Going off the Animated Bumblebee model route they could turn Titans Return Bumblebee into... Bug Bite, Glyph, Tap Out, Bumper, Hubcap, Chase, Freeway, Searchlight, Carrera, Volks, Sedan, and Cliffjumper.
All those would be good, except Cliffjumper. A red Bumblebee is not Cliffjumper. It's either a red Bumblebee, as in the original toy assortment, or Stinger.
Eh I'd say just let Bee NOT have a red repaint unless its an homage to his original red variant. I'd more or less give Stinger his own mold too. If you put both Bee and Stinger in the CHUG line, let Stinger be those high end Italian sports cars and Bee be some kind of compact hatchback or something.
Works for me. That's what I think of when I see any red `Bee redecos. And Cliffjumper needs to resemble a Porsche, since that's what the original was. Altmode similar to RTS Jazz, but with a robot mode similar to the original.
I quote something I wrote when discussing a MP Cliffjumper, but the same effectively applies here: MP Cliffjumper, and thus Hubcap, is potentially a big problem As is well detailed his toy vehicle mode is a super deformed Porsche 924 Turbo TFWiki His cartoon version resembles the toy Cliffjumper (G1) - Transformers Wiki The real life Porsche 924 looks NOTHING like that Porsche 924 - Wikipedia So what vehicle to that go with? A cartoon like version, essentially a squared off Bumblebee, or something that, while acurate, looks nothing like what people think Cliffjumper looks like and may have an impact on the robot mode. An acurate car version has the advantage that it would be easier to do a Hubcap as it would be different to BB. And I suppose create a backdoor oppotunity for a showish Cliffjumper as a red BB repaint.
Actually, that looks precisely like a real-world Cliffjumper. And like how he was drawn in Marvel comics (some anyway.) The original Microman toys that became Bee and Cliff turned into Penny Racers, not real vehicles. Bumblebee's animated incarnation used the Penny Racer proportions as well, but most subsequent toys were closer to a real Beetle in proportion (or more like a real car when a VW wasn't the altmode.) Like the Pretender Classics/KMart Legends Bumblebee, like Goldbug, like MP Bumblebee, a new mold Cliffjumper update should eschew the Penny Racer proportions of the original and provide a more accurate representation of the altmode. Cliffjumper's altmode, not Bumblebee's altmode in red! That's why my "Classics" Cliffjumper is the GDO - it isn't a perfect fit for him by any means, but it's an improvement over being a red hatchback like the Classics figure. Cliffjumper was always meant to be a sportscar, albeit a SD version in the case of the first toy. Making him a Bee redeco just doesn't fit the character.
I just opened mine yesterday and I think I like him better than Rewind. I found that folding out the panels under his arms and then twisting them around at the shoulder make decent looking pile drivers.
I just picked this little guy up when I was out looking for the sadly sold out deluxes in my area. I'm really glad I did, he's a great representation of Frenzy/Rumble (I was a G2 kid, so all I had was the cartoon reruns, he's frenzy to me). I look forward to buying his potential blue repaint, though I think I'm going to skip TR Soundwave and just stick with my old Galaxy Force one instead, that one's got a great Lazerbeak and Energon Ravage is still my favorite Ravage. I was worried this guy was going to be as bad as TR Ravage (the one TR figure I was gifted for Christmas, sadly) but he's a pretty much spot-on version of the character. Tank mode is good, the cassette mode is...there...but the bot is amazing. I love that his little gun has storage in both modes, and that he can even do the little pile-driver thing the original cassettes could never pull off, and for once they didn't skimp on the paint detailing (The voyagers in TR have sucked so far in that regard). 8/10
