Bot Reviews: Transformers: Legacy Evolution Voyager Comic Universe Bludgeon

Sometimes, a tooling’s so nice, I grab it twice. Legacy Tarn, reviewed here, outside of being the first mainline figure of the fan-favorite Lost Light character, was also a really good Voyager. But basically every modern Transformer needs at least one repaint and/or retool to justify making it, and in this case, the powers that be opted to re-release him as another fan-favorite Decepticon, Bludgeon.

Bludgeon was one of the earliest recipients of the “Furman Bump,” where a Transformers author (originally Simon Furman, but other hands have done this) takes a random, semi-obscure Transformer, and makes them famous through the stories they decide to write. In this case, Furman looked at this small 1989 Decepticon Pretender, a tiny tank that could fit into a shell shaped like a Skeleton Samurai, and decided to make him a super-important villain in the latter chunk of the original Marvel Comic, a fearless, brutal martial arts mystic, who’d even become Decepticon leader.

Since then, Bludgeon’s put in fairly regular appearances on the comics side of Transformers, usually as a fearsome, superstitious fighter, though he hasn’t really made the leap to animation very often, with a role in the recent Cyberverse cartoon being his biggest animated appearance yet (and that depicted him as being mute, since that show was made for like 20 dollars and they didn’t want to hire another voice actor). Notably, most of his subsequent fictional appearances, and the occasional figures that come with them, have absconded with the Pretender Shell idea, and just depicted him as a Skeleton-Samurai-Robot that changes into a tank, with no other business in the middle (his Power of the Primes figure, reviewed here, is the only exception on the mainline side). This current one also doesn’t bother with his original gimmick, and just makes him a standard Transformer, but thanks to him having spent a lot of fictional time in a form like that, it doesn’t feel as egregious as, say, Legacy Skullgrin and the rest of Legacy’s other Pretenders-without-the-gimmick updates. This particular Bludgeon is, on paper, “Comic Universe,” because he’s based on his appearance in IDW’s 2021 Transformers Annual, though as we’ll soon see, that’s a bit of a misnomer.

Robot Mode

So, to get it right out of the way, the big thing about this guy is that he’s really clearly just Tarn with a Bludgeon head on him, and new colors.

This isn’t a thing you typically see in Transformers today when it comes to retooling one character into another. Typically, HasTak would either put some budget into retooling more of a figure than just the head (sometimes even retooling most of the figure!), or if they didn’t, the body would be pre-sculpted to be a hybrid design of the two characters, so it could sort of pass at both. In this case, though, everything below the neck is really clearly the distinctive, Alex Milne-designed IDW Comics version of Tarn, including the tread-shoulders, the chestplate, the little antenna at the back, all that stuff. Blame how unique and instantly iconic Tarn’s look is.

But, honestly, I like it. It’s a cool design, and if we get out of the headspace of this needing to be a representation of a specific Bludgeon from a specific continuity, and more of an old fashioned New Interpretation like the Classics/Universe/Generations toys of old, it fits Bludgeon’s character pretty well. It even takes something that I thought didn’t quite work about Tarn and turns it into a strength: The sculpt is less of a bulky bruiser, and more on the slim, lanky side, which works a lot better for this Skeleton Warrior, especially considering how they made the sculpt taller and wider than most Voyagers, so he really looms.

The whole thing also stirs a specific bit of nostalgia for me, too, because “slap a new head on it, change the colors, and call it a day” is exactly what HasTak would have done in the late 00’s and early 10’s.

The one new bit of tooling, the headsculpt, is pretty nice too, and, checking the 2021 Annual, is the one thing on him definitely designed after that comic. It’s Bludgeon’s traditional Samurai helmet with its crest uptop, and a skeleton face underneath. The big difference here is that it’s a lot more mechanical, compared to the organic sculpting of the original, and specifically looks like an immobile, yelling mask, with an open mouth, and the slightest hints of wires (or a speaker) sculpted inside. It’s a good look.

For colors, Bludgeon got a lot on him. He’s a pretty evenly-balanced mixture of orange-yellow, forest green, brown, gray, and black, with tiny hits of silver, red, purple (his badge), and transparent orange. It’s a color scheme that owes more to his 2009 Revenge of the Fallen figure than his G1 toy, which had a lot more purple on it.

His colors are also pretty accurate to his layout in the 2021 Annual, within the confines of the sculpt. He’s a pretty colorful guy, and care seems to have been taken to make his entire layout noticeably different from Tarn’s. It’s not just different colors, it’s colors that were applied differently, too, and pick out different details on him.

Like Tarn, Bludgeon feels a bit on the light side in your hands, probably due to spreading all his mass out to make him bigger. But it’s worth it, because he’s got that really good, better-than-the-size-class-average articulation, what with his opening hands, his legs that can bend super-duper far, and that general sense of bendy expressiveness.

It combines with the sculpt and character to make this already menacing-looking skele-man even more menacing.

That poseability combines really well with his accessories, of which he’s got a lot. Firstly, he’s got the same set that Tarn does: Two translucent-but-painted cannons, and a block for mounting them, with a rotating base. There’s four whole ports on that base, plus a peg on the bottom, and multiple pegs on each cannon, so you’ve got a lot of options when it comes to how to combine these three accessories. The instructions recommend Tarn’s arm-mounted double-fusion-cannon…

…..a pair of shoulder guns…

…or a comically long laser cannon.

Personally, I like to futz with the layout of the shoulder-cannon configuration, drop the rotating base down a bit lower, and give him double back-mounted cannons to make his silhouette a bit different from Tarn’s, as well as make him more comic-accurate. That’s how I’ve got him displayed in most of these photos.

Finally, he’s got one new accessory, one that’s perfectly characterful: The obligatory samurai sword.

It’s a complicated sculpt, one with a bunch of vaguely fantasy-looking detailing on the blade.

It’s cast in brown, painted silver, and he can hold it in either hand perfectly.

Combine that with his spinning wrists, and high-end articulation, and it’s easy to make him look like a cool swordfighter.

He can even grip it two-handed, though the poseability is limited when he does so. The sword’s also got a 5 millimeter peg on the side, for more fun creating combined weapons, or mounting it on him. And that’s something you’ll want to experiment with, because he’s still lousy with weapons ports.

Between his flexible accessories, those ports, and his impressive articulation, there’s just a lot you can do with him. He’s really full-featured, like the opposite of Studio Series 86 Brawn.

Transformation

Y’know, this is a bit fiddlier than I remember. It’s still a fairly basic conversion in theory, since you’re just kind of folding away the arms, folding up the chestplate, and folding the legs backwards. There’s a lotta folding on him. The biggest trouble spot is the chestplate, which is really easy to pop right off of him if you do anything out of sequence, which I frequently do. It does pop right back on, at least, and at this point, I feel like you ought to just proactively take it off when you start. The other fiddly bit is the head, and managing to fold it away in a way that lets the small tank turret above it sit reasonably flush. On Tarn, I needed to rotate his head backwards, something the instructions didn’t say. Bludgeon is even more tricky, since his head’s bigger. Like it or not, there’s no longer a good way to get it in there that lets the panel above it sit flush anymore.

I’ve settled on folding his head in without rotating it, and letting his chin kind of rest in a little groove on the front of the panel that goes over it. That doesn’t get the panel to sit flush, but it does let it sit level. At least everything stays tabbed in place solidly enough once it’s done.

Tank Mode

Okay, the robot mode was clearly Tarn with a New Head, but the tank mode really is Just Tarn.

Again, Alex Milne gave him a really distinct, unique tank mode, with four guns, double treads, a big cowcatcher-type thing upfront, and that’s all replicated here, just in funky colors.

I’m not complaining, because it’s a cool-looking sci-fi vehicle, and I don’t think anyone really cared what specific kind of tank Bludgeon changed into anyway, not when the Skeleton Samurai thing was drawing people’s attention. The whole thing manages to avoid looking too much like a Pile of Robot Parts, but at the same time, is busy enough that any complaints I might have had about that front panel not quite locking down go away.

Bludge’s still really colorful in this mode, to the point where he almost ventures into “crazy-colored-knockoff” territory, but in a good way, if that makes sense. The orange, green, black, silver and brown are all pretty evenly distributed, nothing really dominates, and I think that’s why he has that vibe. Plus, the translucent orange bits look good.

Basically, everything I said about Tarn’s tank mode still qualifies here, so let’s run through it. The treads, weirdly, don’t roll, and have sculpted-in wheels on the bottoms of them that also do not roll, making him a bizarre kind of double-fake out.

His double-barrelled tank turret can rotate pretty well (that loose panel partially justifying its looseness in this case), and the barrels can raise or lower, while the smaller, antenna-like front barrels can rotate in and out.

But the real feature here is, again, that flexibility. You can pop the turret right off, and assemble it differently, if you want (especially if you want him to be visually distinct from Tarn). Similarly, his sword is meant to be mounted on either side of his tank mode (instructions say right, box shows left), but you can pop it off, and mount it pretty much anywhere you can find a 5MM port.

He’s got a boatload of them all across this tank mode, so there’s a lot you can do, before you even bring in outside accessories, which I highly recommend doing.

Again, the fun’s in the flexibility, and it really adds a lot to this mode.

Overall

Well, Tarn was an excellent figure, and that excellence is preserved here. Bludgeon’s an incredibly flexible robot, he’s got tons of articulation and features, he’s a good design, he transforms into an equally fun tank, it’s all preserved here.

They just put a new head on him, and gave him one extra accessory.

The only way this could be considered a downgrade is if you’ve got an issue with this tooling being really clearly designed as someone else, and given a new head and extra sword to turn him into Bludgeon. But that’s a really dour, unfun way to look at the hobby, and it’s still a very fun figure that works as the character it now represents. And as a fellow skeleton person, he makes a good companion piece for Legacy Skullgrin, a similarly fun, flexible surprise of a toy.

So, yeah. You definitely want to get this guy. Or get Tarn. Or get both, they’re pretty equally good, and probably some of the strongest mainline releases this year that I’ve handled (noting that I don’t generally get the Big Robots). Tarn was a bit shortpacked, and was snapped up pretty fast thanks to who he is and what he’s from, so this version may prove to be the easier one to get, anyway.

For over 100 Bot, Non-Bot, and Retro Bot Reviews, click here to view my archive.