CLASSIFICATION: KITBASH
MATERIALS USED: PRECISION SCREWDRIVER, ENAMEL PAINTS
FIRST APPEARANCE: TRANSFORMERS #1 (AS BUMBLEBEE); TRANSFORMERS # 59 (AS PRETENDER)

"Before, when I was small, I was humored, tolerated.  Now that I'm a Pretender, others look up to me, respect me--even fear me!"

Preamble:  I think the only reason I started tinkering with Pretender Bumblebee was because he was the only Classic Pretender I hadn't worked on yet.  I consider him to be the only one of the four toys to be an improvement over the original Hasbro toy, not to mention the only one whose toy is more or less the right size, since the other three shrunk to significantly smaller proportions.  So, compared to the others, he didn't need much work.  Mostly, he suffered from the same lack of paint applications as the others.  One bizarre problem specific to Bumblebee that he was apparently designed using the head of the Cliffjumper toy as a reference.  My guess is that somebody was trying to make him more show-accurate, and knew that he was supposed to have a face, which the original Bumblebee toy didn't actually have.  Well, they get points for the attempt, anyway.

Construction:  The first thing I did was modify the toy's head to make him look more like Bumblebee as he appears in the cartoon.  I whittled away at the forehead crest, cutting it into a hexagonal shape and scoring some grooves into the front panel.  I also cut off the bottom corners of the helmet to give Bumblebee's head more of a diamond shape.  I cut off the Cliffjumper horns on either side of the helmet, and carved some new, rounder ones with scrap plastic, gluing them to his head.  The new horns were too big to clear those huge and bothersome blocks on his shoulders, so I had to whittle those down as well.  (The only reason I didn't get rid of them entirely was because they comprise the hinges that hold his head in place.  I explored other ways of attaching his head, but didn't come up with any that I liked.)

Originally, I thought about ditching the black plastic windows (which were a single internal piece that fit inside the canopy, much like the original toy) and replacing them with transparent plastic sheets, similar to the windows I came up with for my Pretender Jazz project.  I took some clear gloss and mixed it with a little light blue paint to try to create a semi-translucent effect, but you couldn't see through the windows at all.  I guess I could have gone with clear windows, but in the end I just decided to paint them light blue to match the cartoon.

The only other physical modification I made was to get rid of the hole in his roof that was originally designed to accomodate a weapon.  I took him apart and sliced off the plastic cup inside his canopy that comprised the weapon mount, and filled in the remaining hole with putty.  After that, it was just a matter of painting him.  I stripped his stickers and painted over all the yellow parts to give him a nice, glossy appearance.  I also painted his forearms as well as the black arm connectors and the tops of his ankles, which become part of the car body in vehicle mode.  I even figured out a cheatsy way to give him that Autobot symbol on the hood of his car mode that disappears when he transforms: I sliced an Autobot sticker in half and stuck one half on the center of the hood (which flips around and ends up on his back in robot mode) and the other half on the part of his hood that's attached to his lower leg (which is covered nicely by his foot in robot mode).

Comments:  I still wish the toy was just slightly smaller, but then I suppose he wouldn't fit very securely in his Pretender shell.  (Come to think of it, I wonder if I should start working on the outer shells, now that I've finished working on all four inner robots.)