Bot Reviews: Transformers: Legacy Deluxe Skullgrin

Skullgrin’s interesting to me, because he’s an actor. He wasn’t supposed to be characterized as one, but being an actor is the one thing he did in his most well-known appearance, so he’s forever an actor to me.

So, Skullgrin was a Decepticon Pretender introduced in 1988, long after the G1 cartoon was off the air, which meant he only showed up in the Marvel comics. Bob Budianski was known for doing oddball one-off stories later in the comic’s run, and he (seemingly at random) picked Skullgrin to be the feature character in a particular yarn called “Monstercon from Mars!”

See, Skullgrin was a Pretender, a concept I explained back in my Power of the Primes Bludgeon review as a kind of nonsensical idea where small Transformers fit into organic shells to disguise themselves as humans, or, if you were a Decepticon, as Masters of the Universe-esque monsters, for some reason. In “Monstercon from Mars,” Skullgrin gets mistaken for a cryptid (this was at a point when humanity hated the Transformers, so this was a good thing), and this causes a movie director to recruit him into a starring role as the villain in his newest science-fiction hit. It’s an offbeat story, but an entertaining one. It helps that the story’s pretty sympathetic to Skullgrin as well, making him into less of a villain, and more of a confused, misunderstood creature.

Marvel’s not the only thing the character’s been in. He showed up on TV in the Masterforce anime, too, along with two fellow Pretenders, but he didn’t really have a personality outside of “another one of the villains,” so “Monstercon from Mars” remains the one major story to feature him in a starring role.

And that One Story has seemingly kept him popular enough to get a few updates beyond that original toy, including a Generations (2010) figure (a retool of Straxus), and a proper miniature Pretender in the same Power of the Primes line as that Bludgeon I reviewed.

This newest Legacy version is one of three Pretenders who’ve gotten new figures in the line thusfar, though Skullgrin’s the only one that got to be a Deluxe (presumably due to star power). However, they’ve taken a step backward from the Power of the Primes ones, and gone back to ignoring the Pretender shell features of the original, re-imagining him as a standard, two-moded Transformer, and one who’s appearance and design has raised a fair amount of eyebrows and scorn. Still, as someone that recently read Marvel G1 (and who has a friend who really loves the character), I wanted to see what this new version was all about.

Robot Mode

So, in theory, what’s supposed to be going on with Skullgrin’s design is that he’s a fusion of his smaller inner robot, and Pretender shell looks. Specifically, his head, shoulderpads, and belt are based on the organic shell, and the rest is the inner robot. In practice, though, the latter two details kind of vanish, and he really looks like an extremely boxy robot wearing a skull mask.

I’ll start with the face he’s named for, it’s important. It’s a mutated, horned, tusked skull that’s missing its lower jaw, reflecting the interesting visual error of the original having an unpainted lower jaw that mostly went unnoticed. Unlike the rest of him, it’s a totally organic-looking design, and feels like something you’d see as set-dressing in a Doom level, or something of that era. On the other hand, the skull’s nose is in a heart shape, which adds an oddly adorable side to it?

The rest of him mostly scans as the kind of robot that would be a generic backgrounder in a Transformers comic, a fairly basic design made out of squares and rectangles, without any details that really stick out, save for the spiked armor on his shoulders, and the skull in front of his belt. He’s got a couple double-barrelled cannons on his back to give him something more to his silhouette, but you can even remove the whole turret (more on that later) to make him even more generic.

Also, the turret gives him a tiny little tail, which combines with the heart-nose to give him a kind of stealthy cuteness on top of the edginess.

It’s a weird design, but honestly, I dig it? It looks like a normal robot wearing a costume. In particular, if he’s an actor, then it makes me think of old-fashioned stage plays, specifically the really old Greek-type ones where the performers wore big masks.

Or, if you’re ignoring the “actor” idea (because you hate fun, or something), it works as a normal robot who strapped on a mask and a couple other costume pieces to try and stand out from the crowd, which is another intriguing character beat. I have no idea if any of this was the intention, but that’s how I read it.

For colors, there’s a really clean delineation between the Pretender parts and the Robot parts. His skull and costume parts are a creamy off-white (painted on the body, plastic on the skill), with the skull itself having pink eyes (again, oddly adorable). The robot bits of him, meanwhile, are an even mix of dark purple and dark gray, again, alternating between paint and plastic, with decent color-matching. The robot bits are an exceedingly late G1 color scheme, it feels like a third of all the Decepticons were some variation of that, so it’s particularly evocative, and I like the deliberate mismatch between the body and the skeletal bits.

For build quality, most of the figure is solid and chunky. For safety reasons, the whole head, especially the horns, are made of a softer plastic, but one that’s still more on the firm side, so it feels like it’ll hold its shape. The spikes on his shoulders are similarly soft. Being a boxy bot, there’s not much on him to get wrong, though the tank treads on the back of his lower legs do feel like they come undone a little too easily, mostly when moving his feet.

His articulation is mostly good, but does have a couple odd limits. On the positive side, he has the full Siege suite of joints (though his wrists only dip, not swivel, due to transformation), and his oversized skull head’s on a balljoint with enough clearance to allow it a broad range of motion. Plus, you can rotate his horns inwards (which is how he comes packaged) to make it look like he’s shyly hiding, another point on the “odd cuteness” scale.

Down below, while he does have ankle tilts, and even some front to back ankle motion, accessing them has a tendency to put those treads on his legs out of place, and the sculpting on the white belt on his waist causes a really odd joint blockage that prevents his hips from doing the splits as far as he ought to, and makes it a tight squeeze to make them move forwards and backwards. He can still do a lot of poses, but it feels odd.

Okay, so, for accesories and features, here’s where he took me by surprise, because there’s actually a lot going on here. Out of the box, he’s got two handheld weapons that each have two pegs on them, so he can hold them as big, fanlike swords, or laser pistols.

They’re also made out of the same kind of softer plastic as his skull, and are cast in white, with grey paint. They look appropriately menacing. But there’s more going on here. Those cannons on his back? You can pop them off too, and also use them as blasters.

If you want, you can replace them with the sword-guns. Or, because there’s 5-millimeter weapons ports on either side of those cannons, combine all four of his weapons in different ways.

And the turret they’re on? It comes right off, too, exposing another 5-millimeter peg, and a port just above it.

In fact, he’s absolutely lousy with accessory ports. He’s got two on the back of each leg, one beneath each foot, two on each arm, and the ones on his back. Plus, he’s got four weapons that can combine in a bunch of different ways (the back guns have three ports and one peg each!) and a turret with two ports in it, and what you get is a figure with kind of crazy amounts of customization options, with the instructions suggesting three of them, before getting into what you can cook up yourself.

And that’s before you throw in additional accessories! I kind of wish I had more than one Fossilizer now. He’s got really good “construction toy energy,” where he feels like a good base figure for the kind of fan that loves building big creations out of piles of accessories.

Transformation

Before picking this guy up, I’d heard that he had a reputation for being complex to transform. In practice though, the conversion’s not that complex, so much as it is complex for a fairly basic alternate mode. It’s like, medium difficulty. Probably the hardest part is making sure some of the horns on his head are out of the way, so his chest closes up.

That, and it’s one of those transformations full of tiny tabs that need to be lined up very carefully, especially around the robot legs/vehicle front, so I find myself making a lot of micro-adjustments as I go.

Tank Mode

Infamously, the tiny, simple nature of the original inner Pretender robots, who had to be small and thin enough to fit in the shells, meant they often had poor, abstract altmodes. And the rumors are true, Skullgrin’s altmode really is just a slab, with some treads and a turret.

And if you take the removable turret off, literally just a long slab.

And it’s a slab that looks like a folded-up robot, thanks to the way the front of it is clearly still legs and feet, though there’s something a bit impressive about how all the organic parts are now hidden. Oh, there’s also the much-commented-on weirdness of only having treads on his back half. I guess only the front hovers.

Here’s the thing: He’s, again, charmingly generic. This is a background vehicle. Without the guns, it even feels like something pedestrian, like a cargo loader. It’s designed to go from point A to point B, and nothing else.

Three quarters of the alternate mode are fairly stable, but the front chunk sometimes causes problems where the robot shins tab into the rest of the body, and I, again, find myself squeezing them into place a bit too often.

For features, he’s seemingly basic at first glance, with a turret that rotates, and guns that raise and lower.

There’s a hidden feature, too, where you can fold out the bit that makes a robot tail, and deploy it like a cockpit seat, for a Titan Master-sized figure.

And officially, you’re supposed to attach the sword-guns to his treads.

There’s a buried lede here, though: This is, again, a good base to serve as a weapons platform. You can remove the turret, put something else on there, and he’s still got the two pegholes  on each side, a second peg in the space where the turret is, and two pegholes under the front and back of the tank, respectively.

Basically, this is a plain, generic vehicle begging to be transformed into something more interesting via judicious application of accessories. I almost feel like it’s wasted on me, I don’t have the kind of construction toy brain that can really create stuff, I just know enough people that do to clock that it would be good for them.

Overall

I wasn’t expecting to like this guy as much as I do, but in hand, he’s got a certain something. On one hand, I see why some fans have problems with it. Conceptually, part of me would still prefer a proper update of the whole Pretender concept, and his extremely plain vehicle mode, odd mishmash of a robot mode, and overcomplicated transformation could turn people off.  But, and maybe I’m just being an optimist, these all feel like pluses to me? I mean, this is a weird figure, but weird in an appealing way. I like the odd character conveyed by the robot mode and altmode, and outside of that, he’s well-constructed, really poseable, and comes with an astonishing flexibility with all of his accessories, not to mention his weaponizer potential.

So, don’t sleep on this guy. Maybe it’s not for you, but think about it. He impressed me a lot, and I’m having more fun with him than I expected. Importantly, I’m having more fun with him than some other “perfect” updates that I’ve bought in the past, like Studio Series 86 Scourge or Jazz, or Arcee. Sometimes, a little weirdness is a good thing.

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