You know, I don’t consider myself a Third Party guy when it comes to Transformers, I mostly just collect the official figures. But I have realized that I’ve owned, and/or borrowed a figure or two from nearly every major company out there, at this point (not all of them actually got reviewed here, though). Newage is a major exception, though. Like Iron Factory (makers of this unofficial Windblade), their area of expertise is “Legends Scale,” minifigures. I’ve seen Newage’s stuff in display cases at TFCon, they’re all super tiny, and super detailed. One reason these mini guys are not a scale I’ve really bought into, though, is that they’re often really expensive for their size, and while I recognize the reasons why that is (they’re intensely complex little things, and are also produced in small runs), it’s still something that makes me hesitant to buy into them, in this time when I even experience sticker shock over Core-class mainline Transformers. Plus, Third Party stuff’s often very hit and miss quality-wise for me. For every really good figure (most recently, Fans Hobby’s Huntsman), there’s two or three that are overcomplicated to an unfun degree (those Fans Toys transformations blow, trust me), or have horrible quality control without HasTak product standards (Iron Factory’s Bruticus hurt my hands with its pointy edges, and I broke an antenna off by barely touching it.) But I’ve heard good things about Newage, so I decided to go in on this set here, for a couple reasons.
Well, a couple reasons beyond “there are two bots in the box.”
So, Candyman and Bickle are repaints of Newage’s versions of Bumblebee and Cliffjumper (and in Bickle’s case, he gets a new head). Speaking of Bickle, he’s a homage to Hubcap, my favorite obscure Transformer, one that’s shown up a lot on this blog, and I’ve got an ever-expanding shelf of Hubcaps I can add him to. The other reason is that I managed to split the set with someone else, so the other half, “Candyman,” an update of Bug Bite (the Renegade Go-Bot turned Bumblebee Repaint), is going in the mail once my review’s done. This set’s two figures are co-tools of each other, so I’m going to tackle them a bit differently, and cover them as one figure.
Vehicle Modes
A race where both characters are cheating!
They weren’t kidding, these guys are small. To scale them out, they’re bigger than, say, a Micro Machine, or one of those little diecast Transformers vehicles they sell in three-packs. But they’re smaller than the original Minibots upon which they’re based, and smaller than modern Micromasters.
Here’s a selection of Small Robots for your scale-gauging perusal.
Compared to my vintage Hubcap minibot, Bickle is an incredibly faithful downsizing of the design.
Hubs Cap? Generations Selects on the left, Vintage G1 in the middle, our man Bickle on the right.
They didn’t go realistic for this kinda-sorta-Porsche, we’re still in the realm of squashed Choro-Q stylized car, with the larger back wheels and everything. But what’s really impressive is the amount of tiny, specific details that have been copied over, stuff like the specific shape of the bumper, the little triangle on the left of the hood, it’s remarkably slavish, even as it finds room for new detailing, like little sculpted windshield wipers. The one inaccurate bit is that the vehicle has a flared spoiler in the back, something that the original Cliffjumper had, but was tooled out when it was made into Hubcap.
A Selection of Bugs. Left to right: Candyman, Bumblebee movie Speed Series Bumblebee, and Netflix Bumblebee.
Meanwhile, I don’t have a vintage Bumblebee to directly compare Candyman to, but squinting at Transformers Wiki photos shows a similar extremely specific dedication to detail in recreating its squashed VW Bug form (so they’re shamelessly swiping a car, on top of a transformer).
They’re more solid than they look.
Of course, both cars are way seam-ier than the originals, with transformation cracks out the wazoo, but I’m pleased to report that in hand, they feel very solid and brick-y, after multiple transformations. Some of the seams sometimes feel like they don’t want to stay aligned, and I sometimes find myself doing the reflexive “squeeze things into a better alignment” thing when I pick one up, but they never feel like they’re in danger of becoming undone.
This is what it feels like when you’re surrounded by big trucks on the highway.
For colors, Bickle is a more mustardy-yellow than my vintage Hubcap, with some silver accents on the bumper, some black paint for the windows, and light gray wheels, with the neat twist of using flatheaded screws to serve as the wheel rims. Noteably, it’s got more paint on it than the original Hubcap, despite the small size, and colors in details that are present, but yellow on the original. For Candyman, they picked an interesting color. It’s not just white, it’s a kind of pearly metallic sheen, one that I hope I can capture on camera, which gives the whole car a very lush feel. There’s more black paint on this one, for the bumper and windows, and a tiny bit of silver picking out the headlights. It’s wild how lush these feel at this small scale.
Scale’s fun, sometimes.
For features, both cars roll just fine on their pinned wheels. While Bickle doesn’t have any extra features, there’s a tiny one on Candyman. You can delicately pull a back panel of the VW off, and pop on a rounded spare tire, as an alternate bit of detail.
A scarily small bit of surgery.
The end result.
It’s neat that they have something like that on a figure this small, but I’ll admit, I’m not inclined to use this feature very often, because these accessories are so tiny, that losing one if I accidentally drop it is a real, genuine fear, especially from someone with cats in his house.
Transformations
Whoof, but like, a good whoof. I’ve seen my share of miserable, overcomplicated, un-fun Third Party transformations, and this isn’t one of those. In fact, it’s kinda miraculous how it turned out. See, Bickle and Candyman share the same transformation, and it’s very complicated, technically. But somehow, it’s not difficult? It feels like it should be difficult.
The initial explosion.
Certainly, I’m not even going to try to convey it through text. The hood becomes the feet like the G1 version, and that’s about where the familiarity ends. There’s a whole lot of twists and flips, and the whole design ends up having a fake car-roof-chest, too (not that I have an issue with that).
The upper torso’s all done, time to do some twists and flips until the legs start to look right.
Despite this complexity, I only needed to consult the instructions the first time. Beyond that, I wouldn’t say I memorized the transformations, exactly, but I can just kind of twist limbs and flip panels on vibes, and eventually everything settles into place. I make it sound too complicated, but somehow, it’s not. I’d say the only tricky part is remembering how to fold the arms away when going back to alternate mode, that always takes me a minute.
Note to self, they go like this.
Robot Modes
The guys.
It’s funny, when you break out some small Transformers to compare these guys to, you realize they’re not actually the smallest thing ever. They’re both about a head taller than Earthrise Rung, Siege Stakeout, and Power of the Primes Bludgeon and Skullgrin. However, they’re a lot skinnier, and the presence of so many tiny, shrunken details makes them both read as way tinier.
Another big ol’ scale pic.
What we’ve got here is a miniaturized take on the Sunbow Microchange Minibot design, with the hood-feet and roof-chest (fake, in this case), but with all four wheels hidden away, like in the animation. And let me tell you, these designs are impressive, because they’re a heck of a lot more detailed and complicated than anything official in this scale.
Even from this angle!
They’re a bit kibbly around the backpack and the back of the feet, thanks to the plethora of car parts that tuck away there, but it comes across better than, say, the more recent Masterpiece G1 Bumblebee, thanks to it being cleaner, and also, like, at a tiny scale.
Let’s talk about noggins.
Bickle’s head is interesting. Hubcap never had an animation model, so there’s a bit more leeway in how to interpret the G1 figure’s somewhat fuzzy face.
A whole range of subtle re-interpretations here. (Sidenote: I should really review that Ocular Max one on the upper left).
In this case, they went for an extremely rectangular blockheaded design, with a kind of neutral, thin-lipped expression. Candyman, meanwhile, has a hyper-Sunbow-accurate Bumblebee head, one that looks like it was downsized from that Masterpiece I’d mentioned earlier.
“We are not the same.”
I’d almost say it doesn’t work for Noted Villain Bug Bite, since he’s got a cheery smile on his face. Maybe he delights in causing mayhem. Speaking of tooling that isn’t quite right, I’ll point out again that Hubcap’s got a dedicated flared spoiler on the top of his fake roof-chest, leftover from Cliffjumper, instead of the flattened one he ought to have. Ehh, close enough.
An argument begins.
There’s some new surprises when it comes to colors in these modes. Bickle’s now got two-tone gray and black limbs, and a surprising amount of paint on his face. He’s got the orange face, and incredibly miniature Autobot-blue eyes, as well as a tiny dab of orange on his helmet crest. Candyman, meanwhile, has white forearms, a silver face under a white helmet, and tiny pinprick Decepticon-red eyes. How they got all this paint on there, much less straight, is beyond me.
Kids, stop fighting.
One downside to this mode is that both figures are trading away the solid-feeling nature of their vehicle modes for a form that’s a lot more fiddly. Nothing feels breakable, or fragile, or even loose, but there’s a lot of tiny moving parts, thanks to the articulation, and this doesn’t feel like the kind of knockaround toy that HasTak figures in this scale do. At least they’re more stable than your average Siege Micromaster. Still, their shoulders don’t really lock in, and are prone to do all kinds of odd things when you pose these guys, and the reversible elbows (for the transformation) seem like they want to settle in in ways that suggest they’ve broken their arms.
Consider how Bickle’s arm settled here, on the far left. I didn’t notice until after the photo was done.
That, and their torsos don’t actually peg together, they’re just in place on friction hinges. That said, nothing’s loose, and once you pose them, they hold a pose. I just wish things felt a bit more locked in, and I worry that neither figure would function at all if one was to lose the quality control roulette, and get versions with loose joints (not that I’ve heard of that happening). On the upside, those piles of altmode parts at their heels make both figures very stable.
I’ve been showing off their best feature here, their mad articulation.
So, the other trick of Newage, outside of the small scale, is how poseable their figures get, and that’s on full display here. Basically, they have modern articulation on par with your average Legacy Voyager, at a fraction of the size. Like, we’ve got ankles, knees, hips, multiple swivels on the legs, a waist joint, ab crunches (!), shoulders, elbows, wrist swivels despite the wrists needing to dip for transformation (!!), and ball jointed heads. It’s kind of nuts when you consider you’re dealing with joints and parts that are, like, millimeters big, and for all my grousing about that feeling of fiddliness, it’s really easy to make these guys look good with some action poses, and it’s genuinely incredible to see a small thing pose as much as they can.
“We’re afraid we’re going to break these damn things.”
For accessories, Bickle has just one: A tiny, tiny, tiiiiiny gray laser pistol, of the generic Sunbow type, which he can hold really well in his fist, when I’m not fretting about losing it. Seriously, this thing is smaller than the little Optimus Prime that came with the Centurion Drone set. His instructions depict additional accessories, a version of Cliffjumper’s big cannon and waterskis, like the Generations Selects version of Hubcap has, but the instructions are actually just from the Cliffjumper tooling of this guy, so I suppose they were left out, to my disappointment.
Time for a shootout!
*Stock laser sound*
Candyman, meanwhile, has a little more happening. He’s got another one of the same mini-laser-pistols, and can still do the back panel/spare tire swap, with a new twist: He’s got a tiny silver replica of Bumblebee’s jetpack from “Dinobot Island” (seen in HasTak release on Origin Bumblebee), which you can also mount on his back.
“I gotta get out of here!”
“Later, losers!”
These are fun accessories, but, again, my worry about losing them is strong enough that I find myself not really using them, and just letting these guys hang out accessory-free, like in G1.
Overall
“My guy can beat up your guy!” “Nuh-uh!”
Oh yeah, I see the appeal with Newage here. No matter what way you slice it, these guys are nifty. The design and engineering here would make for great Generations takes on these designs, maybe even great Masterpiece takes, but they’ve shrunken it all down to nearly Micromaster scale, and somehow managed to make it all still work, without falling into any of the usual Third Party pitfalls of overcomplication, or bad design, or bad tolerances. It feels like this shouldn’t work, these figures should be a pain to handle, or too fragile, or something, but they aren’t, and that makes it even more exceptional. For all my grousing about the robot modes being kind of fiddly, there’s not much of anything wrong with these. Well, maybe the price.
They cost more than this Voyager-class tank they’re laying siege to.
“Say we’re worth 80 bucks, or next week’s review gets it!”
I’ve seen this set go for anywhere from 80-100 Canadian dollars, meaning you’re paying more than a Leader-Class Transformer’s pricetag for two miniature guys, or 40-50 per little guy. They may be very well-engineered, they may be astounding, but that’s still a hard pill to swallow. So I’ll say this: It’s worth going in on one or two of these Newage guys, if you’ve got a favorite character, but I can’t imagine building a shelf of these guys unless you’re rolling in the dough. But I love this pair, and maybe you’ll find one or two you love, too.
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