All of my favorite toys should be done in yellow and orange.
After musing over which of my BotCon 2010 exclusives I had given the least love, I realized the answer was Scorch, otherwise known as SG Ravage‘s accessory. And with good reason, too, because he didn’t hold together very well and so I left him up in my hotel room to make sure I didn’t lose any of him. I’m happy to report that only some of this was an actual problem. His arm, for example, that kept falling off was actually just a matter of improper assembly, meaning I needed to pop it fully onto the balljoint. So that’s fixed! However, he is still a little too floppy overall and his chest/bumper/cowcatcher thing still likes to fall out. I might try to glue that in later or something. At least only one piece is falling out of him now instead of two.
I also don’t have much attachment to Scorch. Hell, I didn’t even really know he existed before this set! He is a yellow/orange redeco of a toy I really really like, though, so I certainly don’t mind him. And after seeing him in this year’s comic book, I do have an attachment to him now that I know what he’s like. Or, well, now that he’s been written to be like something. He was one of those blank slates, y’know. But now I picture him as the Kup of the group, the curmudgeonly mentor to the young Second Generation of Transformers on Earth. I like Kup, so I like Scorch.
Maybe he's driving backwards?
But the thing everyone’s talking about regarding Scorch is his hood’s flame deco. It points backwards! Like you know how flame deco is always blowing towards the back of the car? Well, here it’s blowing towards the front. Ooookay. I think what happened is that on the original Scorch, there was this block of unpainted hood where the head popped out through or whatever, and the flames sprouted outwards from there. And so they tried to duplicate this exactly, but the problem was the block was on the opposite end of the hood and so the flames go the wrong direction! And then nobody noticed this and it stayed. Whoops.
(Because of this, in the comic Scorch always kinda looks like he’s wearing this orange feathered boa.)
So anyway, I guess Scorch just drives that fast. He’s got a speed of 8, right? That’s almost 10!
Ravage is kinda Reese Witherspoon to Scorch's Ryan Phillipe.
I do wish the gray was a little bluer and his flame deco was a little redder. The flame deco just doesn’t stand out enough on the hood, since it’s orange-on-yellow. And a bluer gray, I feel, might have been a little more visually attractive. (The photos of the toy on BotCon’s tall standee display thing had a much bluer gray, and it looked fantastic.) A bluer gray also might have looked nicer on Ravage’s tail, since that’s where they share plastic.
Overall, he’s a yellow/orange version of a toy I love (as I said), and he (technically) comes with my biggest canonical contribution to the Transformers mythos. Plus I’ve grown to like his characterization. It’s just too bad about the small things.
I warn you, in the coming days I am going to gush over every single other toy in this set. Multiple boners.
Y’know… this toy almost reminds me of what a Gobots Pathfinder might look like, given the e-hobby colors for the toy (yellow truck). She always was a little ‘butch’ for a girl robot…
I think you mean Small Foot, who was Gears’ mold in yellow and red. Pathfinder’s a spaceship and done in Cosmos’s mold in blue and yellow. (Funnily enough, Pathfinder’s original colours are closer to an inversion of Gears’… Aside from Bug Bite, who’d just end up looking like Bumblebee – albeit, wearing a Decepticon symbol – I’m not quite sure why that lot never got colours closer to the originals.)
… Oh, bugger, I did it, too. ‘Pathfinder’s original colours’ should be ‘Small Foot’s original colours’…
The immutable laws of the internet are evil.
I’m pondering just pulling his bumper off and leaving it detached, to make him look that little bit more different from Hound. IT’S NOT A BUG, IT’S A FEATURE
One of the few botcon figures I got this year off the ebay, and must have been one of the few not going for it for shattered glass ravage (though he is adorable and is currently sitting on TM beast wars ravage X9 lap, like blowfelds white kitty.)
Being from the UK I actually had the origonal scorch, and most of the rest of the small turbomaster cars and predator jets. Thinking that i could repaint one of the prowl mold classic cars into Flash as a team mate for Scorch.
I can’t help but feel that FunPub should’ve switched things around and made the Prowl redeco a Turbomaster and the Hound redeco an Axelerator. Prowl as Flash, Hound as Turbofire.
Regardless. Now that Hound is yellow, can he be kid-appeal?
I could listen to your toy reviews all day long.
Same here Dave. I’d actually prefer to get this set for Scorch too. But I promised myself a few years ago I’d stop buying Transformers, and I’ve been good so far…
when are we going to get this Hound mold in blue as Beachcomber? his weapon is pretty much a drill, perfect for a geologist.