Here's your damn Whirl! I was gonna talk about him, like, a week ago, when I got my FIRST one, but he kind of got his leg snapped off at the knee, so I had to get another. Those knee joints? They are a large thigh and a large shin piece very very tightly connected via a thin knee strut and rough ratcheting joints. Whoof. Be careful. I was just trying to get mine into helicopter mode to put on his stickers and BAM the kind of damage you can't pop back on.
OTHER THAN THAT I guess I kind of like him? I mean, I'm super up for a Whirl toy now that he's been pretty glorious in the past few years of More Than Meets The Eye. He's that archetypal anti-social pathological hyperviolent jerk who's somehow an Autobot. Who doesn't love that guy? No one, that's who!
Unfortunately, he's not actually the design from the comic book, which is awesomely inventive. Instead, he's a surprisingly faithful adaptation of the original Whirl toy, but with digitigrade legs because that's how he is in the comics now I guess. Seriously, this toy's just straight-up the original thing with joints. I mean it. He comes with STICKERS, and they nearly all replicate the original stickers. That's how weird this thing is.
Again unfortunately, that means they're those clear GIJOE-style stickers which I am not terribly fond of, so they leave me feeling kind of cold. And since most of them are based on the original stickers, sometimes you get stuff like the triangular stickers which originally fit into the triangular space directly behind the cockpit on the first toy, but this new toy doesn't HAVE that triangular space, so you kind of just have to put them floating there awkwardly behind the cockpit somewhere. Whaaaaaat, why?
(Also, I recommend looking at photos of the original Whirl for better sticker placement ideas than the placements suggested by the instructions.)
Whirl has a third mode, dubbed a "heloped," which is really your traditional gerwalk mode. You know, like with Veritechs or whatever, in which you half-transform it so it's really a jet with backwards legs and some arms. In this toy's case, it's not strictly a midtransformation, as there's a slider along the underside of the cockpit for the crotch and legs to slide back on and center themselves on the vehicle. It's not needed otherwise. I guess it's cool this exists? It's superfluous to my needs, though.
(Another thing the instructions probably get wrong -- I'm pretty sure that it has the leg configurations for the heloped and robot modes switched. The robot mode should get the digitigrade legs, since they actually look like actual functioning legs that would actually work to walk with, and the heloped mode should get the simply backwards-kneesed legs, since that matches other "gerwalk" modes and, say, ED-209.)
(Oh oh oh oh and you can collapse the shoulder struts into the torso, y'know, the long stalks that connect the arms to the body. They're on ball-joints, but you can push them in farther regardless and then yank them out for transformation.)
Whirl comes with four weapons, all of which I believe correspond to the weapons the original toy come with. They attach via 5mm pegs or those c-clipy deals which were a big thing in Transformers a few years ago. I don't really need them, and now that I have my first Whirl AND my replacement Whirl, I've got entirely too many of these things sitting around. Oh well.
Overall... Whirl's good? I mean, he's good enough. He's Whirl. I wish he didn't try to be the original toy so much. It's not exactly that I wish he were the current design in the comic so much that I wish this toy weren't trying to be specifically the old toy with joints. Even though he's a brand new toy, his look is kinda dated. Maybe that's what they were going for. Who knows.
Anyway, be careful with his knees. And thanks to Big Bad Toy Store for being super helpful about getting him replaced.
