Bumblebee

To paraphrase Weezer…

“God damn you half-Japanese toys, you do it to me every time..”

So there I was, wandering around my local flea market, looking for my bootleg toy fix. I pass by the booth where the Vietnamese family had a toy shop. I used to get a ton of bootlegs there, hell, they populated the bootleg section of my old store Cybertoyz. It’s all gone now though, replaced by someone selling those electronic pictures with shimmering water. The whole place smells.

Most of the bootlegs are gone, replaced by junk ordered through discount catalogs and questionable food stalls. However, about half way through I find a light in the darkness.. toys!

This stall had mostly clothes, bootleg shirts with Michael Jackson on them, and bootleg handbags, but there were a few toys hanging on giant cards. I am a sucker for giant cards.

I grabbed this Bumblebee for $17.00 – I tried to talk the lady down but she wouldn’t budge. Definitely not those people I used to go to. They also had a bootleg of the big Movie Prime from the first movie, and something from the cybertron series. None of them seemed like radical bootlegs aside from the packaging, so I picked bumblebee because I could never justify the almost $100 for the legit version.

When I got home, I looked at it and felt dirty. I felt shame.

The toy comes carded, as I mentioned before, on a GIANT card. The thing must be 2 feet tall. It’s insane. The thing is all written up in Chinese, with images on the back of the other toys in the line.

Bumblebee is packaged in car mode, so we will start with that. This toy is based off of the Hasbro Ultimate Bumblebee toy which features lights and sound, but all electronics have been removed from this toy. The plastic is bootleg-quality but has a nice metallic sheen to it. The paint is so-so, and all Transformers and Chevy branding has been removed. If you look at the front you can see where they tried to scratch out the sides of the Chevy Bowtie emblem on the grill.

Parts don’t fit quite right. The doors don’t line up well. You pick it up and it immediately begins to dissasemble.. er… transform on its own. There is noticeable paint on the front wheels.

Flipping the car over you notice that the button hole has been covered, and there is a surprisingly nice wash over the body, giving it a nice weathered look.

Transformation is the same as the original, but with far cheaper materials, so things tend to break. The doors came right off, with the small black tubes holding them on crumbling in an instant. The clips inside the front fenders also broke off.

Aside from that though, the rest of the transformation is trouble free. Bumblebee is tall and looks good. He’s pretty well articulated and he stands well. The missile launcher is retained in the arm, but only comes with one missile.

If anything, this bootleg has inspired me to maybe track down the original. Seems like a cool toy.