Bumblebee

Hop aboard the B. train! When it was first published, Evolutions: Hearts of Steel was its own standalone alternate reality, imagining the events of Generation 1 happening in the 1880s instead of the 1980s. But as the IDW comics continued, they introduced a kind of fascinating twist: this wasn't actually a different world, and these weren't actually the Transformers we knew! Rather, they were a crew of Maximals in the regular continuity who had been brainwashed into taking on existing identities. So that guy who looked like Optimus Prime? He was still the crew's commander, but his real name was Domitius Major. And the little yellow guy? He wasn't Bumblebee, he was "Centurion." But this toy is him when he still thought he was Bumblebee, so that's what we'll be calling him. Guido Guidi designed a great little body for HoS Bumblebee. It retains te essential "'Beeness" of the classic design - a round yellow chest, chunky yellow feet, etc. - but it's all been retroized. There are little details, like the rivets around the panel lines or even the tiny gears visible inside the front of the shins, that come directly from Guidi's original model sheet, but the toy's proportions are weird. Like, the chest is larger and the waist is longer than the art suggests they should be, and if you look at the toy from a ¾ angle, it's ridiculously hollow. If the upper body could slide down slightly, somehow, the aesthetic would come together better. When they decided "Bumblebee" should actually be Centurion, the comics gave him a slatted mouthplate, in part to suggest his locomotive origins, and in part to simply set him apart from Bumblebee. This toy, though, does not get that. It's a standard Bumblebee head, the traditional shape with the traditional little horns, though it seems a little undersized here, dwarfed by the rest of the upper body. Bumblebee stands a scant 4⅝" tall, and moves at the head, shoulders, biceps, elbows, waist, hips, thighs, knees, and ankles. The ankles flex up and down as well as rocking side-to-side, so he'll be very stable even in some wild poses. Because in the story he befriended famous historical steel-driving man (lord lord) John Henry, he gets a hammer as a weapon. (Pay no attention to the fact the comic is set in California, while John Henry is a West Virgina piece of folklore.) He also gets a small blaster pistol, and the weapons can be held in either hand. Like Optimus, Bumblebee's conversion isn't terribly complex, but things need to be in a very precise location or else they won't fit together at all. Raise the two bars and the back flap from the rear of the figure, fold his hands away and turn the forearms to the outside, raise the arms to the back, swing them down sideways into the notches in the ribs, hinge the entire chest backwards, bring the the two pieces of shoulder armor together, swing the thin black bars, tip the head into the chest, straighten the butt-flap, rotate the wheels back, point the feet down, press the legs together and swing them up to lock in place, straighten the arms (being sure to line the unnoticable notches up with the tabs you can't see), and finally swing the wheels up to plug (loosely) onto the small bumps on the former arms. Following his commander's lead, Bumblebee turns into a steam engine (his prehistpric earthmode was, fittingly, some sort of shelled megafauna bug). But while Prime was a more traditional example of what you think of when you think "locomotive," 'Bee is an earlier, more primitive style. It's a made-up model, but it looks like something from the 1830s. It doesn't have a cabin, so the engineer would just stand on the back and look over the boiler to drive. It's cool how many parallels there are between this and the real Bumblebee, like the rounded chest becoming the roof, or the feet becoming the front end (a cow catcher in this case, rather than a bumper and hood). The wheels roll, and both weapons can be stored securely underneath the vehicle. Fun! As a whole, Hasbro's Hearts of Steel Transformers are a very fiddly lot: it's a lot of having to line things up very precisely without any clear indication of when you have a knee or elbow or what have you bent just a little too far or a little not too far enough (the second half of this two-pack more than this one, so look forward to that). But still, getting unique alternate reality designs is a lot of fun, and we wish there were more of it. -- 09/02/25 Bumblebee or Centurion? Tell us on our message board, the Loafing Lounge.