NOTRAB has posted some pictures of his in-hand copy of Bumblebee on his Weibo page:

NOTRAB on Weibo

I hope the face paint on his is an anomaly - the eye paint is bad and it looks as though they have slapped a painted smile over the top (or rather, a little beneath) the moulded stoic mouth:



If that's what they have done on the final version, it's regrettable. My pre-production sample/factory reject (whatever it was) had its mouth only partially painted, but at least the paint was in the mouth itself, and carefully adding a little extra paint myself resulted in what I think is a damn-near perfect Bumblebee face:



It would be a shame for them to mess up such a great sculpt by painting the wrong-shaped mouth in the wrong place! Hopefully NOTRAB's is a one-off, or it's easy to remove the black mouth paint and apply our own.

Still, he seems to like it, describing it as the best MP in years and better than MP-44, even. I have to say that I really love this figure. Despite the kibble, he just captures G1 Bumblebee so beautifully in both modes that every time I see him on my desk he brings a smile to my face. I'm really looking forward to seeing everybody else around here getting theirs and posting pictures, not to mention getting my own final production copy for Christmas.

 

Aw man, NOTRAB's face situation is definitely regrettable, @ambitron , but thanks for sharing! Glad to hear he loves the figure anyway! I have to remind myself sometimes that what looks like an eyesore in photos is often barely noticeable in-hand, especially with a figure this small. I absolutely cannot wait for this guy to drop! Every pre-Movie Autobot that comes out after Bumblebee will feel like icing on the cake to me (the cake being Optimus, Bumblebee, Ironhide, and Wheeljack).

 

Thats pretty high praise, but I expected this guy to be quite fun in hand. My only concern is people flooding Amazon with returns because theirs smile isnt quite right.  

I mentioned before it will be interesting to see the responses he gets from the non-english speaking collectors.

 

Assuming NOTRAB has a final production piece, I guess this confirms that Bumblebee does indeed have the clear windows. Slight bummer for me, especially since a shot of an early production sample of Smokescreen+ I saw floating around still shows him with *blue* windows. Should've been the other way around!

 

They're not entirely clear - there is a blue tint to them, but it's very subtle, much like that of MP-10. Personally I think it was the right choice, purely because of the amount of clear plastic visible from the alt mode on his back. Those early prototypes with blue windows made all the car parts on the back and heels extra-obvious by having all that blue among the yellow, and was quite distracting on a bot that should be yellow in all of those areas. I do wonder if that's why they switched to the subtle blue tint for production.

 

Ok, you win! I can't argue with this - I agree   Obviously they gave both a shot and went with the one they feel works best! No excuse for Smokescreen+'s windows, though, especially since the og's were already the animation correct smoky color!

 

I definitely agree with Smokescreen - although I might not have noticed had you not pointed it out.  

 

I wanted blue windows like you guys too, but after seeing it in hand I think I understood why they choose the light blue/clear windows. Ambitron’s points are very logical and I’d like to add that Bumblebee didn’t actually have the same shade of blue as the carbots. His windows always had sort of a silver sheen vs cartoon blue.

I think they purposefully choose his color to be different.

now about smokescreen... who know what they hell theyre smoking  

 

Smoking hard compounded screens of G1.

 

Same with me...my birthday is actually the release date. ;-)

 

Anyone here know when MP BumbleBee 2.0 will be released?

 

23rd of this month

 

My wife's birthday is at the end of October, mine is at the end of November, so we always celebrate our birthdays halfway in between, which was last weekend.

My wife got me a nice cake as a surprise.  





Yes, I'm getting old...   

 

I like the way you seem to be absolutely determined to cut that cake into *exact* quarters.   (Happy birthday for the end of the month!)

 

Holy Moly! That is a nice cake, man. And yeah...40...not everybody can be as young as me with my almost 39. :-D

 

Hehehehe. Doing my best mate, doing my best.  

 

You're a young god still.  

 

Yeah. Sure.  

 

So just nine days now, right? Can’t believe I might have this beauty before Thanksgiving!

 

Can't wait for this little Bumblebee. Don't be in the denial, this is such an improvement to V1. MP-45 almost makes MP-21 look like he was another character ...