Jpu

Curious as to what makes them less than masterpiece grade. I'm selling my Madterpieces and replacing them with these seekers

 

It's all subjective, but I consider missing fundamental molded details like the shin thrusters and the intake fanblades, while "toon accurate" in the extreme, is not befitting of masterpiece grade figures that are supposed to take a toon design and incorporate appropriate details that make it a high-end rendition of the character intended for display by collectors and evoking the nostalgia of our G1 toys, comic, and cartoon. The MP-11 seekers are overly detailed, so I'm not saying these should have excessive line work like that, just not be so plain as to remove basic elements of what make it a Seeker.

Seeker-sized figures without individually articulated fingers is also a miss, imho. It's acceptable to have flipper hands on a minibot, and even carbots, but not something as large as a Seeker or a leader-class figure like OP or Megs. Fingers are a significant part of how a figure can be shown to express itself and communicate, which matters a lot when posing and displaying them. Unlike MP-11 for which there are aftermarket solutions from KFC properly designed and painted, we're currently left to hack together a solution on our own. And the KFC Seeker hands are a bit too large for the MTRM Seekers, so they'd look like clown gloves.

@songrobin used I believe the MP-28/MP-40 KFC articulated hands, but that requires color-match painting and I have no idea how he painted articulated hands unless he took them apart entirely to spray them, and then how they're still going to function well with paint over all thosee tiny joints? I certainly can't do something like that. So unless a company sells a set of color-matched articulated fingers for these Seekers, this is a big miss, imho. And I wouldn't want some crappy shapeways hands, so it'd have to be KFC or Eness putting them out (or MakeToys themselves, but they're not known for doing articulated fingers).

They also cheaped out on things like certain pieces not being the correct color material (those bits on the underside of the nose and fuselage of Lightning for example) or not painted (the nosecone of Starscream). Or the missing wingbacks, which is just being cheap/lazy, especially when the part was clearly designed and shown in early production samples.

The tiny heads doesn't make them necessarily less than Masterpiece, but it's another annoying miss that we have to solve ourselves, possibly cannibalizing the heads from our MP-11 Seekers, which means no resale for those.

The lack of upward head articulation on the stock heads is also annoying, because these are designed to be very posable figures, yet when it comes to upward neck movement, they can pretty much only stare straight ahead, so when you use the ab crunch, they're staring at the ground in front of them instead of up/forward at their opponent. Or if it's Starscream, he can't look upward to talk to Skyfire or Bruticus unless he backs wayyy up. These are issues because they inhibit shelf layout concepts and photoshoot staging, and because they're another evidence of lazy design that didn't fully consider how to make the figure's overall great articulation useful in a practical sense.

I'll probably still get these, because there are no other reasonable alternatives, they are overall "better" than MP-11 Seekers, but their shortcomings are many and most of us can only remedy some of them and those primarily thanks to the work of this community (nods at @jream).

fwiw, many people are happy with these Seekers as they come out of the box. I'm not, but I'm particular about having what I consider masterpiece-grade figures for my G1 MPs and that means they have to be definitively better than what they're replacing.

 

While my frustrations with the look of this figure mostly have to do with the head-sculpt (not the dark paint, that actually works for me), I think a lot of my issues lie in how close these Maketoys seekers come to being a perfect rendition of the characters and how easily the few ways they fall short could have been improved before they were put out onto the market. I'm a fan of the CD Projekt Red style of making a product...wait until it's basically perfect even if that takes a long time. I'm still hoping on a fourth party head pack for these seekers.

 

Anyone looking, just picked Lightning today from Agabyss. Now in stock.

 

I guess this is ok if I only want him to be choked out for forever?

E-mail already sent to The Chosen Prime, I'm sure they'll take care of me  

 

Thundercracker is now a Headmaster!!!

 

Decided these guys needed some color enhancements!

- Gregg

 

Had a response back within an hour or two. TCP is getting a replacement head for me right away, damn good customer service there.

 

Loving these guys. They put the Takara mold to shame IMO. I also painted my knees, not sure why they didn't do it themselves since they pretty much nailed the toon accuracy with everything else on the figure.

 

What color/paint was used? I'm sure everyone would appreciate this information. I know I would.

 

Love these-exactly what I imagined them to be as a kid

 

I used Tamiya Light Blue spray. =)

- Gregg

 

I used a mix of blue & whiteTestors acyrillic along with a small amount of future polish applied with a brush. Sorry, no exact color names  

 

What spray gun/brush do you use? Is there a thread that exists as a guide to painting, prep, etc.? I have tried to avoid it for as long as possible but need to now.

 

 
I'm just waiting to see if TFSource says these guys are coming in this week for the third week in a row, lol.

 

These could have been almost perfect but some of the design choices is kind of baffling.

The heads and hands are just plain bad and curious as to what they were thinking.

 

Bring a box set with the tree of them and im in.

 

Christmas Tree?