Party Wallop

Party Wallop in the house tonight! Congratulations! You are now the proud owner of the most advanced party vehicle ever designed! Yes! Turtle technology at its best! This Turtle troop transport is perfect for street-level and subterranean travel. All this control is now in the palm of your crime-fighting hands! May the Ooze be with you! That text is from the original 1988 Party Wagon toy, because Hasbro was too lazy to write anything for this new toy. It doesn't even get Tech Specs. We will never forgive Hasbro's creative directors - for all their brands - for the sheer, penny-pinching corners they've cut that have made their product worse. GI Joe needs filecards, Transformers need Tech Specs, and Hasbro needs to pay a goddamn fair salary to copywriters to make those things happen. Hey, check this out, we finally have something positive to say about Ultimate X-Spanse: because that toy exists, Party Wallop doesn't have the dumbest name in the Collaborative line! Congratulations, PeeDub, you avoided the bottom of the barrel by the smallest of margins! The head is very squarish, with wide cheeks and a grimace that homages the vintage Playmates Turtles. P.W. is an exceedinly blocky, as you'd expect from a robot made from a Volkswagen bus. The limbs are chunky on their own, and then there's flat, squarish armor hanging on the outside of all of them. Although he seems to have four fingers and a thumb on each hand, his feet have the Turtle-appropriate two large toes. There's a lot of kibble here, and even disguising it as "armor" isn't really enough to make it less obtrusive. Especially when it gets in the way of the articulation. The figure moves at the head, shoulders, elbows, wrists, waist, hips, thighs, knees, and ankles. The elbow joints are designed to take the place of bicep swivels, as well, so it really does move quite nicely, even if the feet are just rockers to support wide stances, not any up and down movement. You do need to bend the shoulder armor up out of the way when you move the arms, so it doesn't bump up against the forearm kibble and prevent things from moving entirely. Additionally, the large plate that sticks up behind the robot's head wants to pop out of place if you hold the toy wrong: press on the back in the wrong spot - say, when you're just picking up the robot - and the arrancgement of hinges can force it to slide out of alignment annoyingly. Rather than favoring one Turtle over all the others, Party Wallop gets Transformers versions of all their weapons: two swords, two sais, two nunchucks with real (plastic) chains, and a bo staff. They're all designed to be stored on the robot, though, so even if you're using one type, the others won't just have to lay on the ground or get in the way. In fact, all the accessories can be stored on the bot, but more on that later. Sadly, you do have to remove the swords and sais to convert bewteen robot and van. Hey, all the rest stays in place, that's still pretty impressive. (Technically you could just leave the sais plugged into the front of the thighs, rather than the armor over the hips, but that's not the intended use.) It's not terribly hard to get the hang of changing between modes, but getting the panels to move past one another to get into the proper position can be fiddly at times. The Party Wagon (or "Turtle Van," if you prefer) is about 3⅜" wide, 4" tall, and 5⅜" long. The design is based on the cartoon rather than the toy, with just a simple pair of guns on the roof and a few tech devices, rather than weird stacks of junk equipment and mismatched doors. That's the better choice, because it makes for a nicer altmode today. The tips of the swords poke out from the front bumper slightly, but that just makes the van look like it's sporting extra weaponry. The wheels roll and the guns can elevate, and all the windows are simply painted rather than wasting our time with translucent plastic. So, remember what we said about there being other accessories besides the weapons? Well, let's go back to the robot mode for a minute. First of all, the spare tire can be removed from the front of the van, and the back is designed to look like a pizza, so that's fun, isn't it? Then, the entire front of the van can be removed from the robot's chest, revealing a chest that's more turtley, and can be plugged onto the arm to be used as a shield. Nifty! Now that the robot looks more like a Turtle than it did before, we can also turn it into one of them. All of them, actually. The top of the head can be removed, and the set includes four alternates to represent each of the boys; they store under the van's roof/inside the robot's back kibble, so you don't have to worry about losing them when you're switching. Additionally, you can lift the robot's belt buckle, and turn a piece inside to reveal each of their initials - absolutely the kind of thing that no one would miss if it were absent, but dang clever to include! Right after we predicted that Code Red was a repurposed TMNT crossover, Party Wallop was announced. Guess the legal teams got the contracts worked out, just a few months too late. This is one of the better Transformers Collaborative toys released yet, but there does feel like at least one missed opportunity: imagine if, instead of doing four swappable heads on one robot, the van had just split into four tiny Turtlebots, similar to the Skids and Mudflap ice cream truck. -- 10/15/24 Who is in charge of naming the TF Collaborative robots, and why are they so bad at their job? Tell us on our message board, the Loafing Lounge.