-Kanrabat- wrote:william-james88 wrote:-Kanrabat- wrote:Appart the leaders, Movie One line have pretty simple transformations, akin to Energon or Cybertron. Did I miss anything? Appart the fact that I started collecting at HFTD that is.
They are a bit trickier than the rest.
You have voyager Longhaul, rampage, mixmaster, ironhide, all more complex than anything up to that point.
And for deluxes, you had dead end, bumblebee, bonecrusher and barricade which were also more difficult than any deluxe up to that point.
Those are from the ROTF line.
It's true that Voayger Movie 1 Ironhide is also a bit tricky. Ratchet, however, is a breeze. The M1 Bees were also somewhat complex. However, the rest of the line Is eazy enough. I own about all of the Movie One molds. Except voyager Megatron which I heard is complete garbage. I have a scrap one (for custom fodder) as a preview and it does not make me want a complete one.
The majority of Movie 1 figures were a bit more complex and fiddly than what we were used to at the time, sure they come off as simplistic now, especially when compared to ROTF, but back then they were considered quite complex. A big part for that was that they required you to transform certain parts before you could do something else, and if you did not do them in the required order you ran into problems. Older figures were more obvious or much more forgiving in their trasnformations.
Ratchet while possibly the most simple figure from the line had an automorph feature in his legs, it was possibly the most pointless in the entire line because all it did was slightly shift two panels to create a barely noticeable bulge on the legs, and if you did it wrong, the feature would prevent you from moving the legs into robot mode. The way Ratchet's robot-mode transformed, you automatically wanted to just move the legs down, but the automorph, which was supposed to make it easier, actually stopped you from doing it so that you had to do two extra steps for something you usually would have only needed one.
And that went for pretty much every toy in the first movie line, most of the time the automoph made them harder to transform. The last half of the line kinda got rid of that and went towards more complex transformations and designs while dropping the automorph gimmick which made the figures look better, made them easier to transform, but much more involved with much more steps.
From today's point of view Movie 1 toys were simplistic figures, but back then we weren't used to stuff at their level of complexity so we thought they were insanely difficult. I even had to defend Voyager Starscream back then because "he wasn't that complex once you did him a few times".
Posted: Fri Mar 27, 2015 4:14 pm
I was thinking the same thing. I actually like these headsculpts quite a bit. 
Anyways, I actually really like that vehicle mode for Prime, gives me some Armada nostalgia.