Transformers: Prime toys are yet to debut in stores, but between SDCC and NYCC, I own five of its characters already.  Hasbro should really get on that "TF:Prime in stores" thing.  Unlike SDCC's Optimus Prime, whose biggest deal was the fancy packaging he came in, this box set of toys sold at New York Comic-Con is actually redecoed for the occasion!  They come in a packaged diarama that's done up to look like a New York city street, there's Bumblebee as a New York taxi, there's Jack Darby and Raf Esquivel wearing New York t-shirts, and... Arcee's pink.  ...yeah.  She must have missed a memo.

From that set, today I'm talking about Bumblebee.  There's a bit of deja vu about him.  I am going to blow your mind by reporting that he's basically Yet Another Movie Bumblebee toy.  I've been here before, with the hood chest that splinters apart, the arms that tuck in somewhere/anywhere/pleasegodplease, the door wings, and the rear of the car hanging off the calves at at angle.  If you've ever transformed a Movie Bumblebee toy, this will be a very familiar experience.

There are some cosmetic and engineering differences, of course.  I particularly like the way his hood balls up, starting as a wide block and squishing in on itself to more approximate the big sphere that is Prime Bumblebee's chest.  There is a lot of hidden jointing in that torso.  Don't forget to fold the corners of his bumper down into his ribcage!

His shoulders are weird yet interesting.  The fronts of them fold off and his arms hide away under the car in layers.  The upper arm splits in two and runs along just inside the doors, while the forearms tuck up and over the pelvis just under the roof.  The way they hang in robot mode is not ideal.  They feel at little unstable when they're pulled all the way out, as you'd expect them to.  The instructions ask you to keep them mostly inside the hood, just sort of poking out sideways, in a way that does not resemble his appearances in the cartoon.  I've decided to compromise, and have them stick halfway out of the car at an angle.  This is more stable, but not terribly screen-accurate.  (Group picture shows them all-the-way-out and the solo robot mode picture shows my chosen configuration.)

If you like Movie Bumblebees, you'll like this guy.   Thanks to Letao for picking up this set for me!  He also printed out a huge image of Catman to carry around NYCC, Robin Desanto-style.  Because he's awesome.

It seemed like just yesterday Hasbro was showing off their new not-LEGO product at Toy Fair, buried in a secret room, banned from all photography and our LEGO employee friend.  Those were the days.  My thoughts at the time were, well, those are kind of neat, I guess.  I'll probably have to try one out.  Probably Ratchet.  Not because Ratchet's set looks the best to me, but because it's Ratchet.  Yay Ratchet.

It's not Hasbro's first attempt at not-LEGO.  Back in 2003 or so, they put out Built to Rule, which featured both Transformers and G.I. Joe to,  uh, no success.  The vehicles were all right, but the robot modes looked like ass on ass.  (That's double ass.)  They didn't hold together very well and they looked like crap.  But this time around, for KRE-O, Hasbro seems to have wisely outsourced to a not-LEGO company in China called Oxford.  And by my first photograph you can see how obviously this was a better way to go.  It's a staggering comparison.

So finally, post BotCon, these KRE-O kits started showing up in Toys"R"Us.  TRU has a ghetto Feature Wall they have to fill with Transformers product while Cars 2 crap continues to take up 30% of the store, so KRE-O has its first day in the sun.  And by golly, these things are priced to sell.  The tinier kits are $8.  Ratchet, who I wanted, and is pretty sizeable, is $20.  Do you have any idea how expensive real LEGO are?  They are super expensive.  So I grabbed the smaller version of Bumblebee along with my Ratchet.

These are building block sets, not Transformers, and so that means you build each mode.  No, they don't transform in the conventional sense, nor would I expect or want them to.  If I wanted a damn transforming Transformer, I'd buy one of the thousands which do just that.  You put together the vehicle mode, disassemble completely, and then put together the robot mode.  Neither mode uses all the pieces, but the robot mode uses more.  The vehicle modes omit most of the robot mode limb and jointing pieces, for example, and the robot mode ends up leaving off one or two random pieces that you could probably peg somewhere on the back were you to be so inclined.

I very much liked my Bumblebee.  I think I like the smaller sets in general.  Once you get to guys at about Ratchet's size, putting them together starts to feel like this tedious chore where you're just layering in the thinnest of pieces for hours, like you're putting back together an onion.  Bumblebee felt more immediately gratifying.  A few days later I went back and got Jazz, who's another of the smaller-sized kits.

Instead of paint applications on the bricks themselves, stickers are involved.  I would recommend not putting stickers on until you're done with the vehicle mode.  The instructions (which are exactly like LEGO's) call for you to put them on as  you assemble the build, but this is a bad idea if we're talking about stickers that represent stripes going across the top of the vehicle mode.  You're gonna want to make sure you're lining up those stripes evenly from piece to piece, rather than here and there one at a time.  Some of the stickers feel like they're too small for the space, like Bumblebee's stripes.  The instructions show the stickers covering up a larger surface than they do in reality.  As a result, his stripes feel more like a suggestion of stripes rather than real stripes.

(The quality of the stickers are not that great, sadly.  Be careful with the corners.  The color part can separate from the sticky part pretty easily.  Reprolabels has spoiled me.)

The Transformers Wiki still hasn't decided how to categorize these things.  Are they Generation 1?  Are they the new "modern continuity" umbrella Hasbro keeps namedropping?  Are they movie?  The mini-figures that come with the bigger sets are straight copies of the Transformers as they appeared in the original cartoon.  Bumblebee's smaller kit looks pretty G1, save for the stripes, considering his hood legs and windshield tummy.  Both Bumblebee and Ratchet have heads that are knocked-off from their Classics toys.  But the largest kits, Prime and Bumblebee and Sentinel Prime and Megatron, obviously take greater cues from the movie designs, though Megatron and Sentinel Prime's heads are strongly Animated style. S'hard to say.  Hasbro cares less about these things than we do.  They just want to sell some friggin' not-LEGO.

And so far they're doing a bang-up job, at least in my household.

Lookit me, wiling my way into pre-street date Dark of the Moon toys!  I'm like a DPCI ninja.

Here's the new Bumblebee.  Normally I'd be satisfied with my old Bumblebee, but the third movie gives him an altered vehicle mode and a retooled robot mode, so I kinda need a representation of the "current" version.  Now Bumblebee has a little skirt on the front of his bumper and a new spoiler, plus this toy has those little NASCARish grills in place of the side windows.

(Disclaimer: I know very, very little about NASCAR.)

Oddly, during the transformation to robot mode, the NASCARish grills stay attached to the back kibble and translucent blue windows fold up in their place for robot mode.  These blue windows are only for robot mode, and cannot be used in vehicle mode.  Weird!  Movie 3 Bumblebee also has a new, bulkier torso design that this toy tries to replicate the details of.  Pieces of the front bumper skirt fold up into new abs for Bumblebee, while the sides of front of the car still fold out and up.

I am told that this mold is very similar to last year's "Battle Blades Bumblebee," a reportedly fantastic toy that I skipped 'cuz I knew Bumblebee was getting an upgraded form in a year.  Some say this toy is a slightly scaled-down version of Battle Blades Bee, but I don't have Battle Blades Bee to compare with.  Regardless of its creation history, this version of Bumblebee is pretty easy to get back and forth from robot mode.  ...compared to previous Bumblebees, anyway.  The first Concept Camaro Bumblebee from the first movie was a relative chore!  I don't mean to say that this toy is simple, no, because it's not, but it's complex in a way that everything fits together neatly and transforms logically and cleanly.  What seems to aid the toy's transformation, versus the prior Bumblebees, are the way the front wheels fold out of the way entirely during transformation, allowing the arms to maneuver out freely.  And large parts of the car's roof fold up into a big ball of stuff which hangs off his back... which definitely gets it out of the way, though it can look inelegant in robot mode.  This kibble snaps back into vehicle mode very easily, which is a trait that I believe makes up for any ugliness.

Bumblebee's forearms have "c joint" rods so you can attach clippy weapons on there.  I'm glad that functionality is continuing.

And finally, we get to Bumblebee's MechTech weapon.  Ratchet's, if you recall, was glorious.  I couldn't stop playing with it.  Bumblebee's isn't nearly as great.  All pressing on its lever accomplishes is open up the gun into a larger gun.  When you're done pressing on the lever, the gun reverts back to its brickish form.  Not a single spinny saw!  Oh well.  It can plug into 5mm ports on his forearms, be held in either of his hands (the thumbs open a tiny smidge), or they can be pegged into hidden 5mm ports in his back kibble, which, when mistransformed, extends the weapon over his shoulder.

It's a very good movie Bumblebee.  It's probably not the BEST movie Bumblebee, since the very awesome deployable battle mask of Battle Blades Bumblebee is missing from this version, but it's definitely up there.  Perhaps it's the second best.  I own a very small fraction of all movie Bumblebees, so I can't give a real informed opinion on that.

There are a lot of movie Bumblebees.

Just a random war.

Y'know.  For Cybertron.

Cybertronian Optimus Prime was the talk of Friday, and here's his wavemate Cybertronian Bumblebee.  Unlike Optimus Prime, who's had four "pre-Earth" toys to his name, this is Bumblebee's first!  There was going to be one in Titanium Series based on his War Within design, but like the rest of that batch of guys, he was dropped.  And I'm fine with that, because Titanium Series toys weren't terribly great in general.

Cybertronian Bumblebee transforms into a car that looks like a four-wheeled TRON lightcycle.  This results in a pretty slick-looking vehicle.  It's also very broad, using its Deluxe Class mass to be nearly as wide as it is long.  Classics Bumblebee included a sizable accessory to keep Bumblebee himself relatively small while still being worth Deluxe Class dollars, but Cybertronian Bumblebee does no such thing.  He's a big Bee, and he looks bigger than Prime even though they are at the same height.  He's squat and round, but at a different scale, so a lot of his features are bigger relative to Prime's.  Bumblebee's shouldn't be the same size as Prime!  But all of the Generations toyline are Deluxe Class, so this sort of thing's going to be hard to avoid.  Regrettable, regardless.

Like Prime, Bumblebee comes packaged in robot mode.  I thought Prime's transformation to vehicle was rough until I attempted Bumblebee.  It took 15 minutes to get him roughly into vehicle mode, and then another 30 minutes were spent trying to get all his various panels aligned.  Locking one side into place would spring open the other side, and vice versa, rinse/wash/repeat for thirty whole minutes until I gave up.  Man, I wanted to throw him into a wall.  I did not encounter this problem on the second attempt.  I think something very minor inside him, like maybe the wrist orientation, was fudging things up.  But, jeez, I hate Transformers like these.  I just want everything to lock together easily, not a back-and-forth game of fuss.

Bumblebee's sorta a pearlescent gold instead of the usual yellow.  It calls to mind the 1986 Goldbug toy.  Like Cybertronian Optimus Prime's pink accents, the gold color helps distinguish Bumblebee from previous Bumblebee toys.  Oh, and, hey, surprise, 80% of the vehicle mode ends up folded up and stowed on his robot mode back.  It's generally out of the way, though.

His handgun, when not in use, can be stored behind his bumper in either robot or vehicle mode.  The instructions tell you this can only be done in robot mode, but they lie.  So long as you insert the gun halfway through transformation, before the arduous task of getting the legs crammed in there, the gun stows in that same spot easy-as-you-please.  Bumblebee also features a translucent red blade on each wrist that can be ratcheted manually in and out of battle-readiness.

Speaking of Bumblebee's instructions, the art within erroneously depicts Bumblebee with Cliffjumper's head.  Seems we're getting a retool further down the line.