Annoyed By Crappy Repaints
One of the time honored traditions of Transformers figures is the repaint. Some people won’t collect repaints unless they’re another character entirely. Some not at all, no matter how many identical Seekers are produced. I love’em. If I already own one figure of a certain mold, I also want to own every redeco or remold of that figure. I just like to see them side-by-side and study the contrast.
The problem that I have with repaints is when the new deco is almost identical to the older deco. For example, I’m fine if they paint Optimus Prime purple and call him “evil”. I think that’s cool. I’ll buy it. But don’t try to sell me another yellow Bumblebee with a silver stripe instead of a black stripe. It’s not much of a repaint if you can barely tell them apart at first glance. Such is the case with Activators Battlefield Bumblebee.
I’ve talked about my love of the Activators line before: they’re small, easy to transform, and cheap enough to collect any repaint that Hasbro cares to make. Animated Starscream got two repaints from this line: Thundercracker and Dirge. Both completely different color schemes and different characters. The deluxe-sized Bumblebee got a really nice gold and brown Prowl-like repaint with Elite Guard Bumblebee, so we know that good decos are out there.
Bumblebee got a nice white deco in Patrol Bumblebee, but followed with another yellow combination with Battlefield Bumblebee. What?! After the pack-in figure with True Colors Shockwave got no repaint at all, this was just adding insult to injury. There was potential here! Maybe give him flames on the side and call him Team Rodimus Bumblebee? Or they could have surprised us with a Japanese Animated-inspired metallic yellow deco.
Derrick Wyatt designed a number of characters with the same structure as Bumblebee for Animated, so Hasbro had many options for repaints with this mold: a blue one named Glyph (bonus for using a female Transformer), or a green one name Wasp, or a beige one named Bumper, or an homage to any of the G1 Throttlebots. I’m just wondering how another yellow Bumblebee got the green light.
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