Originally written September 2018, this was another super-early review of mine, and focuses on a pretty remarkable third-party toyline that, sadly, went kaput before its time, after MAAS Toys, who were involved in their production, folded. So this has retroactively become a retrospective, and I’ll update it as I go.

Produced by Mayhem Mekanics, the Unrustables are the result of a successful Kickstarter, a line of transforming robot action figures aimed at the discerning collector. The idea of independently-produced figures like this is that, freed from the needs of mass-marketed, mass-produced figures, smaller studios like Mayhem Mekanics can make complicated, hardy, collector-oriented creations. Of course, being big, complex, and limited-run means they cost more than the average figure.

Before talking about the figures, I also need to point out the impressive amount of fiction around these bikes. Mayhem Mechanics haven’t just created bios, but a whole fictional universe around these characters, called the “Robo Dominion Saga,” available to read about on their site, and which will soon be brought to life in a comic book series, the result of another successful Kickstarter. (2022 Edit: Well, the site doesn’t exist anymore, and the comic book failed to materialize, but I assure you, it was cool)

The current lore centers around a robotic motorcycle gang, each of which has the same body, with a different face for each character. Thus, by including different swappable heads, each set can represent multiple characters. Burley is their current leader, while Iride is a new recruit. The Spector Rogues are our villains, a splinter faction of the gang, and Spector General is their leader. Otomo, is a cypher, with no known backstory yet, though he was designed in homage to the movie Akira.

All photos in this article are courtesy of Marc Daniel, of Venomously Addicted Photography. Check his Facebook page and his Instagram for more amazing pics. (And in 2022, he’s still going strong!)

Regardless of which you pick, the figure itself consists of a motorcycle with a small robot rider. The motorcycle can then convert into a larger robot, with the rider balling up and forming a part of that larger robot’s chest. As mentioned above, Mayhem Mechanics has produced three variations on this figure: Burley/Iride and Spector Rogue/Spector General, still available from multiple online venues, and Otomo, a special, rare version only carried in a few places. Aside from having totally different color schemes, each figure has different faces and accessories, so I’ll talk about what they share in common first.

Rider

First, the motorcycle’s rider. He’s a small guy, standing a few inches tall. If you collect Transformers, he’s around the size of a Legends-class minifigure, or a standard Star Wars figure. Speaking of that, Burley/Iride and Spector’s riders come with two interchangeable heads each, which can be switched by popping them out at the neck. All three of them start with the same head, though, a generic mask-and-visor face that’s very drone-like.

The rider makes up for its simple design by being infinitely more flexible and poseable than other figures his size. They’ve got tons of joints in their arms and legs, and can bend, swivel, and contort into a multitude of poses, both human, and creature-like.

It’s really neat how flexible these guys are. They each have their own small dedicated pack of weapons and accessories, too, which I’ll get into next, along with their other alterations.

Burley/Iride’s rider (pictured above) is a fairly plain grey and black, with a tiny bit of silver and red on his face. His alternate face is a snarling, cigar chomping, mean-looking mug that feels like a character from Nick Roche’s Transformers comics. His unique weapons are a pair of two small pistols he can wield in his open hands, which combine with his insane flexibility for some lovely duel-wielding action. I didn’t even notice them at first, because they clip to the sides of the bike for storage, and blend in easily.

Spector Rogue/Spector General’s rider, seen above, is a much lighter white and grey, save for a little bit of purple paint in their eyes. It still has the same generic, faceplated head, but comes with a different alternate head, a skeletal face with a ridiculously exaggerated row of teeth. Instead of the smaller pistols Burley/Iride came with, this one comes with a larger pair of shotgun-like weapons (seen earlier). What’s cooler, though, is that it also comes with a big, grim-reaper style scythe, with tabs for it to wield it two-handed. The guns can still fit on the sides of the bike’s seat, and the scythe can be mounted in place of one of them, where it resembles a flying flag on the side of the bike.

Otomo, in contrast, is various shades of deep red, with a bit of silver on his faceplate, which consists of just the drone-like head. For accessories, he has what seems to be a red racing gun with a small black flag sticking out of it, and more interestingly, an elaborate, anime-esque shortsword in silver and red (shown earlier) that he can brandish, both of which can also mount on his own bike.

The Burley and Spector riders are also sold separately as “Prospects,” with a large cache of accessories, and while they’re nifty, they’re really a sideshow to the main feature: The bike.

Alternate Mode

A big, bulky motorcycle, the bike looks extremely, impressively solid in person, and has a surprising amount of weight to it. Despite its size, the design itself is sleek. Painted details like a speedometer (present on all three versions) add to the level of detail. In a clever bit of engineering, the large, three-fingered hands of the figure’s larger robot mode can be posed to act like nearly-invisible kickstands, supporting the bike in any pose, letting it rest sideways, or appear to be properly suspended driving (it also rolls really well).

You can seat the rider on the bike, and attach them to the seat by a peg on his back. In fact, it’s a REALLY secure connection, enough that I was surprised at how hard unplugging him from his seat was the first time. Of course, they can also grip the handlebars, or dangerously aim one (or both) of their guns or blades at other riders.

Speaking of guns, there’s a pair of small clips on either side of the bike’s windshield that you can use to clip some each rider’s weapon accessories guns to the front of the bike (I’ll talk more about those when we get to the robot mode.) Clipping weapons onto those connections was an initially terrifying experience due to how tight the connections were, but after handling the figures for awhile, I don’t feel like they’re in any danger of breaking. The clips are also on joints, so you have options for rotating the specific direction of the guns. If I had one aesthetic complaint, it’s that the larger robot form’s head is clearly visible right underneath the cycle’s windshield, though in all fairness, nothing says this motorcycle form was supposed to disguise what it was.

Burley/Iride’s bike is colored in orange, black, and silver, with colors that make me think of a Junkion, and the Unrustable logo on the front of the bike, beneath the windscreen.

Spector Rogue/Spector General on the other hand, like his rider, is very, very white, broken up only by small, conservative amounts of light grey, silver, and the tiniest amounts of purple from the painted details on the bike, in the form of an Unrustables logo that’s been graffiti’d over. When handled wrong, white can make a figure resemble an unfinished prototype. Luckily, they managed to make this white visually striking and stark in person.

Otomo does the same thing, replacing a varied colorscheme with different shades of deep red. Otomo’s even plainer than Spector, with no painted logos or other details aside from the speedometer. However, it comes with a unique addition that only it has: A large sheet of decals you can apply to the motorcycle to make it more visually interesting. There’s no set way to apply them, it’s meant to have your own unique touch. These stickers consist of various alien faction logos, and graffiti. One thing that’s caused a bit of controversy is that a number of these stickers use an odd font to hide a lot of swear words on them. If that isn’t your pace, or if you prefer the stark red, though, you can always leave them off. And on that note, onto the transformation:

Transformation

Basically, the rider balls up into a large chest piece, and the bike unfolds into a humanoid robot around it, with the rider forming its core. Right off the bat, I’ll note that the figure doesn’t have any instructions, meaning you either need to figure it out yourself, or watch an official Youtube video depicting the conversion process (plus a few other features). I wound up playing the video at 0.25 speed to figure it out, though, in hindsight, at the time I was worried about breakage, but after the fact, I can safely say that the figure is durable enough that you could try figuring it out on your own without damaging the piece.

There’s some nifty twists, like the way the large robot basically does the splits to form the bike, with each wheel winding up on its thighs. Getting it back into bike mode is much more challenging, as it’s harder to collapse a figure than expand it, and there’s a lot of tabs that need to be lined up, though you’ll know when you have it, since the tabs are all very solid, and both transformations involve moments where it feels like everything pops into place at once. Still, I recommend having some big photos of the bike mode handy, or making an effort to memorize where all the parts go in bike mode. The first time I transformed one of the bikes back, I cheated a bit by pulling out another, un-transformed bike for reference to where everything was supposed to go.

Robot Mode

Once you’re done, you have a tall, solid robot that brims with personality. The figure’s roughly the size of one of the smaller Transformers Masterpiece cars, so there’s some substantial mass to it.

But it’s that personality that stands out the most, and is hard to quantify. Even when the bot’s just standing in a neutral pose, there’s tons of character. And it’s nearly as poseable as its rider, all the way down to articulated, three-fingered hands.

More importantly than that, though, it’s stable, and stays standing with no trouble, which can be an issue with other, more spindly bike-forming robots.

Burley/Iride and Spector feature swappable heads, to represent multiple characters. One thing that some might find challenging: Swapping these faces requires you to unscrew them, meaning you’ll need a small screwdriver. I happened to have one, but it still took me by surprise. Basically, these faces aren’t something you’ll casually swap. Burley/Iride’s face out of the box is a black helmet with a skull spraypainted on it. It’s supposed to represent Burley wearing a facemask, but to me, it changes the figure into a haunted machine with a ghost in it, more of a Specter than his evil counterpart, demanding to be posed menacingly reaching towards you.

Burley’s standard robot face, meanwhile, has a scar, a big nose, and menace. The other two faces transform the figure into Iride, who’s standard face is a more straightforward humanoid robot, with a mask-down face full of green windows that make me think of a drone.

I’m a fan of the Iride face myself, as it reads as more of a neutral robot.

Despite being the same body, it’s amazing how different Spector Rogue/Spector General feels, thanks to itstwo different heads. The out-of-the-box one, the General themself, is a curious design, a pair of eyes peering out from behind a clear dome, with a scowl-like mask over the mouth. It instinctively feels to me like the face of a cartoony 80’s bad guy, a totally different vibe from the characters the figure represented in the original Burly/Iride set.

The other face, one of the generic Rogues, is the complete opposite, a nearly featureless mask with a pair of eyeholes, splashed with purple paint in a way that makes it look kind of freaky. Whereas the first head made me think of an 80s cartoon, this one makes me think of an 80s horror movie.

Otomo, by contrast, only has a single head, a redeco of Burley’s mask-down face that removes the skill decal, turning it into a featureless black helmet that suggests a rider wearing a motorcycle helmet, some sort of automated drone, or even a Boba-Fett-Esque mysterious bounty hunter. As for the rest of the accessories, each figure comes with a big pile of weapons.

Before going into accessories, I’ll note that Marc swapped them around pretty freely in these pictures, and threw in some duplicates, due to accessory packs, so the photos aren’t indicative of what each solo bike comes with. Burley/Iride’s weapons are cast in grey and black, with silver highlights. Aside from the two tiny guns for the rider, it comes with two larger pistols for the robot, a pair of longer, rifle-like guns, and a very Gears of War-esque chainsaw-gun (doubled up thanks to an accessory kit below.)

Each of these contains handles with tabs that let them securely fit into their hands, though the fingers grip them so tightly, it may not have even been necessary. The chainsaw-gun-thing has two handles, so they can hold it two-handed. All of these weapons use those same clips from his bike mode, which are now on his back, for storage, though you can only store two at a time. Another curious inclusion exclusive to Burley/Irideis a pair of swappable chest panels (which end up on the small rider’s thighs when it’s not combined). They usually featurelessly blend into the robot’s chest, but can be swapped for more visually distinct black vent patterns. I’m not sure why, exactly, but hey, more customization options, though it’s not something I miss on the other two.

Spector Rogue/Spector General has an entirely different set of weapons, cast in light grey, with a few black and silver bits. They now come with a single long gun, the same length as the ones with Burley/Iride, but of a different, rounded design.

They also come with a brutal-looking sawblade on the end of a pole (again, doubled up above via a kit), which spins, and seems perfectly paired with the 80’s-slasher-film face of the Rogue.

They also come with a long-handled axe, but I’m not really sure how it’s supposed to be used. There’s no obvious tabs to fit it anywhere on it, like the other accessories, though this one’s hands can grip it tight enough to hold, anyway.

Otomo, like their deco, is much simpler, coming only with a single large weapon, though it’s a doozie: A big, giant cleaver of a sword, in silver, red and black, looking like something Cloud Strife would use. It fits snugly in their hands, and the figure is stable enough to swing around and hold in dynamic, anime-esque poses.

Meanwhile, if you want a more complete set of accessories, Mayhem Mechanics also created a good, old-fashioned weapon booster set for the bikes, containing every piece of equipment all three possess, in more neutral colors.

Final Thoughts

My two biggest takeaways from this figure are how solid and durable the whole thing feels, and how much personality and character each version gives off. This figure definitely feels like a labor of love by its creators, people who just want to make the coolest figures they can. It costs, but you can see where the money is going. There’s really nothing like it on the market right now, and if any part of its design appeals to you, you’ll enjoy it.

Let me be clear: This is an amazing piece, worth owning some version of. It’s tough to say which version of this figure I like more, though. Burley/Iride’s colors are lively, while Spector is striking and stark in their elegant simplicity, and comes with, arguably, more creative accessories. I tend to gravitate more toward heroes, myself, which makes me favor the original, but then again, who’s to say if Otomo is hero, villain, or someone else? I’d say Otomo looks kind of plain compared to the other two, but they went and included stickers with him, so you can busy him up yourself. Really, you can’t go wrong with any of them.

As for the future of this line, concepts and prototypes have been shown for several more figures, ranging from motorcycles to armored cars. They all use the same idea of “small rider combines with larger vehicle to make a super robot,” and all seem to have places in that same fictional universe, which will be detailed in that upcoming comic series. Given the strength of their first release, and how much passion they seem to be pouring into this one, I look forward to what they make next. (2022 note: Ooof. Big, big oof at this entire paragraph)

Alright, so, this was all the company would manage to put out. There were plans for a black Snake-Eyes inspired repaint of this tooling, and a Kickstarter for a second bike-robo tooling, as well as several other CGI renders, but they all wound up getting canned with the death of MAAS toys, who were manufacturing them. It’s a shame, because these were a really neat idea, and very well-executed. Honestly, several online retailers still have them sitting in stock, and if the design looks cool to you, good news, the figure itself is really well-made.