This might stretch the action figure thing as I'm not sure it's not really a traditional action figure. About 10 years or so ago, the last time I reread the Robotech books before the A to Z Challenge in 2019, I was looking to see if I could get a transforming version of the Cyclone from the third Robotech series.
In that series the Cyclone is a motorcycle that can combine with the rider's armor to make it sort of a robot with missiles and laser guns and shit. They were used a lot early on because that was just about all Scott Bernard and his band of "freedom fighters" had until they salvaged some Veritechs. They were also what you used in the lame 2000s video game Invasion for the PS2 and XBox.
Anyway, I went on eBay to see if I could find one that actually transforms for not too much money. They made a Cyclone cycle in the old Matchbox line in the 80s but it doesn't transform. And while they made a lot of the other vehicles for the ExoSquad line in the 90s they never made a Cyclone, though that would have perfectly fit the whole ExoSquad concept.
I did in my poking around find some Japanese thing for not too much money. It's a "Shadow" variant that's painted black and has some kind of stealth cloaking technology. In the TV show Scott Bernard never actually has one of these; it's mostly used by reporter Sue Graham in one episode. Still, it looked pretty neat and it was in my price range.
The problem is that when it came, I found out it doesn't really transform so much as you pretty much have to take the whole fucking thing apart and reassemble it. It literally took hours of fucking around with a bunch of tiny parts to get it to go from the motorcycle mode to the robot trooper mode. It was so annoying that I have never tried changing it back. That definitely wasn't what I was looking for; I was looking for something more like a Transformer.
As you can imagine, when I move it's one of those fragile things I have to carefully pack or else it might fall apart again. Calling it an "action figure" might be a bit of a misnomer as it seems more like a model with all those parts. Close enough!
1 comment:
Robotech is a cool concept for kids to latch onto. I'm not into it today, but as a much younger person, the idea of transforming robots was a thing that just fired my imagination. So I get your obsession with it. And it's nice that you held onto it. A lot of things we like from our childhood tend to disappear with age.
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