| BUMBLEBEE
(PRETENDER)
PROJECT #207
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.) |
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