Shortpacked!: Have I done mirrors before? This felt new, anyway.
Yeah, I ain't drawn anything on paper for over a week now. Yay, Cintiq! And for whatever reason, it leads to more extravagant backgrounds.... probably because it's much easier to doodle them in with colored brushes, versus the usual ink-then-color route. We'll see where this takes me.
Bob Forward, who wrote the Foreword to
Shortpacked! Book 3 (preorder it now!), is mostly responsible for my insane
Dinobot collection. The remaining percentage is due to the sheer number of times they redecoed and retooled his toy. I have no idea what it is that compels me to own every version of a mold once they reuse it more than four or five times. Though I thankfully fight this 99% of the time. But with Dinobot? He's my boy.
I also like completing
Transformers Wiki pages.
So in that vein, this is
Kabaya's "candy toy" model kit Dinobot. See, in Japan, you don't pay tax on candy, so Kabaya makes these kits and various figurines based on various properties, throws in an obligatory stick of shitty gum, and woo. No tax to pay from Japanese children with little money. I have a couple of these Kabaya products in the
Hot Shot variety, what with the Shrine, but none of those were transformable.
Well,
sorta transformable. This Dinobot figure needs assembly in more ways than one. It comes as you see in the first photo, of course, and then you snap and peg him together. But the transformation requires taking him apart a little and rearranging him. The toy's not an expensive thing, but it wasn't supposed to be. Remember, these are supposed to be cheap. Almost as cheap as the gum. To transform this Dinobot from robot mode to raptor mode, you take off his legs at the hip, peg those underneath, take off his robot arms, switch them so the elbows bend the right way, and then remove his tail just like his "real" toy. The tail splits apart to reveal a sword, same as usual, though this
rotate blade doesn't spin, of course.
It was pretty fun to do. For a guy who has as many Dinobots as I do, the act of physically putting the design together with my own hands was kind of... cathartic. Except for the stickers. They actually stuck on the plastic better than I thought they would, considering this thing is 15 friggin' years old. I was sorta suspecting them to just flake off the paper onto the ground when I opened the box. Naw, they still stuck. And they stuck just well enough it's possible they haven't degraded at all. I can totally imagine this being as well as they stuck back in 1996. That is, not very well. And, heh, isn't it always the way that using Superglue adheres your skin better to the plastic than it does the sticker paper? Ahahaha. Man, the teeth sticker that wraps around the front of the dinosaur head is the worst. The absolute worst.
But all in all, it's a neat little artifact to have. In robot mode, it's generally Basic-sized ("Scout" in modern jargon). And he has a little rotate blade and a rigid grill structure.
Just don't eat the gum. For the love of God, no.