Phil's
Revenge of the Fallen
Dead End, Nightbeat & Slapdash
Review
Welcome to my review of the ROTF Homage king ! The original Deadend is a Stunticon, a burgundy red Porsche 928. The new Deadend is a red car that resembles a Peugot 9009 concept car. I think the vehicle mode for this Decepticon looks similar to the Porsche 962 car used for previous Transformers such as Tailspin and Backstreet. Try very hard and you can open the car's boot on this vehicle mode.
TF: Fold the sides and back wheels of the car out and up. Turn the car over. Fold the boot back & up, then fold the boot down and slide the top of the car up to reveal the robot's head. Open the bonnet up, separate the legs, fold the feet out and fold the wheels back.
Dead End's robot mode has the skeletal characteristic common to many ROTF Transformers toys. He's blessed with a goodly amount of ball jointed articulation including shoulders, elbows, wrists (!) and hips. Bending joints are found at the knee & ankle and there's a swivel joint at the thigh - no bicep swivel is necessary due to the ball jointed elbow: another lesson in why ball joints are great. He's got no waist swivel or turning neck but her does have some compensation in the head: the jaw opens to reveal a set of teeth! Mostly the robot mode continues the red plastic seen in the vehicle mode, but the waist, lower legs, shoulder joints and head are a bronzey beige plastic and the lower arms, hands and feet are black plastic. The hands have a small round hole in the middle of them. While not obvious at release it's become apparent that these holes let him hold Skystalker's hand axes by the peg sticking out the handle.
Overall: The car mode and robot aren't shaped like the original, but they're coloured right. The Bayness of the toy is reduced by it being a basic. Worth a look, but check out the repaints first.
The Nightbeat Autobot repaint is obviously a homage to Headmaster Nightbeat swapping the red for light blue, black for beigey bronze and beigey bronze for grey. He also gains some yellow flame details. I've seen it claimed that this repaint started life as a Packrat homage but ended up as Nightbeat because "Marketing felt the name "Packrat" wouldn't appeal enough to children,". I think the bubble on the car is a decent evolution for Nightbeat's rounded shape, but think a blue version of this toy might be better named Tailspin. I also question the appropriateness of putting out a Nightbeat repaint so soon after the fan club tried to sell it's own Nightbeat repaint of Energon's Hotshot.
Slap Dash is a Wal*mart exclusive repaint sold in a 2-pack with Trenchmouth who is himself a repaint of Knock-out. The original Powermaster version of Slapdash was a yellow and blue race car. This new version is a yellow/orange (for red) repaint of Dead End (bronzey/beige becomes a similar orange/yellow and the black becomes grey). I think the colour and mode combination points towards a different late G1 toy - the Triggerbot Backstreet though I think you could make a decent argument for this being a ROTF homage to Generation 1 Wheelie.
Either way this pack failed to show up in ASDA (Wal*Mart's UK arm) possibly due to an abundance of the Data War and Wave War 2 packs.
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