Posted May 27, 2011 at 12:05 am
A few days ago I talked about Roadbuster, and here's Topspin, who's his Wreckers NASCAR buddy. Like Roadbuster, he's named after a guy who was a Wrecker in Generation 1, and he's even in a similar blue-and-white color scheme. It's a nice bit of multiversal symmetry. (The third guy, Leadfoot, is not named after a former Wrecker. It's too bad. "Broadside" really would have fit the red-and-white dude designed to look like a fat bearded man. There's no deluxe Leadfoot known about at the moment, but there's bound to be one later on.)
Topspin's head looks like he has long hair and buck teeth. Take from that what you will.
One of the conceits of the Wreckers (and perhaps Dark of the Moon vehicles as a whole) are that their vehicle modes have these halfsy weaponed-out modes. Roadbuster's toy was "normal," or "stock," as I believe the jargon goes, but Topspin is sculpted into the halfsy weaponed-out mode. His surface is all split and shifted with bits of tech and weaponry poking out. In addition to his MechTech gun (which goes from crossbow gun? to claw), Topspin has four additional 5mm-pegged guns. In robot mode, they all end up on the weird harness behind his shoulders. It's hard to figure out exactly how this harness is supposed to be configured in robot mode, even with the instructions, but I've done my best.
One thing I didn't notice about Topspin until a second pass was that he doesn't have claw hands. It looks like he does, but he has little sculpted "normal" hands underneath them.
The transformation isn't as clean as Roadbuster's, but it's not that much worse, really. It just takes a few extra seconds of wiggling to get him back into vehicle mode from robot mode. It is kind of neat how you layer his arms and legs together underneath the car mode, but still not as intriguing to me as Roadbuster's simple-yet-explodey transformation. That, plus my affection for the "stock" version of the NASCAR alternate mode makes me prefer Roadbuster over Topspin. There's no guarantee they'll do a "normal" Topspin, but if they do, I'll snatch him up. I don't know much about NASCAR, but NASCAR cars do look cool. Certainly more cool than cars in plain colors.
Wheeljack > Sideswipe
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