Cliffbee.com Actionmaster Blaster Toy Review

Individual Review




Name: Blaster
Series: Generation 1
Allegiance: Autobot
Function: Communications
Alt Mode: None (was a boombox)



ROBOT MODE
Height: 9.5cm Width: 4.5cm

   A red robot with silver legs and face, Blaster has dark grey feet, elbows and fists, along with sine dark grey cassette deck aspects on his boots. His waist is silver while there's a yellow cassette door on his chest. Blue eyes round out a colour scheme that's quite faithful to that of the original Blaster toy. He sports an Autobot logo on his left shoulder.

   A lot of the cassette deck features so prominent on the original are still here, which is good to see. The cassette door on his chest is the most distinctive, but Blaster also has four buttons on his waist, speakers on his shins and handle grip on the outsides of his boots. The head is quite true to the original although it's a lot rounder than the flat head required of the larger toy. The overall resemblance in his head ends up being quite weak, which is a shame.

   Poseability is the same as every other Actionmaster - head turns, arms rotate and legs have G.I. Joe poseability (fully poseable hips, knees bend 90 degrees). Compared to the original, the poseability here is great, although the rotating wrists which were a by-product of the transformation are gone. Blaster has a good black gun which suits him well even if it's not quite the same as his original gun.

THE PARTNER - FLIGHT-PACK

   A blue backpack with fold out wings and a horribly dull name. The wings are geared together so raising one will raise the other. The bright yellow really doesn't go with red and silver - which work together on their own but blue and yellow push the friendship. It's one of the less imaginative partners amongst the Actionmasters, and really fails to inspire me (although it's not as bad as Inferno's backpack.

   This backpack doesn't add anything to Blaster at all, really. It makes him rather backheavy. The gun mode is just as unstable, and is formed by extending a black barrel and attaching the handgun to this. The gearing is nice, but doesn't really make me want to use the backpack

VARIATIONS

   None that I know of.

OVERALL

   Finally we have a Blaster toy that doesn't tower over every other Transformer - which is cool. Of course, he's not much bigger than a cassette, and the inability of this toy to work with the cassette TFs does count against it. It's a good replication of the character with no stupid paint apps and a lot of detail retained from the original toy, making Blaster a pretty good classic Actionmaster. The backpack is a waste of time, which tempers my enthusiasm somewhat, since Blaster has already lost the tape deck functionality - 6/10

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