Review: #311
Name: Bumblebee
Brand: Transformers
Allegiance: Autobot
Line: Hunt for the Decepticons / Autobot Alliance
Year of Release: 2010
Size Class: Deluxe (Wave 1)
Mold Status: new
VEHICLE MODE:
Battle Blade Bumblebee transforms into a yellow Chevrolet Camaro with racing stripes. Despite looks, this is a brand new mold with no reused parts.
This is a good vehicle mode with heaps of detail and barely any visible robot kibble, the only robot bit that sticks out are the robot feet from the back.
Bumblebee has the distinctive Camaro grill, and there's a lot of paint, including the silver rims, headlights and rear lights. His only play value is the ability to roll.
Bumblebee is a Deluxe figure, back when they were still a decent size. Above is him compared to ROTF Brawn.
A fantastic vehicle mode but considering that there were so many Bumblebee toys before this one, getting it right in this mode is no surprise.
TRANSFORMATION:
Battle Blade Bumblebee has the most complex transformation of a Deluxe Bumblebee toy ever. In the designer's strive for extreme accuracy, there are a lot of moving parts. Once you get the general idea, it's not too hard. The legs are heavily based upon the original Movie Bumblebee toy, including the Automorphing feature. The head loves to pop off during transformation, there is barely enough clearance, if any. An impressive transformation but can easily frustrate.
ROBOT MODE:
Bumblebee's robot mode... can be ugly or amazingly accurate, depending on your preferences.
Bumblebee can be almost called a shellforming considering that most of the car are compressed into panels onto his back. That said, there is barely any kibble here.
The headsculpt is accurate to how he looked in the movies, and he has a blue lightpipe.
He features a flip-down battle mask which is really cool. A tip in pulling it down is to lift it up first before pushing it forward to cover his face.
The vehicle grill is split into various parts to mimic the CG character model but it is still a bit off. If the two side pieces to angle down a bit then it would be perfect.
Bumblebee is super poseable but he suffers from the inward facing elbow joints, which limits the number of poses he looks natural in.
The thumbs are for some reason separately jointed. His knees are also double jointed and overall, can look skinny or stretched. He feels a bit more substantial in hand than how photos show, especially with the semi-hollow torso.
Battle Blade Bumblebee is one of the tallest Deluxes you'll ever encounter, taller than even the original.
Bumblebee packs a lot of gimmicks in this mode. In addition to the battle mask, on his left arm is a spring-loaded flip out axe.
The axe is transparent blue but the blade faces upwards which sucks.
His other gimmick is on the right arm, where you can open the arm gauntlet and flip down a cannon barrel, to recreate his arm gun.
Since the barrel is orange and clashes with the black of his obvious folded up hands, the integrated cannon doesn't work as well as you'd hope but still very impressive.
To make the cannon less bulky you can leave the halves of the gauntlet open on either side, so it looks more like a morphed hand.
Bumblebee has large feet with ankles that can tilt, allowing him to balance well.
When posing him, you just have to be careful not to dislodge the grill pieces on his torso as it's very easy to do so.
A fantastic robot mode with nice integrated unobtrusive gimmicks, and an accurate looking robot mode.
OVERALL:
Battle Blade Bumblebee was designed to be the definitive ultimate Bumblebee figure and the designer has succeeded. It's impressive in the amount of engineering, number of parts and number of paint applications, that have went into this figure. This figure is amazingly accurate to the character model of the movie and with three neat gimmicks, Battle Blade Bumblebee is worth purchasing as to this day, there is no other Bumblebee figure that surpasses this one (maybe with the exception of the original Deluxe Bumblebee from 2007... but that might just be because it was the first one).
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