Originally Posted by
SharkyMcShark
First, I want to give Hasbro a great deal of credit for trying to pull this design off in the Generations line, which unlike the Animated aesthetic (which last gave us a Blitzwing) doesn't allow as much room for chibi-fying and messing with proportions.
Springer as a triple changer has always been easy hat really - the helicopter mode is more or less the car/buggy mode with the back end unfolded into a tail boom and a rotor on the top. It's far more difficult to try and get two vehicle modes with vastly different modes visually, here a bulky tank with hard edges and a sleek jet with curvy aerodynamic lines, out of the same pile of plastic and throw a robot mode in there too. I suppose what I'm saying is points for trying.
The end product is fairly poor though. The robot mode has major stability issues around the shoulder area - the shoulders have what are effectively vestigial tabs that don't really grip anything. Think the first run of 2007 Movie Brawl, but possibly worse. The head is on the end of a bit of plastic that telescopes back into the cockpit for transformation, but this doesn't really stay up in a convincing manner (not sexual). The head has a face changing gimmick similar to Animated Blitzwing - the figure could have done without this to be honest, all it achieves is to make the head too bulky to transform properly and limits the articulation to side to side.
Jet mode is actually a very good effort. It manages to avoid massive undercarriage kibble but having some of the bulk of the tank mode on the top of the jet. It ends up looking a little bit like Macross FAST Packs (or alternatively Classics Jetfire's backpack boosters) (which were based on Macross FAST Packs). Unfortunately another major design flaw works to more or less ruin this mode - the nose cone is a very soft malleable plastic that doesn't really do a convincing job of holding the aforementioned telescoping head joint back in place on my sample, and inevitably ends up coming free at the sides and stretching/warping into an odd shape. Your mileage may vary - I've read around the place that some people have problems with this, and some people have samples that fit perfectly.
Tank mode is a bit phoned in. From certain angles it looks amazing. From other angles it looks like bits of jet folded into a gappy tank mode. That said with triple changers one of the modes inevitable suffers for the other, and here that would be the tank mode. It works a lot better than some of the this modes we've seen on other triple changers down the years (Drag Racer TM2 Megatron anyone?).
It's a bad figure unfortunately. All of the problems I've mentioned are fairly major on their own, but probably without being figure destroying. Working together however they bring down what could have been a fantastic figure with some engineering changes.
I'd like to see Hasbro keep making triple changers. There are signs here that they are learning from the mistakes of the past - I was especially pleased to see that they've learned that where one of the modes is a jet not just to shove the folded up third mode under the jet and hope no one notices. They've demonstrated that they know to hide the defining visual characteristics of each mode when they're in the other alt mode (here the tank turret and treads are hidden well in plane mode, and the cockpit, wings and stabilisers are hidden well in tank mode). So not a good figure, but perhaps a bit of hope for the future in there somewhere.
Toy Review - Generations VOY Blitzwing
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