Bot Reviews: Transformers: Age of the Primes Deluxe Fugitive Waspinator

I’ve got a little tradition these days of certain friends gifting me completely random Transformers. It’s something I love, because I get to check out figures like Wasp here, which are slightly outside of my collecting sphere. 

We all know and love Waspinator, the unlucky, frequently-blown-up goon from Beast Wars (here’s my review of his Kingdom figure) but this car-forming version of him’s actually from Transformers Animated, the three-season Transformers show from the early 00’s. I usually describe the show as “Teen Titans (the Cartoon Network one) but it’s Transformers,” since that kind of nails the art style and vibes it had.

I really enjoyed Transformers Animated when I watched it back in the day, though I’ll admit that I haven’t revisited it since it first aired. That said, while I enjoyed the story, characters, voice acting, all that stuff, I didn’t actually care for the exaggerated art style of the show, and so I never really collected the figures from it, beyond a Shockwave/Bumblebee versus set they did. I’m definitely in the minority there, though, as Animated’s one of those Transformers shows that has a really diehard segment of super-fans, most of whom still pine for a Season 4 of some kind, which is definitely never going to happen. The show ended! Move on!

What IS happening, though, is that Legacy, and now Age of the Primes are making new figures of some of Animated’s cast, while also giving them minor re-designs to make them slightly less exaggerated. In Wasp’s case, he’s a retool of Legacy Bumblebee.

Wasp’s Age of the Primes release, meanwhile, represents an important little gap being filled for Transformers Animated collectors, since the original was actually an unreleased toy. They did put out a figure of Animated Waspinator, with his insectoid altmode back in the day, but on the show, he only got this body (and the full name Waspinator) in the back half of his final appearance, and he actually spent most of his multiple episodes of screentime as a normal carformer (designed on the show as a retool of Bumblebee, ready to make as a toy). They were going to make that toy, too, but it  was part of the final, cancelled wave of Animated toys.

So, this Age of the Primes version is something a lot of oldhead Animated fans are probably clamoring for. Me, I didn’t really get into the new Animated figures, due to focusing on other Transformers (and also, like, money), so getting a chance to take a look at this guy’s a fun little novelty. By the way, his name’s Wasp, but the packaging gives him the full Waspinator name, due to Marvel having a legal lock on the shortened name. 

Robot Mode

Okay, so, let’s get the big, obvious problem out of the way. Or rather, the little problem: Wasp is really, really small for a Deluxe.

Now, I’m no stranger to Transformers being smaller than their pricepoint, because it usually means the money’s getting spent on partscount, engineering, accessories, all that good stuff. There’s even a whole little category of “Deluxe Minibots,” like Netflix Bumblebee, Earthrise Hubcap and Legacy Gears, who are a bit short and small, but have obvious tradeoffs for their smallness. The thing is, Wasp’s smaller and skinnier than any of them. Heck, he’s only a tiny bit larger than a Core-Class.

To get one more easy bit of scaling out of the way, he’s nearly the exact same size as a Cyberworld Cyber Changer, and those guys are about 12 Canadian dollars, not the 36-ish of a modern Deluxe. 

To be fair, firstly, this is mostly so Wasp can scale with the rest of the new Legacy Animated figures, since Bumblebee (and Wasp) were tiny guys on the show. And the operative idea behind making undersized figures is that the budget gets spent on engineering, partscount, paint, accessories, and so forth. Still, seeing this tiny guy in the box, it made me relieved I didn’t pay the full price for him.

There’s basically two kinds of Car Robot Transformers body plans most of the time, Hood-Chests and Roof-Chests, and this guy’s a Roof-Chest, with the car front forming his legs and feet, and his rear wheels on his shoulders. It’s a sensible design, and it’s executed well here, with the combination of thick car parts, and skinny limbs and waist suggesting the cartoony dynamism of the show he’s from.

Uptop, he’s got a very well-done, very clever headsculpt, in that he has the shapes of Beast Wars Waspinator’s insectoid face, but none of it is technically organic bug details, it’s all robotic lines that approximate that bug face. For example, his “antenna” are actually a head-crest.

Something about his small size, his kind of servile-looking headsculpt, it makes him feel like some kind of Igor-like toady to the bigger villains, even if that’s never been his role, save for an extended Frankenstein homage in an episode of Beast Wars.

He’s decently screen-accurate, too, from what I can tell, just a little more blocky, and a little less streamlined, which makes sense as something that has to exist in the real world. Unlike some of these new Animated figures, it doesn’t feel like there was an effort to de-Animated the design, though he doesn’t really need it. 

The biggest problem on the sculpt, though, is his arms. His shoulders attach to his body on these weedy little struts that can find themselves in awkward positions really easily, and his elbows are…odd. He has double-elbows, but there’s a lot of space between the two joints, and kind of a gap between where the upper joint attaches to the car panel on his shoulder, and his actual shoulder. You can rotate his arms so this gap vanishes, but still, it’s an odd visual, and something I’d expect them to engineer out on this tiny-but-sold-for-a-Deluxe figure.

The colors, meanwhile, are interesting, and very nice. See, it’s not exactly Waspinator’s colors. There’s no yellow, and he’s a lot darker in general. He’s mostly a drab, dark green, with a more lime green as a secondary color, some black accents, translucent purple highlights, and some opaque purple for his eyes and badge. I’ve never associated these kinds of colors with Synthwave (well, except the purple), but it’s giving Synthwave, and I really dig it because of that. 

In terms of build quality, he’s mostly rock-solid, none of his translucent bits feel like they’re in danger of breaking, and he stands perfectly well. My biggest problem is just that he feels small and light. Usually, when they do undersized figures like this, you can feel the extra mass and density to them, but not so, here. He feels about as weighty as the Cyberworld figures he’s the same size as. Meanwhile, I have stability issues with his thighs, which love to detach from the mushroom pegs that they’re on. They pop right back in easily enough, but it’s a bit irritating.

His articulation, meanwhile, is pretty good! Going top to bottom, he’s got forwards-and-backwards ankle rockers, and a tiny bit of sideways ankle tilts. Going up, he’s got swivel knees, thigh swivels, universal hips, a waist swivel, and a balljointed head. His shoulders have three swivels that make them functionally universal, and let him shrug a bit, and while his double-elbows are oddly constructed, at least they’re there. Finally, he’s got wrist swivels.

He doesn’t actually have an ab crunch, but I’ve found that you can fanmode one by detatching his hood from his torso, and his torso itself from his back panel, though it’s involved enough that you’re basically transforming him into a hunchback mode. 

Generally, he’s nice and expressive, and makes for a good little minion. But again, this is the part where I say that it feels like he should have had some kind of bonus articulation to justify the small size, and the technical ab crunch doesn’t count. 

For accessories, Wasp has a pair of translucent purple rockets, with silver paint to highlight the details, based on a pair of accessories from the original Animated Bumblebee. He’s also got a pair of pyramid-shaped stingers that can plug into the backs of these rockets on very small tabs.

I understand that they’re basically combining two different features that Animated Bumblebee had, and people were a bit miffed at this accessory setup, but honestly, when divorced from context on Wasp, they’re plenty fun.

He’s got a total of six 5-millimeter ports on him, perfect for mounting the rockets, especially since two are on his back, and two are at his ankles.

Wasp’s stingers kind of need to hang out on the rockets, though, since those tiny tabs that they’re on aren’t really compatible with anything else, or else you’ve just got to chuck them in a bin. Or, you can use them with his other feature.

This one’s neat to me. Basically, he’s got an “attack” mode where you transform his forearms a bit, and flip away his fists. You then plug the two stinger halves into tiny holes where his hands were, and clap them together to make a single drill-shaped weapon.

It’s literally the 2007 Movie Megatron’s “Join them in Extinction!” combined arm attack, which is funny, since I just got the Blokee figure of him that can’t actually do that (in fact, most 2007 Megatrons can’t).

The big complaint here, apparently, is that the way his wrist-stumps are offset to facilitate this means that he can’t mount the separate stinger halves there in a way that looks good when they’re not attached (because they’re offset a bit), but, like…that doesn’t bother me, I just have him hold them attached to the rockets. 

Transformation

This is one place where you actually can see where the money went, because Wasp’s got a complex conversion going on. While the basics of it are easy to understand (legs become hood, chest becomes roof, arms become doors and rear wheels), there’s a ton of little panels that flip, rotate, twist, and peg together. This is the challenging kind of transformation where parts fight for space, and the order of operations gets persnickety, in order to keep things out of other things’s ways (here’s a protop, the arms go in place last). It’s also the kind of transformation where I forget how it goes every single time, and have undo and redo bits as I figure out what went wrong. Remember how I said his thighs like to separate during transformation? It almost always happens at this point.

It’s not exactly a difficult or impossible transformation, but is maybe too complicated for its own good, and might have been easier if the figure were larger, and everything just had more space. Shout out to the way his lower legs morph into the front of his car, though, there’s a bunch of neat flips and rotations in there.

Vehicle Mode

Okay, I’ll admit, this is pretty cute. Wasp changes into a tiny little compact car with a single police siren on top, and the whole thing reads as a bit chibi-fied, and a bit stylized, like Animated’s art was. I can see this car zipping along frantically, nearly falling over as it takes sharp corners. There’s a funny clash of styles here, too because this is the kind of design I’d expect a simpler gimmick toy to have, and this is anything but that.

He does look like he should be hanging out with the Cyberworld guys, though, both because of his design, and the fact that he’s still nearly as small as they are.

His sculpt’s riddled with seams and 5-millimeter ports, but the show was set in the Space Future of the 22nd Century, so I can buy them as techie detailing. 

For colors, Wasp’s mostly that darker, interesting shade of green, with the light green hidden, except for a couple unpaintable patches near the back of the car. He’s also got a slick black stripe running down the side of his roof and hood, a red police siren, yellow headlights, and silver paint on his tire rims. It’s a very complete-looking car, save for his totally unpainted back panel, though the fact that there’s very little sculpted there means I don’t read it as incomplete.

It’s still a good color scheme, and I appreciate how it’s different, yet evocative of Waspinator’s colors. 

I griped a bit about his stability in robot mode, but once you get him all pegged together, this is a compact, solid car that stays together nicely, and rolls along the ground in a pleasant, toyish way.

His other features are his six 5-millimeter pegs, perfect for mounting his rockets on (well, not the ones on his bumper) for a boosted flight mode, or an attack mode.

The stingers have absolutely nothing to do in this form other than go on the ends of the rockets, though.

Overall

Okay, here’s the thing. Wasp is actually a really fun little figure. He looks good, he poses well, he makes for an endearing little car, he’s got personality. In fact, he’s had a very long tenure now of hanging out in my saddle bag as my Transformer that I take places. I think his transformation’s a bit too fiddly for its own good, his robot mode arms are a little odd, and he’s got a couple joints that like to pop out, but these are all relatively minor gripes. Fundamentally, he’s good.

But I just can’t shake the fact that he’s not worth Deluxe prices. I’ve reviewed a few of these smaller-than-their-size-class Transformers over the years, and more often than not, I don’t mind that they’re undersized, because you can see obvious other areas where the budget went. Here, I guess it went into his transformation? But it also doesn’t feel any more complicated than, say, Legacy Shadow Striker, and if anything, is made more fiddly by his small size. He’s just…really tiny, and doesn’t feel worth what they want to charge for him. I’m grateful that he was gifted to me, he makes an excellent random Transformer to give to a person, but I have to say that he’s only worth getting if you can find him on sale, or clearance, or get some kind of bargain on him. Which is a shame, because I do legitimately like him, I just have to acknowledge, at the end of the day, that he’s bad value, despite the fun. 

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