Posts tagged with "hot shot" - 1
Posted January 8, 2023 at 1:00 pm

Hello!  This is attempt #2 at Modern Poseable Hot Shot!  Let's see how this guy does.

See, there's an integral problem with making Armada Hot Shot, But With Joints.  Armada Hot Shot transformed in a certain way that doesn't really.... allow for real arms?  Like, he's a sports car, and his arms are layered on top of his torso, and they really only swung out to the sides because, like... there's no room for additional jointing, and this also means his torso is absolutely flat.  So if you want to give him real arms and a real torso so that he doesn't look like Pancake The Robot Man, you have to... change things?  A lot?  And the more you change things, the less he looks like Hot Shot.  

The first attempt at Armada Hot Shot But With Joints, Universe (2009) Hot Shot, tried to reinvent him pretty hard.  It gave him a vehicle mode that was shaped more like an actual car (an Audi TT to be precise) and it did all sorts of crazy shellformer stuff that resulted in him having arms, sort of.  I mean, sure, he had arms, and those arms articulated... but not with the amount of panels piled on them from every direction.  The toy, despite all its joints, was immobile.  (also the feet were extremely loose, making it difficult to stand the thing, but that's a separate issue)  

And so attempt #2, in all honesty, has a pretty low hurdle to succumb.  Legacy Evolution Armada Hot Shot comes back to do Armada Hot Shot Again.  But good this time, we hope!  And for the most part, it succeeds!  The good news is, its arms are finally absolutely free to move about.  Nothing is attached to them.  If there's panel-y backpack stuff, it's tucked away.  And he's got a waist rotation joint, at long last, which honestly seems like heresy in connection to an Armada Hot Shot toy.  Also unlike the previous new Hot Shot, he's got his axelzooka again (but not geared to a Mini-Con nor does it fire anything).  He's also stolen Jolt's gun one more time, but that's really the cartoon's fault for stealing it first.  His feet do fold out like the original toy's, but there's no chainsaw stuff sculpted on there.  Driving claws?  Sort of.

The downsides are his forearms are a little anemic.  They have to be, because so much is being crammed into that middle section of the car, but the result is a Hot Shot that's not quite his expected silhouette.  He had big punchy arms, and now he doesn't.  The roof of the car, instead of hanging off the underside of his forearms, is now on the back of his legs.  This is out of the way of his arms!  It's not out of the way of his knees, though, and in order to bend those knees more than 30 degrees, you gotta fold those car roof halves out of the way.  (The car windows are still sculpted on the insides of Hot Shot's forearms.)  

But otherwise, hey, yeah, it's finally an Armada Hot Shot that functions well as an action figure.  It's an odd existence, since his entire appearance was originally wholly dependent on being a platform for various gimmickry.  He looks the way he does because the play pattern came first.  But now here's that design but with ankle tilts. 

Something gained, something lost.  

Posted November 15, 2019 at 10:57 pm

When War for Cybertron: Stege Hound first came out, everyone noticed something odd about his packaging art -- he had Hot Shot's head!  Specifically, Cybertron Defense Hot Shot's head.  The packaging artist painted the wrong head, possibly because the photos they were sent presented the toy with it.  CD Hot Shot was a military vehicle, while currently Rescue Bots Academy Hot Shot is a dune buggy, so a Cybertronic Jeep mode isn't too far off the mark for the guy.   Thing is, most toys these days get extra heads built into the tooling for potential later releases, but these potential later releases don't always happen!  And so despite us knowing (intuitively) there was a Hot Shot head somewhere in Stege Hound's tooling, it didn't guarantee we'd get a Hot Shot from him.

Ultimately (obviously), we did!  He wasn't confirmed officially until dang near the end of the line, and just days before he was released exclusively at New York Comic-Con (via Entertainment Earth).  Entertainment Earth also had a matching Hot Shot pin and a little Hot Shot badge tag, both of which Adam Pawlus was gratefully able to get for me.  (I also was helped getting a pin by good ol' warcabbit.)  Since, you know, I've never been to a NYCC.  Hot Shot himself was available readily online through various outlets.

And the Stege Hot Shot is... good.

I mean, he's not the Hot Shottiest Hot Shot, since he's not a yellow sportscar, but he's probably one of the best Hot Shot toys?  Because Hound himself is pretty good, you see.  He's got a neat transformation (both sets of wheels end up in his legs), and he comes with two cannons and a ... fake spare tire thing, since the altmode is Cybertronian.  The fake spare tire thing can attach to the side of the larger cannon and make it look like a Tommy gun.  

But Stege Hot Shot is definitely the most articulated Hot Shot toy, that's for dang sure.  Like, I'm not sure any transformable Hot Shot toy has even had waist rotation before.  And all the standard Stege articulation is present, including waist rotation, ankle tilts.... shoulders.  You can get some dynamic movement out of him.

Cybertron Defense Hot Shot was known for his double cannons mounted on his shoulders, but Hot Shot's two cannons do a poor job of recreating both of them.  They can recreate ONE of them pretty well, if you combine them.  And so, whoops, I have two Stege Hot Shots, and one is borrowing the other's weapons.  I am now sated.

Until more Hot Shots come out, anyway.  Dang, do you know there's a Rescue Bots Academy (Series 2) of those blind-bagged figurines you find at Meijer or Kroger?  And there's TWO Hot Shot figures in that.  It's been reported exactly once in the United States and zero other times.  That shit needs to saturate the market.  Or at least eBay.  

Posted January 7, 2013 at 2:15 am
Can't find my Frenzy! So pushing back talking about the Data Disk guys once again.

Here's Beast Hunters Bumblebee. I found him and nobody but him when I was out looking for his wave, and as I am weak, I snatched him up. He wasn't on my list or anything, since my place is kind of lousy with Bumblebees already, but after seeing some photos of him in-hand on the Internet, I saw that he was pretty neat-looking. And, hey, Bumblebee with spikes all over him. He reminds me of Johnny Five at the end of Short Circuit 2 where he covers himself in random spikey punk rock shit and then uses his last five minutes alive for spiteful vengeance, as you do.

As you might notice, he is heavily retooled! Not much of the original toy survives, though the engineering and transformation is the same. Let's see, the middle of his upper torso, all of the gray of his middle torso and thighs, and the non-vehicle-y parts of his lower legs, plus his arms from the biceps on down... those are all old parts. The head and pretty much the entirety of the vehicle mode (other than that middle hood section) are new.

He still comes with the two arm-mounted blasters of the original tooling, plus a crossbow-like weapon that mounts on his hood or his arm or in his hand. He comes with a whoppin' six dang missiles, which the crossbow-thing can fire with a spring-loaded mechanism. This dude is armed. He will murder you. If you're a beast, anyway. Or so I think the story goes.

He's pretty hard core.
Posted June 6, 2012 at 11:49 pm


So Cheetimus made me a yellow Hot Shot, because he loves me or something.  Sorry, Cheets, I already have a bromance going!

At some point Cheetimus realized that he can paint, and so recently he's been doing piles of modifications to Transformers toys to either make them look more like their media appearances or just for fun.  For example, he's done buttloads of Ratchets and Knock Outs and such.  Definitely stuff above my particular skill level, for sure.  For example, just by looking at this Hot Shot he sent me, I notice he can actually paint straight.  (Rulers and straight lines have always been my natural enemy.  I mean, check out these old It's Walky! strips... these panel borderss were drawn with a straight edge.  I kid you not.)

The Hot Shot he sent me is the offspring of two toys.  Cheets took a PRID Bumblebee and gave him PRID Hot Shot's head.  After all, that gives you a yellow Hot Shot, correct, without nearly as  much painting?  Then it was a simple(?) matter of detailing him to look more like a classic Hot Shot deco.  He seems to have gone for the Armada animation colors route, with the grays instead of navy blues.  Bumblebee's stripes were painted over in red and his gut and thighs were done in red also, with some silver accents to call back to his Armada seatbelt chest details.

He's perfectly transformable, though Cheets warned me not to fuss with his visor.  The paint there means it can't be moved anymore without scraping.

This toy reminds me of the early Armada Hot Shot prototype, the broadshouldered one.  Aaron Archer said one of the reasons for the change was that he didn't think the "football player" look worked for the character, and the transformation made him too wide.  And yet,  here we are.

To sum up, Cheetimus is good at painting.  If you think your Knock Out needs more yellow, I'd check him out.
Posted May 9, 2012 at 12:23 am
Hey, let's take a break from BotCon stuff!  I got other guys that weekend, after all!

This is Transformers Prime Hot Shot!  I enjoy him very much.  In a world where Bumblebee is Optimus Prime's trusted yellow hot rodded sportscar and Hot Rod has taken back the "hot headed youth destined to be leader" job, I'm happy to see there's still a place for Hot Shot nestled somewhere in between.  Sure, he kinda has to be his blue-and-red-then-yellow Cybertron colors so he's not exactly Bumblebee, but I understand that this is the compromise between him existing and him not existing.

Prime  Hot Shot is a retool of the second Bumblebee Deluxe toy.  I only have the first Bumblebee Deluxe toy, and so this mold was a new one to me.  This version transforms a lot more simply than the first one, which is good for fun but not as good for show-accuracy.  But this is Hot Shot, who's not on the show (yet?), so it doesn't matter that he's not screen accurate to a screen version that may or may not exist.  So I can bask in the fun of him.

His entire torso is geared to autotransform, you see.  If you pull his shoulders/front wheels outwards from the hood, this incredible thing takes place where the torso and head orchestrates itself wildly into position.  It's kind of amazing.  Everything else is kind of an easy afterthought.  Pull out the legs, fold up the roof, the end.

Like the original Hot Shot, this guy has a visor that flips down!  This really makes him feel like Hot Shot to me.  Unlike the original Hot Shot, the visor is translucent plastic painted mostly black, leaving unpainted goggle lenses, which is an improvement over the original opaque piece.  Also unlike the original Hot Shot, his head can turn at the neck.  He's pretty poseable overall for a Hot Shot!

One thing I have trouble grasping visually are his eyes.  See those horizontal silver slabs?  Those are actually his eyebrows!  Below them are his eyes, and they're blue translucent plastic, same as his windows and the unpainted portions of his visor.  But you can't really see them very well when they're buried inside the middle of his blue face.  They're lightpiped, but the big plastic piece behind his head tends to block light from going through there.  Maybe at some point I'll paint his eyebrows black to help my brain read his face properly.

(I've never actually customized any of my Hot Shots.  This would be a first.  I might get a double, just to have a pristine specimen to match the rest of my Shrine.)

This toy comes with a fun story!  I had this guy (and the rest of his case) preordered from Big Bad Toy Store, and they were due to arrive from UPS the day I left for BotCon.  Well, dammit, I knew that the truck wouldn't arrive until I got to the airport.  And sure enough, I was right.  No sooner than I'd been dropped off by my wife and gotten checked in than I got a phone call from her telling me the UPS guy got there with my Hot Shot as she was pulling up to our place.  And because my wife is the best friggin' wife in the whole damn world, she grabbed the Hot Shot for me, drove back to the airport, and handed him over to me on the curb.  (We live one exit down the highway.)  Hot Shot got to be my trip buddy!

One of the security guys asked if it was collectible and if I was gonna keep it sealed.  He was really sad when I told him that he was gonna be opened as soon as I got to my gate.

And then licked.
Posted January 22, 2012 at 12:42 am
A few days ago, case assortment information for the upcoming Transformers Prime: Robots in Disguise toyline revealed that we were getting a new Deluxe (now redubbed "Revealer") Hot Shot toy.  Despite my super obvious love for all things Hot Shot, I wasn't all that excited.  See, we learned previously that "Hot Shot" is a name that had been reassigned to Hot Rod for trademark ownership reasons.  Screw a Hot Rod!  Anyway, I figgered it'd just be a Hot Rod toy.  Meh!

But then the Argos catalog over in the great United Kingdom gave us photos, and there was this blue Bumblebee with a new head.  This head has a visor that is lowered over the eyes.  Now, this image had no label of any sort, so it could still be anybody, but I'm laying odds it's a friggin' real Hot Shot.  Not the  Hot Roddy kind, but a genuine JaAm-loving Hot Shot.  He's in his Cybertron colors since, well, y'know, he can't be yellow for obvious reasons, but it's definitely looking like a Hot Shot.

So I made sure I was the first guy to do fan art of him.

Posted June 22, 2011 at 2:07 pm
Guess which of the three is the building kit from the failed not-LEGO line. Go on. I'll give you 5 seconds.


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.

Like Animated Ratchet, KREO Ratchet comes with surplus tools.


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.

The stretcher is upside-down, isn't it. Dammit.


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.

Just off-screen is a pile of arms and legs.


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.

If the kit's small enough to not have proper hands, I tend to like it. Though that's correlation, not cause.


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.)

Turn a page, put on two pieces. Turn a page, put on another two pieces.


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.

"And I have... all these pieces left!" --Leonardo Leonardo
Posted September 23, 2010 at 2:01 am
Die, Hot Shot, die!


So, hey, Transformers: Drift #2 came out today. Last week, I made fun of Issue 1 for casually killing off G2 guys with reckless abandon, and Issue 2 does it one better! In the second and third panels of the first page, we see both Hot Shot and Shattered Glass Ravage all endeadened.  Well, that's conspicuous, isn't it?  The character I famously have a shrine of and the character I created?

And it's not just a coincidence.  Artist Alex Milne writes on the IDW forums:
when i started issue 2 i had a battle scene between the autobots and decepticons and i asked a few of my friends who to draw in there. a few of them said i should draw hot shot, and i was like hot shot??? why the hell do i want to draw him??? i'm not the biggest fan of armada anyways. then one of them said it was Walky's favourite, but i still don't know if that's true or not, and i laughed, and i said, if you want me to put him in, i will. personally i don't care. so at first i asked my friends what characters to add, they gave me a few choices and when i then wanted to know the reason behind there choice they told me, and i got a laugh out of it.

so, no lie here. no favourite characters of anyone who i hardly know in issue one. in issue 2, there is. did i do it because that guy upsets me. no. i don't really care what he says. i did it because my friends thought it was be funny and it's a character not in the G1-G2 line that will be used. oh, and i'm not the biggest fan of armada, so theres that too.

Sweet!  So basically, Alex Milne has a friend who not only hates me, but also has incredible control over what he draws in his comics for Hasbro.  I'm genuinely flattered!  I'm serious.  I made a difference in someone's life.  And I can't really throw a fit or anything.  I make fun of IDW's comics plenty.  I have little room for outrage.  I'm mostly happy they (or their friends) know who I am.

Aimed for SG Ravage, but hit Glit.


I like attention.

The only thing that really bothered me about this whole affair was Editor Denton Tipton's response to people being upset that their favorite characters were being casually offed in the backgrounds.
I have no control over what Milne says (outside of this forum). Just like he doesn't have any control over what characters live or die. For the record: All those characters are generics. This wouldn't even be an issue if it weren't for the fascination with "canon."

"Fascination with canon"?  Really?  You're going to condescend to us for caring about the stories you sell to us for $3.99?  If we see characters dying and we get upset, it's our fault for caring?  Great.

And if Milne really doesn't have any control over who lives and who dies, maybe you should tell him not to draw characters dying. Because from where I'm looking, he sure does seem to be determining who lives and who dies.  Or are we to disregard what we see in the comics we're reading?

Comic books are still a partially visual medium, right?  Or did I miss a memo?
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