photos... I am always in awe of some of the minds here, without actually having seen the instructions or in-hand a transformer toy, and able to deduce from just one or two photos, if the bot is mistransformed. I can understand and deduce from a photo of alt and bot mode, how approximately it transformers between those, but... how do you know that it is mistransformed? I can understand if I look at a picture, that maybe, its not "fully" transformed. But how can you tell a mistransformation? I am just curious.
Generally the people taking the pictures are not experts or don't care about the toys, especially if they are stolen pre-release toys. They just slap them down and snap a picture and put it on the internet and wait for people to bid $600 on it. Or on the official releases are just given to a photographer who doesn't play with toys, and probably basic instructions,they just flip it around snap pics so they can go home and pick up a pay check. The fandom on here, has has years/decades of looking at playing with toys, dare I say some are experts, and just know if something looks wrong or if something should clearly be in another place. The same way a Architect could tell a building or wall they was crooked or built wrong just by giving it a quick glance, where a "civilian" probably would never notice it.
that's always baffled me as well... I have seen people say "this panel should be rotated this way" and stuff like that and I am thinking "how do you know?! we haven't gotten it yet!" It really shows you how much some people are into it and how smart some people are.
I'm more amazed that you could post any robot bits, and they'll be able to tell you which bot its from, which year it was made and what version is it. Like missiles and guns.
Well it goes like this: We get some blurry lo-res photo of a botmode for a character we've never seen before and don't even know how it's supposed to look. But right now, it looks kinda crappy. Cue response: "this sucks". "Hasbro really dropped the ball" "These new toys are pathetic" "I just saved 20 bucks!" "Fail" etc. Cue apologists: "What a bunch of nerd-raging man children" "that's totally mistransformed anyway, the legs are back to front" "You can see how the torso slides together so he's not so fat". "The backpack folds up" "The legs extend out further." etc. Then there'll be a back and forth exchange of certainties. If the debate becomes heated enough, photo-shopped pictures show up, of how it's imagined it's supposed to look, or pictures pointing out everything that's wrong with it. But as far as I'm concerned, no one know anything until they either have it in-hand, or better pics emerge. But different things can be claimed with varying degrees of conclusiveness. I'll make premature judgements as much as anyone else, and offer opinions on how things might work, but you have to be open to revising them as better pics emerge.
Well, i did say the Green Wrecker was mistransformed cause of the early prototype picture we saw before. It looks different from then.
Sometimes you can tell by looking at a figure. If I have a bot mode pic and a robot mode pic I can usually figure out how it will go together roughly. It's usually always the case. Transformers engineering is the kind where sometimes figures borrow techniques from other figures so to speak, so there are cases where a transformation is similar to another, and therefore you can get an idea of whether a toy is mistransformed or not. This isn't always the case but sometimes it is. Sometimes it's just obvious, like those first photos of DOTM deluxe Starscream.
Man... it drives me NUTS when I see a released pic. and people have to declare "MISTRANSFORMED". Heck, even an official photo where the freaking toy designers pose it... and yet people chime it "MISTRANSFORMED"!!! They have never had the toy in hand... never read the instructions... but are ready to declare the professionally produced pictures wrong! Damn it's annoying... trying to make themselves look better or some other pointless thing...
You do know that the toy designers have absolutely nothing to do with the official photography right? They get the prototype designed and painted, and then send it to the photography department, where they shoot it without instructions or the designers handy.
I always have issues when offical photos are mistransformed. It doesn't matter if the person could care less about the toy. They are being paid to professionally take photos. If they expect to be paid, they better damn well be sure the thing is correct. Hasbro should be more concerned as well. Offical photos are a form of advertising. I've seen some mistransformed things that, if I only saw the photo, I'd think the toy is crap & not buy it. Hasbro just lost $$ because some hack couldn't do his job. Maybe Hasbro should have the designers (who know how it should look) send the toy pre-transormed so it can't be screwed up. Hell, superglue bits so it can't get screwed up in transit.
And you know this... how? Unless you are there in the studio, you really can't say that. What I DO know is that a lot of times when someone declares "MISTRANSFORMED", it often times isn't!
this fandom figured out basically how masterpiece rodimus convoy transformed from the very first pictures we are kickass
A lot of the time, it's REALLY obvious. TFArchive - Transformers Toys Other times, you can see parts that haven't moved from vehicle mode, joints that haven't been used that look to only exist for transformation (recent DOTM starscream's sides were easily identified as mistransformed in early pics because of this). Some of us just have really good eyes. I found out MP Rodimus had a (then-unannounced) Hot Rod mode by looking really hard at the first bad-angle gray proto picture we ever got of it by picking out a single sculpted square that matches up to the G1 hot rod toy. Gogdog figured out the combining gun gimmick when we only saw the big combined gun. Then a whole mess of us figured out exactly how it transformed into it's various modes from the same pictures, in some really awesome discussions in the same topic. It's nothing about being "apologists", it's not jumping to conclusions right away, and instead staring at a picture much longer than any sane person would bother to, to try and figure out how it works, mistransformed or not.
It also helps that there are only a handful of designers (you can find interviews and credits if you know where to look) who design 99.8% of our Transformers (I say our because many Transformer products, such as SW Transformers are not designed by them), and after years of handling their products you can start to see their mindset. Heck, I was able to guess which designer designed a few figures before the design credits were out just because you can see the parallels in products they had designed previously. After you've owned and transformed so many of them for years you know what design ques to look for. Sometimes you may be a little off (Like many, I was rather certain DOTM Shockwaves chest could accordian up further then we've seen to fill in the gaps in his chest, narrow his shoulders, and lower his shoulder joints), but usually it's not that hard once you realize what you're looking at and for. Then you've got the blatantly obvious like the early pics of DOTM Starscream or WFC Megatron. Really, go back and look at the first pictures (that were via official sources!) of Generations WFC Megatron and tell me you can't tell right away that it's mistransformed. It's pretty much that done at a finer level. Then in some cases, like the recent pics of the Minicon Dinobots, we already have their molds, so we know that Swoop is mistransformed or because of pics from another event or show, like Botcon pics. Plus, with enough time with the fandom and you start to distrust nearly every picture you get. To build off the link in Valkysas' post, I recall seeing an official picture for a spychanger. A spychanger, whose tranfsformation is pull back half of vehicle for legs, pull out arms from front wheels/doors, and fold down hood over chest, a transformation that was one whole step less then original Go-Bot Turbo, upsidedown and backwards!
