was individually numbered, and looking at the number on mine (located just underneath his vehicle mode cockpit), I really wish I’d gotten him two figures earlier.

So close. So, let’s look at this Neon Nightmare.

The Power Driver

Before I get into the main figure, let me talk about this little guy. The original Stalker wasn’t a Powermaster, but this retool of Double Agent kept one of the two Powermaster figures that he’d come with, formerly Knok, now a nameless “Power Driver.” Calling it that, and not giving it an identity honestly kind of fits with the era that Stalker came from, where Japanese Power- and Brainmasters were released in Europe with their partners recharacterized as anonymous “Energon Figures.”

This little humanoid robot is about the same height as a Siege Battle Master, but a good deal more substantial in terms of materials, colors, and articulation. The Driver’s got a helmet, visor, and the slightest hint of a mouth on their face. As for the rest of the details, they all actually line up pretty well with the original Knok, including the rectangle on their chest, and the odd circles on their knees.

The Driver’s colors are a complete chef’s kiss from me, consisting of a deep pink and medium blue, like Cotton Candy ice cream (my favorite), with a little bit of silver, a hit of green for the visor, and black on the feet, plus a backpack in silver chrome.

Amusingly, from the back, the Driver’s legs are pretty hollow, so it’s not just HasTak that does that (okay, they’re hollow for the transformation). Despite that, the Driver stands just fine, and, since this is a Third Party figure with infinite budget, is impressively articulated. The Driver’s got swiveling knees, hips that are actually omni-directional, complete with thigh swivels (!), ball-jointed shoulders, and swiveling elbows. Their neck also technically swivels, but it’s hard to move with their backpack in place. Still, this had no need for this much poseability, and it feels a bit luxurious.

Their transformation, meanwhile, is G1 simple. You’re just rotating the legs sideways, folding them up, clipping them in, and turning the whole thing around, as you pretend it’s an engine block. The detailing on the backpack admittedly helps, largely thanks to all the pistons on there.

Anywho, onto the main attraction.

Tank Mode

Whoof. One of the things that sold me on this was seeing other convention-goers unboxing theirs, and thinking, “oh, he’s big, but not that big.” I seemingly can’t understand that things get smaller the farther away you are. This thing’s Big McLargeHuge. If you stand it on its end, it’s slightly taller than Siege Leader Ultra Magnus.

But more importantly, it just gives off a feeling of Mass. Probably because it’s actually heavy in your hands, heavier than most Transformers I handle, despite not having a lick of diecast in it. There’s Density and Substance here, and I can immediately see where the money went.

So, what we’ve got here is a giant slab of a missile tank, on eight wheels, with a giant rocket down the middle. It’s technically a retool of Doubledealer, but I couldn’t tell at a glance, because it really does look like Stalker’s alternate mode, maybe with some details changed. I guess it helps that both characters change into the same thing. There isn’t even a lot of retooling here, from what I can tell from squinting at photos. They moved the wheels out from under the tank, adding new wheel-wells in the process, fiddled a bit with the back end, and that’s basically it. Admittedly, the resemblance is helped along by the also-newly-tooled eight plastic missiles Huntsman comes with, which clip onto those wheel wells the same way the original Stalker’s did, and a satellite dish that clips onto the top of his raised back end.

Speaking of the back end, that’s the only part where the design suffers a bit, as the original Stalker figure didn’t have that extra bit of chunk back there, and on Huntsman, it’s leftover from Double Agent’s third mode, which this guy doesn’t have (some people were sour about that, and I admit I’d have liked to see a crazy-colored vulture).

But enough about that. Let’s talk about the colors, because OH MY GOD. This is some premium, 1992, extreeeeeme, Splatoon-looking nonsense, faithfully replicated here. He’s got the same medium blue and vibrant pink as his driver, plus a whole pile of toxic-looking lime green from his missiles, and all of the hits of paint on his body. Uptop, his giant rocket’s white, with a clear green tip, and a little bit of silver and gray. There’s also a little foil checkerboard sticker I had to apply, it wraps nicely around the missile’s lower-midsection.

Huntsman’s got the same sort of thing going on as Magic Square’s Light of Freedom, where a large amount of the color isn’t actually paint, it’s just plastic colors, because they’ve got the infinite budget to sprue it out like that. Still, he does have a surprising amount of paint apps on him, thanks to all of the lime-green detailing added to his blue body, along with little bits of black and gold. Just, generally, these colors are amazing in person. Unapologetically loud, unapologetically 1992.

For construction, I’ve already talked about how heavy and dense this guy is. Luckily, he’s mostly solid and secure as well, without that feeling of unstable fiddliness Masterpieces often give me, both official and third-party. This is especially impressive, because basically nothing on the back end actually pegs or tabs together (the front end does, though). The back’s all just ratchets and swivels held together through their sheer tightness.

The big exception to his solid construction, and the big problem, is that rocket on top of him. It pegs onto him via a single, thin tab, into a single thin hole halfway up the tank’s body, and that connection’s just not enough to keep it secure.

The whole thing stays on just fine while the tank’s at rest, or being rolled around, mostly because the missile rests on the body itself, but if you move it around, tip it, or interact with the rocket in any way, that thing’s coming off, and has crashed on to my floor a whole bunch of times already. It’s a shame, because it’s the opposite of how the rest of him feels.

Huntsman’s accessories and features are an interesting mixed bag, in that he can’t really do much of anything Stalker could do, but he’s still left with a lot of interesting features of his own. See, Stalker had all those missiles so that he could fire them out of an included launcher. On Huntsman, the missiles literally don’t do anything, and he can’t interact with them in any way outside of clipping them onto the tank body.

Still, I appreciate that they’re here, especially since they’re seemingly newly-tooled. Meanwhile, the original Stalker’s rocket could tilt upwards to shoot at the sky, whereas here it’ll just pop out if you try it, not to mention the fact that it doesn’t have the funky Viewmaster-esque scope-with-images gimmick of the original.

So what can Huntsman do? Actually, a fair amount. Firstly, he rolls nicely on his eight wheels, which, by the way, are rubberized black tires. Secondly, there’s a driver’s seat for the Power Driver, though you have to access it in kind of an odd way. It looks like you just flip up the little panel on the front-right side of the tank and fit him in, but that’s not actually how it works at all.

Basically, you undo and lift up a big chunk of the left-front side of the vehicle, and kind of awkwardly wedge him in sideways through the hole, before securing him into his seat through lowering it. And you do have to awkwardly wedge him, because the Driver just straight up doesn’t fit through the hole, unless you carefully bend and twist his legs.

That said, once he’s in there, he’s in there good, and it’s kind of amusing seeing his upper torso peek out of the little compartment. There’s even a sculpted control panel in front of him, painted silver!

Finally, despite the rocket not raising, it can light up! Pressing a button on the back end of the rocket makes that back end of the rocket do a kind of rhythmic pulse with a red LED light.

And it just keeps going, thrumming on and off, until you press it again. There’s a second light for the robot mode that isn’t visible in this form, and you need to click it a couple of times to trigger that one. Conveniently, you won’t accidentally turn that one on by switching the rocket off, thanks to the sequence of clicks the LED operates on.

Now, the rocket doesn’t come with batteries, instead, you need three LR-44 Buttoncell batteries to get it operating (I know the type, because the instructions tell you). Getting them in there was a pain, though. The battery compartment on the rocket comes off just fine, but the spring that the batteries are braced against was so tight and strong, that I had to struggle with a small flathead screwdriver for a long time before managing to squeeze all three in. I can see plenty of collectors not bothering to track down these batteries, and not willing to fight with the compartment to get them in there, leaving this feature unused. But to me, it was worth it, because seeing a light-up gimmick on a toy like this in 2023 is genuinely unexpected, much less on something purely collector-targeted like a Third Party release.

While the bird mode is totally gone from this retool, Huntsman does kinda-sorta have an extra mode, in the form of a “missile platform.” Basically, you just take the rocket off, unfold some panels on the back of it, flip out some stuff on the bottom, and fit the rocket onto the newly-formed base on the back of the vehicle.

It’s a loose fit, but if you align the “teeth” on the rocket’s back end with the grooves in the base, the rocket will stay pointing upwards, though again, it’s not a terribly secure fit, and the various panels around it are definitely keeping it from tipping over.

It’s not much, but it does make the glowing base of the rocket make a bit of sense, and hey, there’s dedicated tooling created for it.

Transformation

This was a big worry of mine, as if there’s one thing that Third Party stuff’s known for, it’s nightmarishly unintuitive, complicated, joyless transformations. And I’ve messed with some pretty miserable ones, including Fanstoys Sovereign (Fake Masterpiece Galvatron), and Hoodlum (Fake Masterpiece Hot Rod). I’m pleased to say that this is not one of those! It’s not a cakewalk, it takes a bit of doing, but it’s mostly sensible, and intuitive. It helps that it has the bones of a fairly simple transformation, basically just unfolding the legs, extending out the arms and head, and getting some altmode parts out of the way, with the more complicated stuff basically just being that last bit. And even then, this transformation’s more about moving big chunks of stuff around, instead of tiny, fiddly bits.

Heck, by transformation #3, I could almost do it all without the instructions, something I can’t even say for some third-party figures I like, like Azalea (Arcee) or Sphinx (Mirage). By the way, shout-out to the instructions for being clear and helpful, something a lot of third-party figures struggle with. The big trouble spot, the thing I had to unfold those instructions for is that mass of stuff at the back of the vehicle, which becomes a ton of panels that fold into a backpack in robot mode, and does so in a complicated, unintuitive way. It’s definitely leftovers from Double Agent, where these panels unfolded into a spread of wings for his vulture mode, and you can even kinda-sorta do that here, they just aren’t shaped like wings anymore. So, this is the part where I take a picture, and use that to figure it out next time.

The upshot is that this backpack business is easier to deal with going back into tank mode, since you’re just exploding them outwards, and past a certain point, it becomes visually clear where and how they all fit in. Meanwhile, the other bit of panel-layering, the feet, is interesting, in that it does the Studio Series 86 Ironhide thing where the feet are actually a three-layer cake of vehicle mode panels stacked on top of each other. Plus, the sequence of folding and tabbing is a lot more intuitive. Speaking of the legs, I found what looked like additional unfolding wing parts inside them, that they definitely forgot to take out of this.

Finally, to complete the transformation, the Power Driver needs to plug into Huntsman’s stomach, otherwise there’s an unsightly gap there, and you need to split the rocket, stick half on the shoulder, and rearrange the missiles and radar dish. Despite the complexity of those back panels, the whole thing’s still way more simple and faster than I was expecting, even if it’s not something I’m going to casually do with my hands, like many mainline Transformers.

Robot Mode

Double Whoof. The Tank Mode was already big, but the fact that you’re extending this guy’s robot legs in a way that ups his height means he’s now even bigger. To actually scale him out, he’s about a head taller than your average Prime Wars-era Leader-class figure, but a head shorter than a Combiner Wars-era Combiner.

Again, his sheer density and chunkitude, plus that lack of any hollowness, and the amount of plastic in him makes him feel much bigger. This guy’s got a presence.

In terms of the sculpt, he’s still a surprisingly good match for the original Stalker, despite me checking photos of Double Agent and realizing there’s not a ton of retooling here, again. Basically just the head, the backpack, the wheel wells, and everything else was already close enough.

His shoulders are scrawnier than the original Stalker, and there’s seemingly a lot of tiny details that don’t match up, (plus the original didn’t have an engine block on his gut), but they all fade into the background. This is just making me realize how much the original Doubledealer and Stalker figures resembled each other, really.

Speaking of the sculpt, this is a real nice-looking noggin. It’s not quite as angular as the original Stalker, but it’s got the uniquely Euro-G1 mouthplate-with-a-dent, and the visor down pat (in fact, they seemingly just retooled the face, Double Agent’s helmet was already really close). I do sorely wish it had some lightpiping, though.

Once again, the colors are loud and proud, and doing some heavy lifting to make this guy look like the original. The pink, blue and green are still out here, but he’s now got a lot more black on him, and an increase in gold on his chest and head, plus a lime-green visor, and chrome abs from the Power Driver in his gut. It all goes where it did on the original, and again, it just really looks amazing in person, if you’re into this look (which I very much am). The look is completed by two more foil stickers, which add tiny green shapes to his forearms, again matching details on the original.

So, just like his vehicle mode, Huntsman is very weighty, and very solid, composed entirely of big chunks. Everything’s locked-in, with the exception of that pesky backpack, which again, doesn’t lock or tab in any way, but has joints that are tight enough that it stays in place.

The half-missile on his shoulder even stays attached a bit better, thanks to using a different, wider peghole, though it’s still gonna fall off still if you, say, dangle him sideways for too long. That solid feeling is helped by the fact that a lot of the joints on him are tight ratchets, and loud ones, but more on that later.

His big problem in this mode is a lot more mission-critical: He’s backheavy, and his feet are smaller than I’d like, with no heel support. It’s not super figure-killing, it’s nowhere as bad as, say, Thrilling 30 Windblade (my personal nadir of “this figure can only stand about 30 percent of the time, huh?”) but you do need to set him down on the table carefully, or he will fall backwards. You can technically turn his feet around to give him a ton of heel support, but it doesn’t look good. Still, I’ve managed to  stand him on one leg just fine, so he does have a level of balance, but not as much as I’d like. I’m definitely not going to stash him on any high shelves.

For articulation, he’s got that good Masterpiece-tier poseability. Ankles, knees, hips, waist, shoulders, elbows, wrists and head are all multi-directional, on joints that have real far range, though I do wish his head could look more up and down than the small amount that it does. Other points of interest are all of his fingers being individually articulated (on solid joints that don’t fall out, looking at you, MP-10), shoulders that you can unhinge to give his arms more range, and, again, the fact that so much of him is really tight ratchets.

This figure is loud and clicky when you pose him. To be specific, it’s his knees, hips, elbows and shoulders that all contain ratchets, and, luckily, they’re all smooth enough that you’re not stuck between different fixed positions that don’t work when you pose him. I have had some trouble “resetting” his hips to neutral, thanks to his bulky shins preventing me from giving them that last final click into being straight, and have needed to kick one leg forward to give me room. Oh, and his hip skirts are on oddly poseable swivel joints, making me initially think I’d broken them, until I realized they’re supposed to move like that.

There’s also something interesting going on with his knees and thighs. Apparently, Double Agent had two robot modes, and reversing the waist/swiveling the legs was how you re-arranged the lower half. If you decide to swivel the thighs on Huntsman into a different direction than the instructions and promo images suggest (so the screws are facing outwards, instead of hidden), you now have access to additional ratcheted knee joints, for double-knees.

Now, for all that articulation, there is something of an X-factor with this guy: Between his bulky design, his hefty weight, and those tight ratchets, he *feels* less bendy than he is in a way that’s hard to quantify. Despite all the joints, I don’t feel inclined to pose him as much as I ought to, and tend to leave him in a neutral stance. Maybe it’s the slight bit of struggle with the weight and joint tightness, maybe it’s the design itself looking like he should be lumbering and semi-immobile. Either way, my reflex is not to elaborately pose him, even though he can pull it off.

For accessories, he’s got all the same stuff from the previous mode, with his rocket now splitting in half. The front half fits on one shoulder (the radar dish on the other), and, like I said above, while it’s still not the most stable thing, you can now point it upwards a bit.

The other half of the rocket has a golden barrel you extend outwards, that turns the whole thing into a large handheld gun (seriously, it’s bigger than an old Scout-class Transformer). It doesn’t really look like Stalker’s original missile launcher (and can’t shoot any of his green missiles), but it does look like a long hunting rifle, which fits both his real name and his fake name.

There’s really well-designed grooves on the palms of his articulated hands to slot the weapon’s handle into nice and tight, though I wish his forearms also had some kind of groove in them, it feels like the rocket fins on the end of it are bumping a bit.

More importantly, the LED light gimmick returns, and with the front end exposed, the other half of the gimmick becomes viewable.

Press the back end once to turn on the pulsing rocket, press it twice to turn it off, and a third time to make the front end of his weapon pulse with the same red light, like it’s thrumming menacingly, or perhaps firing shots at a regular interval. Press it a fourth time to turn it the gun’s light off, and reset the cycle. I don’t know if I like this light-up gimmick better than an old-fashioned missile launcher (you can’t even fit one of his green ones into the barrel!), but again, the fact that there’s an even more rarely-seen gimmick on this Adult Collector Action Figure is astounding.

Speaking of weapons, the only weak point here is those still-unusable missiles. The issue in this mode is that there isn’t actually room for all eight to stash on him. Four can still go on the wheel-wells on his thighs, and the instructions tell you to clip two more onto the wheel wells inside his backpack. But doing so makes his backpack come out sideways a little bit, instead of sit flush. It didn’t peg together anyway, but at least the whole thing was tightly compressed. And there’s no room for the last two anywhere, unless you flare out his backpack and fan-mode him a little bit (like I did a few photos back). It’s not even a big deal, it just bugs me that you can’t stash all his accessories on him, and they didn’t just, say, cut grooves onto his shoulders so you could stash them there, like on the original. I guess they’ll have to live in my accessory bag in this mode.

The Headless Bird Mode

A late update here, before I close things out. By following some Double Agent transformation videos, I was able to discover that you can almost make the abandoned vulture mode.

It’s missing the head, and the wings have been partially tooled away, but it still kinda works.

The most interesting thing about this is how much dedicated bird tooling was left behind, including a fully articulated set of legs for it to balance on. It makes me kind of wish they’d just included the bird head, and added this extra mode.

Overall

This is a hard one to rate, since it’s so out of my standard, Official-Mainline-Collecting wheelhouse. That, and if you didn’t already grab one at the convention, obtaining this will be extra-tricky, unless there’s some left in stock at future TFCons (which does happen, they still had Azaleas and Doccats on sale this year, and I’ve seen American TFCon exclusive overstock offered, so I’d presume it flows the other way too).

That said, I have messed around with enough Third Party stuff over the years to understand its pitfalls, and Huntsman manages to sidestep all of them. He’s not made out of odd materials, he’s not impossible to transform, the whole thing is stable, chunky, and genuinely fun to convert and mess around with. Plus, just the fact that they released it in these wonderfully excessive colors means that it was always going to appeal to me. I’m glad the figure underneath the colors is really fun, too. Really, there’s not much wrong with Huntsman, he’s got some Retool Jank around the backpack thanks to the ejected third mode, the rocket doesn’t like to stay on, and his substantial density causes a bit of balance trouble in robot mode. But that’s all minor, and this whole thing’s a lot more playable than I expected. And it’s got a light-up bit!

I will say this: Buying a $210 Canadian Dollar Masterpiece-scale figure of an obscure, almost fictionless Euro-and-Canadian-G1 character is not something I would normally do, regardless of how good the product is, it’s just that I happened to be in a situation where I’d earned enough money as a vendor to cover it, and still have cash left over. But for what it’s worth, there’s enough plastic, coloring, engineering, and gimmickry here that I can see where the price tag went, and it feels worth what they’re charging, if that’s a price you’re willing to pay. I’m glad I get to add him to my niche shelf of oddly-colored third-party characters, though he’s going to have some trouble fitting, given his size.

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