Introduced in Series 4, the Wilderness Troop never got a store in the Transformers BotBots mall to call their own. We can assume it was a Bass Pro Shops or something, but Hasbro stopped including any art with the figures, so it's just a theory. Like, is it a small outlet, or a major location with an indoor climbing wall and an artificial pond stocked with real fish? The world will never know.
A small hatchet is definitely something you might expect to need on a camping trip, and thus something you might expect to find in a camping store. The handle on this one is way thicker than it should be, proportionally, and the robot's face is unfortunately visible in this mode. You can't even turn the axe around and hide the face in the back, because the matching area on that side is unpainted tan plastic. The actual blade of the hatchet is painted silver, rather than the dark grey of the rest of the head.
Converting BotBots is not hard. Here, you split the legs, fold out the arms, and flip the axe blade around.
Rusty Von Cleave is an expert survivalist. Once, he was out exploring all alone. There had been no sign of any Energon snacks for minutes. In a race against hunger, Rusty Von Cleave scaled a treacherous 60-foot escalator with nothing but chewing gum and dental floss. From its peak the rugged adventurer bot was able to spot a nearby food source. It's razor sharp survival instincts like that that make Rusty Von Cleave a cut above the rest.
Thanks to the shape of the axe handle, Rusty Von Cleave ends up bent to the side, like he's got some form of robo-scoliosis. The big chunk of axehead kibble on the right shoulder doesn't help him balance, since he's already leaning that direction. You can get him to stand up, you just have to be careful how you pose the arm.
Russ is available in a Magic Tricksters 5-pack, or 8-packs for the Movie Moguls or Wilderness Troop.
Very nice choice for the last week of October. Though I was hoping you'd review those fossil transformers for October since they're so creepy awesome.
Wonder if we could get some repaints out of this guy. Obviously can't turn it into something else like some of the others, but perhaps reference variants, like one for chopping down a Xmas tree or a George Washington cherry tree joke.
I was tempted to get the Triceratops fossilformer, but wasn't impressed by the robot mode. Really, the robots for any of them just seem weak. Maybe it's a side effect of having to be able to pull apart to become armor/weapons? They all look great as dinosaur bones, but then you change them and it's just... meh.
The triceratops is the weakest of the bunch, but the other 2 are surprisingly fun, especially the sticklike pterodactyl ninja (that comes with a combiner head) I was surprised at the amount of personality it had.
The Rex is the best of the bunch though, it can get into so many alien and creepy poses, plus it can fill in as a monster/alien for non transformers to fight