I wasn't exactly thrilled when I saw the first images of ROTF Scout Depthcharge. Yet another ROTF figure with bizarre legs. Yay. But I knew I'd probably get it, eventually. And sure enough I did earlier in the week, after having bought and enjoyed all the other scouts currently on offer. Looking at it first hand, it's not anywhere near as bad as I'd feared. In fact it's a current favourite of mine. I'm fast coming to the conclusion that the official photos, the packaging, and the instructions probably perpetuate a mistransformation of the legs. You've seen what they look like, and it's not pretty. Anyway, here's what I came up with: I don't just think this is an alternate transformation; I think it is most likely what the designer originally intended. It makes a lot more sense to me in respect to how the leg is jointed. Okay, you're probably thinking, just cause you like how it looks, doesn't actually prove anything. Well you'd be right there. But there's more than that. Each arm and leg part on any transformer will have an L or and R marked on it, depending on whether it's a right or left part. The way DepthCharge is packed and depicted, the legs and arms don't match up. The leg kibble marked L is on the right side, and R is on the leftside. Again, this is not neccesarily proof, but IMO, that's why it looked so awkward. The legs were the wrong way around! Naturally enough this is a very simple fix. The legs will never be super posable, but they can now at least manage a believable standing position. No matter what, you're still left with 2 halves of a ship hull. Now the only remaining ssue I have with the guy is one of scale. Given the nature of the alt mode, I imagine he'd be pretty huge. Like Omega Supreme huge. (yes, photoshoppery) Completely unrelated... While I had the camera out, I thought I'd share a simple mod I made to Detour/Deadend: He had actually has an unpainted lower jaw, full of sharp little teeth(I didn't even notice this for ages). Anyway I picked out the outline of the jaw with a permanent black marker, and now it's a lot more obvious. This must surely be the first Scout figure to have jaw articulation! Pretty cool Scout Class kicks ass.
Yeah, that's the WTF Battle Mode. Helps give him the element of surprise. Decepticons are like 'WTF is that', and then BAM! Hasbro likes to do line-wide gimmicks, so my theory is before they came up with 'mech alive' they were thinking of just coming up with extra random modes across the whole line. You see this in Soundwave and the Constructicons. It's not such a bad idea in theory, but I kinda feel like they cheapen the whole idea of what 'triple-changer' used to mean.
