So we've waxed about NYCC Bumblebee and Arcee, but the figurines of Jack Darby and Raf Esquivel who come with them are enticing to me as well.  I like toys of humans, okay?  I will forever desire toys of Robot-Master, Bomber Bill, and the Mechanic.  I've bought lots of live-action-style Transformers (again) because they were repackaged with human characters!  I imported Kicker.  And I am actually a little angry we never got toys of Sari Sumdac or the Angry Archer.

I like the characters in Transformers stories.  And many of those characters are humans.  It makes sense to me.

Like Arcee and Bumblebee, Jack and Raf here are going to be released later to retail, though of course not in this NY-specific deco.  Jack has a New York t-shirt, which is cool, but Raf seems to have a white New York ... sweater vest.   That sounds especially not real.   I would love to be proved wrong, though.  And then lose however many dollars it takes to get one.  I will totally cosplay at BotCon next year as New York sweater vest Raf.

These figurines aren't to scale with anything.  Which is just as well, because they're not going to succeed at it.  Arcee and Bumblebee aren't in scale with each other, so any attempt to make Jack or Raf in scale with either of them is going to cause failure somewhere else.  So I'm glad they're small-but-not-too-small, and also that they exist.

Really, though, what I want is Miko.  She's awesome.

The toys come in a pretty nice packaging display that you can remove the plastic bubble from without too much trouble.  That leaves you with a city street with a guardrail in front of a row of beveled skyscrapers.  It's pretty great, and I put a T-Rex in it.

I mentioned the New York theme to most of the NYCC-exclusive Transformers set yesterday. Emphasis on the "most," unless being pink and white is some Big Apple-y thing I'm not aware of. (I would not rank this as an impossibility.) Bumblebee gets to be a taxi, and the two humans get to wear New York t-shirts. Arcee gets to be pink and white.

Not that I'm against pink and white. It just stands out as an anomaly.

Obviously Hasbro was going for a Classic G1 Arcee color scheme for her, as Arcee is normally black and blue in the show.  I'm of two minds with this.  The first mind tells me that I don't really care for G1-inspired redecoes on folks who don't appear in them and I'm not particularly fond of G1 Arcee in general.  Mind Number Two reminds me that toys in these colors happen basically never, and I should savor this.  And I do.  The toy is gloriously pink.  Not red or somewhere in between so little boys might be fooled into buying a girl, but out-and-out Barbie Dream Car pink.  It's a novelty.

My friend Sam reminded me that Arcee in War for Cybertron is pink and white, so this could be Arcee in a transitional form in between then and now.  I was happy, frankly, to repurpose this toy as someone else entirely in a recent strip.

There are many things about this toy that I like.  Sometimes motorcycle toys go through insane contortions to get from a passable motorcycle into a passable robot.  Animated Prowl is perhaps still the master at this.  Arcee isn't quite as elegant an execution, but she's not a failure on any scale.  I like  how simple her leg transformation is.  Often this is the annoying part of the motorcycle Transformer, but her legs just sit side-by-side in robot mode, sharing a wheel which splits up during conversion.  The arms kind of messily hang off the sides, but they're hidden well enough.  The only thing that really bothers me is the mess of kibble directly behind her head, and how the handlebars located therein conflict with her shoulders.  Her shoulder kibble and her back kibble are not meant to coexist.  They will be a source of annoyance.

Prime Arcee is one of the Autobots' most agile and formidable warriors, so I'm grateful that the toy has a large range of movement built into her, short the shoulder/back kibble battle.  Her elbows are double-hinged and her hips and knees are versatile.  And she has a rotating waist, plus a neck that's balljointed at one end and hinged at the other!

I really like Arcee, the character.  Despite being the only girl on the Autobot team, she's not characterized as such.  Her personality and individualized pathos are frequently showcased, and she became a quick favorite of mine.  I'm glad I was able to get an early version of her, even if it will eventually be displaced by a more accurately color-schemed variant.   Also I really really really really hope little boys will buy her toys as readily as any other awesome character.  (Obviously, her being blue instead of pink would help facilitate that.)  If any female Transformer could manage that, it's her.

Transformers: Prime toys are yet to debut in stores, but between SDCC and NYCC, I own five of its characters already.  Hasbro should really get on that "TF:Prime in stores" thing.  Unlike SDCC's Optimus Prime, whose biggest deal was the fancy packaging he came in, this box set of toys sold at New York Comic-Con is actually redecoed for the occasion!  They come in a packaged diarama that's done up to look like a New York city street, there's Bumblebee as a New York taxi, there's Jack Darby and Raf Esquivel wearing New York t-shirts, and... Arcee's pink.  ...yeah.  She must have missed a memo.

From that set, today I'm talking about Bumblebee.  There's a bit of deja vu about him.  I am going to blow your mind by reporting that he's basically Yet Another Movie Bumblebee toy.  I've been here before, with the hood chest that splinters apart, the arms that tuck in somewhere/anywhere/pleasegodplease, the door wings, and the rear of the car hanging off the calves at at angle.  If you've ever transformed a Movie Bumblebee toy, this will be a very familiar experience.

There are some cosmetic and engineering differences, of course.  I particularly like the way his hood balls up, starting as a wide block and squishing in on itself to more approximate the big sphere that is Prime Bumblebee's chest.  There is a lot of hidden jointing in that torso.  Don't forget to fold the corners of his bumper down into his ribcage!

His shoulders are weird yet interesting.  The fronts of them fold off and his arms hide away under the car in layers.  The upper arm splits in two and runs along just inside the doors, while the forearms tuck up and over the pelvis just under the roof.  The way they hang in robot mode is not ideal.  They feel at little unstable when they're pulled all the way out, as you'd expect them to.  The instructions ask you to keep them mostly inside the hood, just sort of poking out sideways, in a way that does not resemble his appearances in the cartoon.  I've decided to compromise, and have them stick halfway out of the car at an angle.  This is more stable, but not terribly screen-accurate.  (Group picture shows them all-the-way-out and the solo robot mode picture shows my chosen configuration.)

If you like Movie Bumblebees, you'll like this guy.   Thanks to Letao for picking up this set for me!  He also printed out a huge image of Catman to carry around NYCC, Robin Desanto-style.  Because he's awesome.