by starfish » Mon Oct 20, 2008 12:31 pm
Sure, we've now seen a very small picture of Grimlock unpainted, but there are a few things to bear in mind...
1) Colour. A good paintjob can bring even the crummiest Transformer to life. Just look at the Pink movie Arcee repaint to see what I mean. Colour is key. I reckon there'll be a lot more people drooling over this baby when they see him in all his grey-and-gold glory.
2) Transformation. As far as we can tell from the picture, it LOOKS like he transforms in a similar fashion to his G1 counterpart. But when you think about it, MP Megatron's transformation was clearly based on the G1 toy as well, but the complexity of the Transformation was vastly different. Depending on your personal preference, this is what made MP Megatron so frustrating / rewarding (delete as applicable).
I realise that, for some people, this guy is just going to stand there on a shelf, on display, or maybe even kept in the box. But these are TRANSFORMERS, and the value is in the transformation. What will really make-or-break this figure for me is the conversion to robot mode and back. Will he be clever-yet-straightforward like MP Prime? Will it be convoluted and complex like MP Megatron? The truth is, we don't know.
From what we can see, he doesn't have any obvious design oddities, like MP Starscream did with his deal-breaking hip kibble. He looks faithful enought to the G1 design to please the purists, yet sufficiently improved to warrant MP status(from what I can make out from the pictures, this new version has excellent posability and, intriguingly, discreet feet in robot mode).
So while this picture makes me exceedingly optimistic, I think we should perhaps reserve real judgment until we see the colour scheme and the transformation videos.
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