Last time on Transformers Kre-O, Sam Witwicky was driving Bumblebee to Mikeala's place to get some gas, and have a quick look over for a tune-up and lube job when suddenly, out of nowhere, Starscream the evil Decepticon Air Commander attacked! The horror left us with this unfortunate development.
But Sam has the technology and he can rebuild him. We now return to your regularly scheduled Kre-O Review.
After that bit of harmless fun, and showing off what it looks like when you've emptied all the plastic bags in the box, we now present Bumblebee in
Hasbro Officially Approved Robot Mode which is to say un-modded Bumblebee.
He's got a fair decent range of motion, looks surprisingly close to his on-screen model in many ways and even gets to have a real, working weapon. Sadly his weapon is really just a brick that launches a missile.
With these parts left over you can once again build a little station for the Kreons to man while Bumblebee takes down his nemesis... And since Barricade hasn't been made in Kre-O form yet, that means he's going to fight Starscream.
Still that silly looking brick gun needed something...
So I used some of the spare parts left over from the vehicle build to bulk up the gun and make it actually look like, well, a gun.
What's truly interesting to note, Bumblebee's head is a combination G1 and Movie. There aren't any horns to speak of, but he does have an actual face and then, almost like he's wearing some kind of helmet, his chin strap thing looks like the vocoder box of the movie design's mouth.
Admittedly it makes him look kind of odd, is he G1 playing at being Movie or Movie playing at being G1?
BEHOLD! I just love shouting that, lookie what we got here, a couple of pint sized knuckle draggers... Uh, I mean, it's a smorgasboard of Autobot Kre-O sets and our good friend Bumblebee towers above them all.
Since when did little Bumblebee become such a giant of a mech? He's totally out of scale with anybody, except Optimus, Sentinel, Megatron and Starscream who are all taller than him.
But again, who the slag cares so much about scale where Kre-O is concerned? Certainly not I. (Well maybe just a teensy bit, but this doesn't bug me too much.)
G1 and Movie together at last, not that anybody wanted to see this kind of crossover. You can really see the difference in the yellow colors between the two models here.
Another huge difference is the detailing involved thanks to stickers. You might also notice a slight difference on the smaller Bumblebee compared to his review's images, that's because I slapped the extra two black stickers on him to get rid of the sheet. They don't take away from his look either way.
And here we have a much better Kreon manned battle station, using the same pieces that were left out of the robot model the first time. I just wasn't feeling the original extra build so I fiddled around a bit and got something I like a whole lot better.
You can see there's place to store weapons, an extra table where the Medic can help other injured Kreons on the stretcher, and some controls for... Whatever purpose you'd care to use them for.
My overall thoughts on this set. It's pretty big, a bit pricey honestly and the missile launcher just looks stupid in either mode so you might want to do some tweaking with it. The Kreons are great, I dig Bumblebee in all his G1 glory and even Sam looks decent, if only Red Alert wasn't such a cop out. If the Micro-Changers give us a red Sideswipe helmet I'm buying two of that guy to at least swap the black one out. Maybe even add some white legs to him because as it is Red Alert is a real downer and the weakest Kreon in existence. (Even compared to the human Kreons.)
The models are pretty great, by the time I'm done collecting all of Kre-O though I'm going to wonder if we wind up with more than Four Bumblebees, it seems every year has seen him in some form or other. So where's Movie Barricade to fight this one? He's pretty poseable too and the stickers aren't as obtrusive as on some models.
I still have to wonder why part of the dashboard for vehicle mode wasn't locked onto any studs though. It's a bit of a head scratcher.
Ratings wise, I'm going to say this set deserves a solid 4.5, especially if you scored it from TRU this past week for 10$, I got him for 15$ at Zellers and... That wasn't so bad of a price either.
Whew, now we're all caught up. The only other Kre-O set I've already photographed is Decepticon Ambush and I think I'll give you all a break/chance to catch up here and wait for next week to post it. Which will give me more time to prepare Sentinel for his photo shoot and finish taking the pics for the Micro-Changer Preview Wave.
Until next week, may your brick building fun continue and let's hope to see many creative mods to existing models just to see what you might come up with.
