william-james88 wrote:Wolfman Jake wrote:More importantly, this Optimus Prime is a complete mess. We're back to the look with the gray hands, yellow eyes, and unpainted cod piece. That means we should be seeing the version of the trailer with no blue plastic, because the hands are allegedly gang molded to the trailer parts. However, the trailer has the blue plastic parts like it did in the initial Hasbro renders, meaning the hands on Prime should be blue, but they're not! Furthermore, it looks like the bicep pieces are gang molded to the trailer too. They're ALSO blue on the robot mode! They've shown up as gray in all other stock photography and renders before. Did Takara mix and match different test shots of the figure for their stock photos? That still wouldn't explain the blue biceps and gray hands, though. Both should be one color plastic or the other.
When I read that first line I was sure you would also bring up the fact that he has a 5 mm trailer port that doesnt hide away in robot mode.
Holy crap! How did THAT happen? All of the other pics we've seen show a much different assembly, with 2/3 of the hexagonal 5mm hole on the right leg and 1/3 on the left, creating a bit more symmetry and not making it look like some weird growth is sticking out of the right leg. That's the Hasbro renders, the NYCC at show pics, and the recently leaked pics with the new paint apps all follow this "split" design. Where did this Takara stock photo come from!? Nothing about it makes sense!
Also if they had kept the trailer parts blue and preserved the correct color of the inner calves of the robot mode, that split hexagonal port would be even less obvious. They could have avoided so many issues with this mold (gray hands, gray back of head, etc.) if they had just realized no one would be upset about blue parts on the trailer, since it's supposed to have some blue parts anyway, and they didn't interfere with the look of the alternate mode at all. Or, some smarter parts distribution among the molds might have helped too. Yeah, I know, "budgets and sizes and logistic and blah blah blah," but it's Optimus Prime, for goodness sake! Bend a few rules to get him right! It's not like he won't sell out!