I have the Hercules set. While I think it's the better Devastator, I'm not crazy about the individual robots, especially with the darker shade of green. I like the individual Maketoys figures with the exception of Bonecrusher. It looks nothing like the character in robot mode. Is there a way to mod or mistransform the figure so that the blade ends up on its chest?
No, not really. I saw someone try to fan mode it a long time ago but it didn't look very good. EDIT: Found it. Your mileage may vary I guess.
I think you have to switch them around or something, but it looks equally bad when the shovel is on his chest, but facing inward.
That's my one major beef with the Giant set, is the inconsistent application of "updates". Hook and Mixmaster are recognizable, and share much of their G1 shapes and details. Scrapper is quite close, minus his new chest, and Scavenger the same, except for the unrecognizable head sculpt. Long Haul and Bonecrusher, on the other hand, are major departures from their G1 looks. Long Haul's head is vaguely reminiscent of the G1 toy head at least, and I'm fairly forgiving of his new body due to the old transformation not playing too well for an articulated Devastator. Bonecrusher I just scratch my head at. The head sculpt is unlike both the toy and television models, the torso has no similarities with the G1 body, and while he's got tread legs, they're Scavenger's tread legs, and not his own. I have no qualms with Classics-style updates, and for the most part, I prefer them (the overly blocky G1 cartoon and toy designs are pretty boring), it's just the lack of consistency with this set that irks me. That's the one element where Hercules has the leg up in my eyes, in that he's at least consistent in his aesthetic cues. But I've mostly gotten over it, because the Giant set's a great bunch of figures otherwise.
During transformation, I leave the blade halves up front, spin them around on their ball joint and just push them up against the chest. I think it looks pretty good.
Much thanks for the responses. Why do third parties do this? They lose sales when they take too much creative license.
Maybe they believe that most fans will appreciate their efforts to retain the G1 essence of these figures, but at the same time recognize that certain sacrifices have to be made for articulation, aesthetics, engineering and other equally important aspects of the toys. The high sales of Giant implies that this belief is well founded, in my opinion.
Fair point. However, I can't imagine that maketoys would have lost any customers if their figures looked more like the source material. I mean, at least get the heads right, right?
I haven't actually compared the heads, but if they're vastly different, yeah there's no good excuse for that. And back to Bonecrusher, I tend to sympathize with Maketoys because I really don't see any good way of placing the blade on the chest without it looking goofy. I mean, if there was, I'm sure they would have done it.
Exactly! Giant really fits in well as a classics updates to the original toys, and just like the official classics/generations figures Hasbro produced, there are some that stray greatly from the look of the original.
