Phil's
Transformers Beachcomber
Review

Beachcomber

The second year of the Minibots makes for some interesting toys. There's no record of the 1985 Minibots having had any kind of prior life so that makes them the first original toy moulds in the Transformers line: Everything prior to this was in Diaclone or Microchange or something even more obscure!

Beachcomber is a blue dune buggy with a grey passenger compartment & engine and a black roll cage & wheels. There's a slightly paler grey used for the headlight sticking up between each front wheel & the car body. The vehicle doesn't look super deformed reducing the possibility of it being a left over Microchange Minicar design.

Transformation: Fold the front of the car forward 180 degrees to form the legs. Stand with the underside facing you. Pull the sides of the car out to form the arms. Fold the head up. I'm told that you can also extend the legs slightly by pulling down on them.

Beachcomber's got a lovely well proportioned robot mode with bending knees (useless because of the lack of hip movement) and turning shoulders. The revealed chest is the same colour as the passenger compartment while the upper legs are the same colour as the headlights and the face is the colour of the bodywork.

Bonus points for being the only year 2 Minibot to actually be a car ! Autobots are CARS not planes or tanks!

Beachcomber was sold as Japanese toy C-63 in 1986. Beachcomber is yet to have any form of re-release in his original colours.

Beachcomber

Beachcomber's G2 appearance has the blue swapped for chromed green and grey of the upper legs, headlights and hubcaps becomes neon pinky orange while the grey of the chest stays the same. Now obviously the pinky orange is just wrong but the metallic green leads me to a minor rant: when they picked the four G2 Minibots why did they pick two that were yellow and two that were blue and *then* decide they all had to be different colours of chrome ? ? ? ? Yes, OK with Hubcap maybe they really wanted Cliffjumper all along, I can see that as the sort of thing (mistake !) Hasbro would do. Now I like the metallic green, it's not wrong, unlike the pinky orange, it's just it's not Beachcomber, just like Hubcap isn't red. If they'd wanted to do a metallic green toy then why not make a G2 Cosmos ? ? ? ?

G2 Beachcomber was sold as a G2 launch toy in the USA in 1984. He wasn't officially released through Hasbro in the UK but a number of the G2 Minibots were imported by Woolworths. G2 Beachcomber was not sold in Japan. And I need to add this information to the Bumblebee & Hubcap reviews!

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