Sometimes, I can be a bit of a hypocrite. You see, there’s been plenty of times across my 200-plus reviews where I’ve railed against the modern churn of Transformers, where we just see the same characters getting new figures with incremental improvements, and how that Ouroboros of perpetual updates is something I’m trying to avoid buying into.
Yeah, the new one’s a really good figure. But so was the old one!
Well, I bought into this one, mostly out of my love for the Bumblebee movie, and the bots that are in it, including the leading role.
A representation of how the Bee Movie made me feel after five Bayverse films.
See, 2018’s Bumblebee movie wasn’t just a good Transformers film for me, it was a whole moment. I got to see the movie early as part of a set of special screenings designed to drum up word of mouth, and just going to the cinema to watch a non-Bayverse live-action Transformers film, one that was actually good, and pleasant in tone, one with a real emotional arc for its leading lady, it was probably one of the happier Transformers memories for me as a fan. I’d go see it two other times, and generally evangelize it to my friends as much as possible. And my wife still considers it the best of the movies! It’s not a perfect film by any stretch, but it was just…good and pleasant. And like any merchandise-poisoned Transformers fan, it made me want figures of the robots.
Yeah, about that.
However, the Studio Series figure of the new VW Bumblebee (pictured above) was pretty instantly disliked by a lot of collectors, for a few reasons. Like all the other initial Bee movie figures, production lead times meant that it was actually designed based on concept art, rather than his finished appearance in the film, so it was something of a poor likeness of the movie’s lead Autobot. And on top of that, it just had a reputation for being a fiddly, overcomplicated, messy figure, one that was really hard to transform, and just not very fun.
I still owned three of him at one point.
Personally, while I thought that the first Studio Series figure had a lot of problems, I still, oddly, liked it. In fact, I liked it enough to, at one time, have three different repaints of it, and today, I’ve still got the fancy Takara Premium Finish version, reviewed here. I just think he’s neat! But even I’ll admit there was room for improvement, which is exactly what we’ve now got, with this brand-new Deluxe-class do-over. Notably, this is actually the very first time Studio Series, in its eight (!) years of existence, had done a straight-up “same movie, same character, same body” redo of a design, though recent reveals have shown that it’s not going to be the last time.
Next up: A newer, bigger Age of Extinction Grimlock. I guess eight years is long enough to redo this former Wave 1 figure.
There’s another important angle to this New Bee, too: He’s actually apparently an extensive retool of the older one, so extensive, that most of the figure is different, with only a few of the car parts being the same, sort of like a reverse-reshell. That makes him different enough to treat as a fresh figure, while also meaning he has the potential for some of that “made a new figure on a retool budget” jank as Studio Series Rise of the Beasts Optimus, and Legacy Cosmos. Let’s see how he holds up.
Robot Mode
Bro thinks he can fly.
Let’s start with the backpack, because that’s been a point of contention since we first saw photos of this new version of Bumblebee. So, the original Studio Series figure of this design gave him doors sticking out of the sides of his backpack like wings, the same as most of the earlier Bayverse Bumblebee designs. This was because all of the concept art of this film’s design kept those door wings, whereas the finalized CGI model in the actual movie had them fold away into his back. Even the Movie Masterpiece figure they did of this Bee gave him the door-wings!
And this was the “we have tons of budget to do it exactly how we want” figure!
So, the new one not having those was probably the biggest thing people wanted from a re-do. And he sort of does it? Okay, so, in the box, and in most of the promo pics, this new one still has door wings.
“Look, I’m you!”
But this version of the figure puts them on little swivels, and the instructions even show them rotated inwards, into the backpack, out of the way.
They tell you to do this.
And that makes them a little less visible, but not totally tucked away. He’s basically just got a wide upside-down triangle behind him now.
It’s kind of like a wingsuit.
However, after fiddling with him for awhile, I found a better solution: Unfold the flipped-in edges of the doors, rotate them so they’re directly facing upwards, and then fold them down flat against his backpack.
Like this!
This new position makes them far less visible from the front, avoids adding too much mass to his backpack (hence me unfolding the ends of the doors), and even imitates where they end up on the onscreen design. Doing it this way made me like this guy so much better.
And there he is!
Anyway, flipping him around to the front…Yep, that’s him, that’s the guy, the sweet boy from the movie. He’s got the sideways VW headlights, the big stompy sneakers, all the little details of his screen model.
The scale here’s wonky, but the Actor Allusion’s worth it.
He’s not 100 percent accurate to his onscreen design, though. He’s got wheels on his shoulders that ought to be on his backpack, and he’s got some vehicle mode parts hanging around his lower legs, but he feels like he’s 90 percent there. More importantly, the vibes are there.
Soak it in.
This design just feels correct, and has the spirit of the character right. He’s got closed fists, instead of the splayed fingers of the first Studio Series version, and I feel like they did that mostly so he could do the Breakfast Club Fist Pump gesture from the movie.
My kind of screen-accuracy!
It’s interesting, comparing this Bee to the first Studio Series figure of the design, because most of the actual sculpted details are the same, with only the door wings, and the details on his abdomen being flipped around as the differences.
Similar, yet not.
Instead, what’s changed on the new one mostly comes down to proportions. Basically, the new one’s less person-shaped, and more chibi-fied. He’s a bit shorter, a lot stockier, his legs are shorter and wider (especially around the feet), his arms are beefier, his torso wider and more squat, and his head’s larger. And it works! It turns him into the Movie Guy, whereas the old one was more of a stylized, traditionally heroic take.
Man of Cuteness versus Man of Action.
Speaking of that, the new guy’s got a really good headsculpt, that perfectly captures the “Bayverse, but softer and friendlier” vibes of the design. Having a larger head gave them room to add more detail, I think.
Much less sinister than some of the Bayverse takes.
Outside of the car parts on his lower legs, and the shoulder wheels, his backpack does stick out a bit, even with my fixes, but those car parts had to go somewhere.
Ehh, good enough.
A more obvious eyesore on him is how hollow his lower legs are, with a honeycomb of holes on the inside edges of them. That retool budget had to hit him somewhere, I guess. At least there’s a vague gesture towards stylizing the holes to look like an intentional (if inaccurate) part of his design.
She’s telling him not to be self-conscious about his hollow legs.
He’s also, technically, got holes in his upper arms, but they’re harder to notice.
Alternate ending where he doesn’t scan a new altmode.
For colors, I’ll start by saying the same thing I say every time I review a live-action-movie Studio Series figure: The designs from these movies have too much going on with their colors to do on a standard retail budget, and the best we can hope for is for the deco to hit the important highlights. And on Bumblebee, it does! He’s mostly two tones. A mustardy yellow, and a metallic gray. It’s a good, accurate shade of yellow, something other versions of the design have struggled with (like the Premium Finish version).
No two primary colors are the same amongst these VW Bees.
There’s also bits of light gray, and tiny accents of silver, orange, and blue for his eyes.
I just like pairing these two up.
I think the reason that the deco looks so complete is that all the yellow and gray each go where they’re supposed to, and the film model’s extra colors are limited to little tiny flourishes of silver here and there, and some wear, tear, and weathering, so it doesn’t feel like he’s missing much of anything at this scale and fidelity. They even managed to find the budget to place a tiny, millimeter-tall Autobrand on his forehead, something the Premium Finish repaint of the original figure couldn’t manage!
To be clear, I colored the forehead symbol in on my Premiun Finish version with a Gundam marker.
His build quality is another improvement over the first Studio Series figure. Everything on him holds together, and feels sturdy and solid, whereas the previous release had hands that loved to fall off, a removable arm that came off too easily, and a general feeling of fiddliness that isn’t present on the new guy. Well, okay, the new guy’s backpack doesn’t actually clip into his back, the way the first one did, it just kind of hangs there on hinges, but they’re tight enough that the whole assembly stays in place. Plus, if you transform his doors the way I suggested earlier, it secures the whole thing extra-well.
Stable enough to lean on!
I do have a concern about how many of his points of articulation are now ball joints, only because of how those sometimes loosen with time. He’s fine after a few weeks of ownership, but years down the line, a layer of crazy glue, or floor polish, could easily be needed.
Imagine he’s got toast in his mouth.
Speaking of articulation, this is one area where he seemingly got hit with the “we made him on a retool budget instead of a full figure budget” stick, because he’s missing at least one obvious joint. Specifically, he doesn’t have a waist joint at all, his whole lower abdomen’s one solid piece, with a bracket to hold his legs screwed into the back. At least, I assume it’s a budget thing, though I know of at least one other instance of a modern Transformer missing obvious articulation points due to transformation stability concerns (Studio Series Bee Movie Shockwave, if you’re curious), so that could also be the reason. Either way, the missing waist joint’s a bit of a drag, but in hand, something I find myself not caring about as much as I thought I would. It helps that the rest of him’s got plenty of articulation.
What if he’d watched Karate Kid instead of The Breakfast Club?
He’s got ball-jointed ankles, swivel knees, universal hips with enough rotation on them to cancel out the need for a thigh swivel, ball-jointed elbows and shoulders, and a ball-jointed head with enough range on it to look up and down a generous amount. Basically, he still manages to feel really bendy and expressive, waist or no waist. I suppose another budget limit might also be the fact that he doesn’t have any wrist swivels, something there’s no reason not to include here. Again, I don’t miss them too much.
It feels wrong for him to have this.
For features and accessories, they cut one, but kept the others. Let’s start with what he’s got. Firstly, to replicate the way his arm morphs into a blaster in the film, he comes with a gray-and-yellow piece that fits into his fist, and over his forearm. It replaces the swappable arm on the old version, and results in a bigger, meaner-looking cannon.
He probably just uses it to shoot tin cans or something.
Despite what some of the stock art out there shows, it only fits on his right arm, unless you want to put it upside-down onto his left one.
Like so.
Next, he’s got his short little arm-blade.
A singular Knife Hand.
It works the same way as the old version, pegging into two holes on either one of his forearms, but it’s a new sculpt, with a properly-shaped blade.
En garde!
The connection points are a different size than the old one, though, so he’s lost that neat feature where the weapon was compatible with the Studio Series Offroad Bumblebee/Cliffjumper/B-127 family of toolings. What you can do, though, is clip the blade onto the bottom of his gun-arm like a bayonet, thanks to a peg meant for storage.
In case he wants to re-enact the civil war.
That storage is the other thing you can do with his weapons. Storage solutions aren’t really exciting, but I appreciate when they’re there.
I forgot to take a photo of his weapon storage, so enjoy a fight scene!
In this case, his arm blade clips onto the gun-arm, and also acts as an adapter to stick the assembly onto a couple of pegs on his backpack. It’s a more stable bit of storage than on the old figure, but also you need to have the backpack in one of the official wings-out configurations for it to work.
The battle continues!
Luckily, there’s another undocumented bit of storage. His gun arm also has a little peg on top, and it can plug into a port on his, well, backside, to stash it there, leaving the arm blade free to plug into his backpack on its own, skinny enough to have the doors nestled over it in my unofficial configuration.
By god, thats Charlie’s walk-on music!
Oh! And Bee’s fists are 5-Millimeter compatible, so you can have him hold accessories from most other modern figures, too.
He raided Jhiaxus’s armory.
What this Bee’s missing, though, is an unusual, neat feature that the original figure had, where you could pop his face off, and swap it out for his battle mask from the film.
“Can I borrow that?” “You really can’t.”
That’s not present on this version, and that’s a shame, because it stops him from being the Complete Bumblebee Experience (™), since he used the battle mask a fair amount in the movie, once the weapons came out. Still, if he has to have only one headsculpt, I’d rather have his unmasked one than his masked version.
He’s gonna try to fight him for it, and fail.
You can pop his head off the balljoint easily enough, which made me check if there were any other compatible Bee Movie figures with masked heads, but the only figure that has one, Studio Series B-127, has a differently-sized neck joint (according to a friend with both, I’ve since sold mine), so you’re really stuck when it comes to the masked head, unless there’s a retool some time in the future. For now, it gives me an excuse to keep the old tooling, since it can be the Battle Mask Version.
The impossible rematch.
Transformation
One of the big sticking points of the first Studio Series Bumblebee was how complicated and difficult his transformation was. I know people, in fact, who never once managed to successfully get him into vehicle mode at all! And yeah, I had a pretty bad time when I first got him, too, but eventually got the knack for it. These days, I have no problems with that transformation. But still, I know it’s a lot. So, I’m happy to report that the new Bee’s transformation is significantly easier. Now, it’s still not the simplest thing. He’s still a shellformer, where, in the abstract, you’re unfolding most of a car from his backpack, scrunching up the robot mode, and fitting the car parts around him, hoping everything lines up enough for those panels to close.
It starts like this.
But, beyond unfolding that backpack, nearly every step of his transformation is at least a little bit different, clearly with an eye to making it easier. To put it in perspective, I actually got him transformed on my first try, but as of now, I still struggle for a bit to get all his car parts lined up and closed. My biggest sticking point is his robot legs, as I’ve found getting them to sit flush under his roof, and having that roof also stay plugged into his feet takes a bit of massaging, but I’ve found it helps if you save shutting his doors for the last step, and lining everything else up first.
I usually make closing these the last step.
Bottom line, if the old one was a 10/10 on the difficulty scale, this one’s like an 8.5. Easier than the original, easier than Studio Series Rise of the Beasts Mirage, easier than Studio Series Last Knight Hot Rod, but harder than, say, Netflix Bumblebee.
Left to right, hardest to easiest.
Vehicle Mode
Beep, beep!
At the end of it all, we get that once-impossible dream, an officially licensed VW Bug altmode, a little bit larger than the Netflix one, but still a bit small by Deluxe Car standards.
More than just an upscaling.
And at a glance, it looks 100 percent identical to the previous Studio Series version. This is fine, though, because it was already perfectly screen-accurate.
To make one thing clear, the yellows on these guys are doing that thing where they look mismatched in photos, but not in person.
In fact, this is the mode where the two figures visibly share the most parts. Specifically, the new one has the same hood, windshield, roof, rear windshield, and front doors as the old one. I think it also has the same trunk and rear bumper pieces, or they’re good facsimiles.
I dunno, you tell me.
Near as I can tell, every other piece, including the wheels and headlights, are new tooling, same with the entire robot.
The dinged paint on the doorhandle gives him personality.
This is a nicely-detailed altmode, with lots of sculpted-in flourishes, like door handles, windshield wipers, one sideview mirror (which is accurate!), a little VW logo on the hood, and four more on his hubcaps, the works. They really got their money’s worth with that license. One slight difference on this version is that his wheels sit a little bit further down below him, a little less snugly than on the old version. I’m not sure which version’s more real-life accurate, it’s just a curious little difference.
“Hop in, Charlie.” “I don’t think this scale is-” “I said. Hop. In.”
There’s also a little more visible undercarriage on this new one, in that his arms hang down a bit. On the flipside, his head’s still located on his underside in the exact spot where Charlie saw it in the film.
A great moment of simultanious toy and screen accuracy.
For colors, this is a mainline figure, so it’s not hitting all of the silver highlights of my Premium Finish one, but comparing it to photos of the original mainline release, it seems to have almost the exact same set of colors, with the only difference being that the new one’s headlights are painted silver, while the old ones were cast in clear plastic.
They compromised.
So, he’s mostly that same shade of yellow, with some good color matching between the painted and plastic bits, with light gray bumpers, head and taillights painted silver, orange and red, wheels in black with silver hubcaps, and most impressively, windshield wipers picked out in black. The only downgrade on him is his windows. Most of them are clear plastic, but the ones at his rear doors are opaque gray.
The mismatch bugs me, honestly.
I’m not a fan of totally clear windows on a Transformer, because they just show robot stuff on the inside of him, but I’m less of a fan of inconsistency, so I’d have liked them either all clear, or all opaque on this guy, instead of a mix (the best option, in my opinion, is clear, but heavily tinted windows).
Optimus is missing his trailer, but Bee’s the wrong model of car, anyway.
Bee’s build quality in this mode is adequate, but mixed. Like any shellformer, he’s riddled with seams, and sometimes, those seams get a bit gappy. This is definitely the kind of car mode I pick up, and then immediately squeeze and massage, to tighten his parts up, especially around the back of him, where his trunk meets his windshield piece.
I know I’ve gotten everything more flush than it is here before.
But it’s an aesthetic thing, and he actually holds together nice and sturdy. If he has any problem, it’s his rear wheels, which sometimes rotate a bit inwards or outwards, thanks to his transformation, and need adjusting.
Sometimes, they do this, like his suspension gave out.
It’s a problem the original didn’t have, but not much of a problem, since the joints they’re on are decently tight.
Time for the rematch, in altmode.
For features, once you get his wheels flat, he does roll nicely. My right rear wheel’s a little tight, but still manages to spin.
Shatter’s getting the heck outta there.
The only other thing he’s got going on is accessory storage, and it’s another case of a downgrade from the previous figure. The older model could actually stash his gun-arm, blade, and battle mask underneath his car mode, in a way that was (mostly) invisible, and still let him roll.
As seen here.
That storage isn’t present on this new version. Instead, you clip the blade to the rear bumper, and the gun-arm to the blade, and tow them behind him, the same way the Movie Masterpiece version did it.
This time, I remembered the photo.
While I guess it’s good that there’s some kind of storage on him, I usually just leave his accessories in the parts bin in this mode.
Overall
Out of my limited selection of Lisenced Studio Series Carbots, he’s the strongest one by far.
I really, really like this figure, warts and all. Sure, he doesn’t have a waist joint, or a battle mask, and his backpack still isn’t as clean as it probably could be (well, until I figured out a better way to configure it), and he’s still a bit tricky to transform, but, honestly, everything else about him is aces.
These two pair nicely, even if they’re extremely non-canon.
He looks great, he’s fun to pose and roll and play around with, and he just looks and feels like the Guy from the Thing, the lead character from a movie that was a whole happy moment in time for me. He’s got the spirit of the character, in a way the original release didn’t. On a technical level, let’s break it down. Here’s what the first Studio Series figure does better:
-It’s more poseable
-It has a swappable battle mask
-It has better accessory storage in altmode
-All of its car mode windows are identical.
The Battle Mask means I’m not getting rid of the old one.
And as for the new figure? Literally everything else is an objective improvement over the old one, in my books.
Already have a VW-former? Get another!
I guess the moral of the story is that the Ouroboros of Perpetual Updates is bad, except when they do characters I really like. So, I’m going to go out on a limb, and recommend this guy to everyone who likes Bumblebee The Movie, and Bumblebee The Guy From The Movie, even if you’ve got the older version. That one can be the battle mask variant! Everybody wins! Buy him!
The vibes are just there, man.
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