Bot Reviews: Transformers: Legacy Deluxe Skids

Does Skids even qualify as “obscure” anymore? I feel like he has a reputation as being “the obscure guy,” despite being an early G1 gharacter in a franchise with far deeper cuts. He has a Masterpiece figure now, even!

Sure, his original figure was released in unusually limited quantities around 1984 and 1985 (and for its Japanese release, only in a multipack with Sunstreaker and Buzzsaw), but it’s been reissued three times since then, so it’s not hard to get one. And sure, he only got two lines of dialogue in his two brief appearances in the original animated series, but if you were reading the Marvel comics, he actually got a lot of panel-time across quite a few issues, culminating in a whole issue to himself, where he tried to abscond with his duties as a soldier, and lead a simple life with a cowgirl companion.

Since then, he’s mostly known for having a big, central role in IDW’s More Than Meets The Eye and Lost Light comics, as an amnesiac secret agent with the talent of learning any skill really quickly (funny enough, that comic sometimes riffed on the idea that he was obscure a fair amount, despite that already being unearned).

His previous Thrilling 30 figure was even specifically based on his design in these books, though it’s a tooling I was never super-fond of, due to how overcomplicated the whole thing is.

This new figure, released right at the start of Legacy, is the first new mainline Skids to be based on his classic look, and as a Marvel G1 and More Than Meets The Eye-liker, I was after him to serve two different purposes. Well, three, since I get to see what a proper mainline Legacy Deluxe is going to be like.

Robot Mode

Right out of the box, the first thing I thought about this figure was that he was a brick. I’m not talking about the G1 definition of brick, where it means no articulation. He’s got plenty. I meant brick in that he’s a condensed slab of plastic, in a good way. I think a part of it is that, at least on this copy, his joints are bizarrely tight. Not so tight that I feel like I’m going to break anything, but enough that I actually have to exert effort to move them. Still, it’s not a bad problem to have, and when you combine it with a figure that mostly avoids looking hollow (okay, his legs are, but that’s where some of those really tight joints come in), he manages to feel more substantial than I was expecting.

And in this era where so many people are wringing their hands over shrinking budgets, and shrinking figures, it’s good to see (and feel) something like that. His backpack and door wings are also entirely made out of transparent plastic, but it feels like a thick, hardy variety of it, so I’m not especially worried about breakage.

It’s funny, I spent the whole intro talking about how Skids is not really “obscure,” but the fact that Skids is barely in the cartoon, and Marvel was notorious for inconsistency when it came to character designs, means that there’s less impetus to adhere to a specific model, or at the very least, there’s less of one in my head. I tend to think of the original ‘84 figure when I think of Skids, since I briefly owned a copy of it back in the mid-2010’s (while trying to assemble some of the MTMTE cast). So, this version of Skids is very much that original figure, but larger, and made more humanoid in proportion, including, critically, his shoulders being at standard height, instead of weirdly low on his torso like the toy, comic, and cartoon did, though there’s enough joints in the shoulders that you can make them sag, if you really want.

Skids is really the platonic ideal of a Car Robot, so it’s a pretty straightforward design, with a hood-chest, door-wings, a roof for his backpack (sunk a bit lower than on the G1 figure), and lower legs made out of the back of the car (oh, also, there’s a little nifty trick here that I appreciate, where his rear wheels actually fold into his feet, another engineering quirk copied from the original release.)

Straightforward isn’t bad, though, and he wears the traditional design pretty dynamically.

Uptop, his head looks to be more or less based on his G1 animation model (or rather, whatever source the Masterpiece used), depicting him as a stern, determined ‘bot in a helmet, and manages to look like the good kind of generic. Something interesting about the sculpt that I didn’t clock until he was in hand was that the panel behind his head isn’t a separate piece, but is tooled into the back of his head, in order to avoid it colliding.

I always loved the G1 Skids figure’s colors, and I’m glad to see they modeled this one’s deco more on that than the show and comic look, which basically means he’s mostly dark blue, rather than a lighter shade. Outside of that, he’s black, silver, and red, all of which contrast really nicely against that blue. He’s also got a bit of yellow (his headlights), light blue (his eyes), and transparent blue (his windows). It looks good, in a very vintage 70s/80s robot way.

It’s true that there’s no attempt to replicate the toy’s stickers, making the deco a bit plainer by default, but what’s there looks good, and complete, with the only thing that feels off being his hands, which really ought to be red, instead of black (hm, I’m having Studio Series Bee Movie Ratchet flashbacks).

I already raved about how tight and sturdy the whole figure feels, and that comes with plenty of articulation, too.

His huge feet are on ankle tilts, his wrists swivel, the built-in panel on his head lets it rotate, he’s got movable door-wings, there’s a lot going on here. Interestingly, thanks to a transformation joint, he has a kind of reverse-ab-crunch, where he can bend backwards at the waist.

And the fact that these joints are all so tight means that it’s easy to put him in gravity-defying poses, and have him stay in them.

I do kind of feel like his shoulders are oddly-articulated, though, thanks to the placement of the joints (one attached to the torso, one inside the shoulder wheel, one right below the wheel, on his bicep) and have a tendency to splay out into odd-looking arrangements as I pose them.

For features, Skids has got three accessories, making me glad we’re past the Siege days of feeling like these guys were under-armed. The first two are silver-painted guns, a single and double-barreled one respectively, based on the missile launcher and double-barrelled weapon the original figure came with.

They can fit in his hands, but for bonus classic fidelity, can also fit into his forearms, like on the original figure (and in most of his classic media appearances.) If I had one criticism here, it’s that I’d rather they plugged into the sides of his forearms, but the pegs are on the tops of his forearms (though, to be fair, the original figure also did this, it’s just that his arms were permanently turned sideways.)

His third accessory’s a new one for the character, instead of the original’s third gun, he’s got a a translucent blue energy axe, though it’s also got a peg on the bottom so that Skids can hold it like another gun, instead.

This is one of Legacy’s new features, with every non-repackaged release coming with at least one energy weapon (Laser Prime’s sword and Pizza-axe were two examples), the idea being that you can combine them into multi-weapon assemblies. Just on his own, though, Skids has got a lot of different possible combinations between these three weapons, which are all sculpted to peg into each other in a few different ways, including a big multi-barreled stack, making him surprisingly armed up for the daydreaming scientist he’s usually characterized as (though it fits the the secret agent from IDW).

Including the ports on his forearms, he’s got seven total mounting points across his body, a little slim, but definitely workable if you’ve got more weapons to mount (or more -Izers).

Transformation

The broad strokes of this transformation are just as straightforward as a classic G1 carformer: Fold his hood up, his arms into his body, and his feet forwards, before belly-flopping him. The most interesting twist is this kind of flex-and-compression his torso does to shorten him a bit. Me, I’m a simple guy, who enjoys flipping the wheels in and out of his feet.

That compression into a compact car mode does have a bit of a drawback, though: If you don’t line everything up just right, his roof won’t sit flush in his alternate mode. I recommend making sure to plug the back of the roof into the back of his thighs before closing him up, rather than trying to make it connect after the fact.

I also recommend making sure the backs of his forearms are plugged into the pegs on his torso, it can be a bit hard to figure out, since the pegs are black-on-black, and the holes are hidden in forearm details.

Still, I think the important thing here is that it’s a “forgiving” transformation that’ll mostly still work if you don’t nail all these quirks, and just hit the obvious broad strokes, rather than any kind of shellformer-y “it has to fit or it won’t work” deal. The roof might just not quite be aligned.

Vehicle Mode

Anyway, while I called Skids a brick in robot mode, he’s really a brick in this alternate mode, in that he’s a dense rectangular object, one that holds together very solidly.

One of the most commonly-said things about Skids is that his alternate mode isn’t a van, but a Honda City Turbo, a compact car not often seen outside of Japan. And, considering this is supposed to be an unlicensed approximation, it’s surprising how close it is to the G1 original. Like, the specific lines on his trunk and hood are different, but broadly speaking, it looks like the original, though not quite to the “are they gonna get sued?” level of Studio Series 86 Jazz. The funny thing about his scale, though, is that he looks like a compact car in isolation, but compared to modern Deluxe cars, he’s still pretty large.

Whatever he is, he’s nicely sculpted, and out of all the car-specific details he’s got, it’s the sunroof that I find the most interesting.

The colors are kind of a mix of highlights and lowlights. He’s still a really nice-looking mix of dark blue, with red stripes lined in silver along the sides, a silver grill with an autobrand above it up front, and painted upper and lower headlights in yellow and red, specifically. It’s around back that we run into an issue: The back of the car’s totally unpainted.

I guess the budget did manage to catch up with him, after all. Taillights, bumper, even what I’d presume is a rear window is all blank blue. It’s giving me flashbacks to that era around 2011 when paint apps were slashed to deal with a cost-of-materials increase, since it’s been so long since I’ve seen an unpainted car rear. At least his extremely cubic shape means it’s not as noticeable from most angles as a normal, rounded car. What is noticeable is his unpainted black wheels, though, which give me further flashbacks.

Speaking of his wheels, for features, those rear wheel roll pretty well, but the front wheels are kind of odd. Basically, the inner half of each wheel doesn’t roll, and there’s a split halfway down the tire, the idea being the outer half does the rolling. Only, between the tightness of the wheel, and the fact that, like, half of it drags, he doesn’t really roll, only the back wheels spin, the front half scrape, which is kind of disappointing.

A positive that I wasn’t expecting, though, is that his doors open like a regular car’s, though there’s a robot folded up underneath.

It’s not quite on the level of the G1 toy’s doors-and-trunk combo, but it’s more than I was expecting!

His other feature in this form is his weapons ports, in the form of one on each side, near the back, and one uptop, perfect for pegging in all three of his weapons….

…or combining them into that three-weapon stack.

His energy axe, thanks to its shape, can only turn into a kind of additional thruster or exhaust pipe, though, unless you make it part of the Stack.

Overall

Two in a row, after last week’s Legacy Blaster, I’ve run into a figure that I got to fill a role on a shelf that wound up going unexpectedly hard on their own merits. Skids is a surprisingly solid, chunky, tight-feeling robot, that manages to capture the specific energy of his G1 figure really well, and has an impressive amount of stuff going on in his robot mode. And that’s capped with a fun transformation, and a good-looking alternate mode. The only flaws he has are in that alternate mode, and even then, it’s missing rear deco and wonky wheels, flaws that can’t really take away the good energy this guy has.

I don’t know how the rest of Legacy’s Deluxes will fare (I think this’ll be a light line for me, honestly), but this is an unusually strong start, right out of the gate, who, again, impressed me way more than I was expecting. If you’re just after a solidly-engineered carformer, this is your definitely-not-obscure guy. That, or the upcoming black repaint with a new head, Burn-Out, in Wal-Mart’s Velocitron line, though I hope that one doesn’t lose the tight joints on this guy.

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