Airazor review - Transformers Collector's Club version. wew

 

Back when I was a young(er) fella, I was all excited at the Official Transformers Collector's Club! Finally I was able to get my hands on some of the magical offerings that seemed to tempt me, but were too pricey/hard to get a hold of.  Yes, them Botcon recolours.  I even had the motivation to think about going to the convention in the US one day. I never did, but the thought was there.

Then as the club progressed, they often failed to deliver on the juicy designer interviews and upcoming releases information that they said they would have access to. Then add to that for whatever reason, the Magazine they made (which was ok for a club mag) seemed to take a good 2 or three months to make it around to my house.  Why?  Also, any news that was news was then spread around the internet as it does, thereby negating any benefit to the club mag.

At least I had access to their exclusive toys thought, and this one was one I got, just because I could. 

I didn't really care for Beast Wars at the time it came out, only getting interested in it when they moved on to season 2 and Transmetals.  Fleshy beasts? Nah.  Robot beasts? Hell yeah!

Seeing this Airazor was based on her when she was on Cybertron made me go "All right, I'll have a look."  Thus, I paid for the toy and their excessive shipping fees and I had it in my house in about a week or two.

Why did the magazine take months?

This Airazor is a recolour of the Energon series Slugslinger toy, which I also had at the time.  Mainly because his twin cockpit Jet mode was cool.  Sadly I did not have a high opinion of the toy itself.  It was flat, annoying to transform and floppy as nothing really pegged in solidly.

Naturally Airazor also suffers many of these flaws.  But she does come in a very nice box.  Let's have a look.

Its a solid box with some, er nice I guess artwork, but the perspective is a bit odd.  Anyway, you can open and close it as much as you like without damaging it, which is great, and inside, you can see the figure nestling snugly amongst the foam. 

Hmmm, good packaging!

The Instructions and Bio Card are in a plastic baggy with a silica gel pack underneath the foam.  The instructions have been changed to reflect Airrazor's head!

The Bio isn't badly written!  Crazy!  Although, it kind of calls her "Chromia 10 Pilot" rather than Airazor directly, so there might've been some trademark or some rubbish going on.  

Now we'll pull her out of the box to check out the jet mode.

It's very flat, but I feel that the colours to represent Airazor correctly, and it feels like a bird-adjacent vehicle mode.  She has landing gear with moulded nubs as wheels that can fold in and out of her limbs, which is nice.  Sadly her head is pretty obviously just chilling out at the back.

Looking from above, there is a lot of cool detail, like turbines and various sculpted panels.  Did Slugslinger ever do vertical take offs?

The plastic is kind of pearlescent, which makes me think, perhaps it isn't mixed the best... Will there be crumbling Airazors in the future? 

Energon figures had a Decepticon Spark crystal thing in the toys, the club have removed this and put in a solid blob.

In the end, I decided that I don't really like this plane mode.  It's so flat and boring in a way and it fails the "swoosh" test.  That means it's not fun to fly around your room.  Partly because it is so flat, making it hard to hold.  If you are able to hold it for swooshing, the thing is so badly connected and floppy, bits will disconnect and the plane just flops.  It's pretty terrible.  There's much about this toys that has hints that the people who made Energon Grimlock and Swoop were involved.

While the Autobots in the line could combine with each other, the Decepticons had an overpower? EnergonPower? Overcharge? something gimmick.  Essentially is was a way to have them bust out a mega powerful blast, or enhanced attack mode.  These modes should be applicable in both vehicle and robot mode as far as I remember, and Airazor has one.

Annoyingly you must split the already floppy vehicle mode apart.  Then you can swing out her dong, er blaster...

For additional effect, you can swing up the panels on the top of the plane. They aren't used for anything else, so they MUST be for this mode.  Aerodynamics be damned!  I ain't picking this thing up, because it's like handling pizza dough.

It does come off as a good size for a Transformer jet, especially when compared to other deluxe sized toys.  I don't think they were called deluxes as yet, maybe Super-con or something like that.  But it is the equivalent of it.

That's about it for the jet mode.  It's a floppy mess.

Transformation... is also a floppy mess.  BUT it's also clever?  Yes. I think it is!

Exploding Transformation, clever and annoying!

There is a bunch of Z joints which require a lot of wiggling about.  Wings clash with arms.  Underarms clash with elbows.  While this is pretty clever, it is just not fun or particularly easy.  Things are always getting in the way of everything else, leading to a bit of an unenjoyable mess, that leads to points of confusion and a sigh of relief when you finally have everything together.

The end result looks a bit like this.

It looks all right.  Again, the colours have been added very cleverly to replicate the look of her BW colours.

You can even replicate the pose on the box, which is always a fun thing to do.

Her head sculpt is new and looks very Airazor-ish, even to the point of including feather details on the side.  It's heavily inspired by the show, so it can look a little plain, or flat perhaps.   But It isn't bad. The rest of the sculpt just copies what was on Slugslinger.  New additions in paint are new colours and a red Maximal symbol.

Her cannon for the powerup mode just hangs of the back when she's not using it.  When she is using it, it flips over her shoulder in a nice shoulder blaster way.  It has a single missile with a round glob on the end.  Does it look threatening? I dunno, but Count VonCount from sesame street seems to think it's pretty dapper!

From the back, she has some nice details as well, but again, these are just carried over from Slugslinger.

And the same sequence of shots from the front.

Sadly though, the floppiness of the plane makes it into the robot as well.  You can see the split crotch above, and much of the robot mode is made from slipping the two sides together.  Sadly thought, they just don't clip in as well as they should.

For example, the leg flares by the ankles, just hang with nothing to clip in to.

And most annoyingly, the side of the ribs does clip into the chest, but it doesn't stay there very well.  Why? Because the landing gear of the jet is jammed right by the underarms.  You might get it pegged in, but the moment you move an arm, it's going to unpeg.  Like the transformation, bits just get in the way of other bits.

Also the wings on the fore-arms are meant to kind of waggle out of the way, but they don't do it very well, so they are clashing with the wings on her back.

Just like the jet mode, the robot mode is a good size for other figures as well.

I just realised that in the photo, the majority of characters are re-colours.  For some reason, I've been really into recolours over the original colours lately.

So there we go, TFCC Timelines Airazor is a decent figure.  Not great, not terrible, decent.  I think the bio isn't bad, the colouring an layout are actually great and I feel using Slugslinger for his look was a good call.  It's just a shame that the EN Slugslinger toy itself is a floppy turd of a toy with both floppy robot and Jet modes, and a not very enjoyable transformation.

Generally, I thought the Decepticons of Energon were much better than the Autobots, as they weren't hindered by the need to combine.  They were slightly hindered by soundboxes though, but that is neither here nor there right now.  However, this mould was very much hindered by the gimmick.  I guess having the missile in between the two cockpits, and the overcharge mode requiring the jet to split in half, leads to natural floppiness.  It's certainly an interesting idea, especially since the easy way would be to just have the cannon flip over the back of the jet somehow, it's just poorly executed here. I do admire what they were going for

So, for my final superfluous rating:

Great colouration, head sculpt and conceptual idea, flawed by a floppy-mess-of-pizza-dough-original-toy.