Mixmaster

Some day we may review a Mixmaster toy without including a Beastie Boys "Three MCs and one DJ" reference, but today will not be that day. The Constructicon desert sands quake as Constructicon Mixmaster Constructicon-combines with his Constructicon comrades to Constructicon-form Constructicon Devastator. click to embiggen Okay, so clearly the bio doesn't use the word "Constructicon" as often as that: we put some extras in for good measure; can you tell which ones? Guess them all, and win absolutely no prize! There have already been two Mixmaster toys in this general scale (that is, "not-Legends Class"): one that turned from a robot to a vehicle, and one that turned from a vehicle to part of a robot. But the Studio Series is meant to give us better toys (aka the quality we should have gotten in the first place), so now we've got a third one. Mixmaster's body is quite dense and compact - at least, the central part is, he's still got long spindly arms with the pieces of his "shell" hanging off them and making the toy about 11" wide. The "Bayformer" style is evident in the sculpt, with all the weird little mechanical parts covering the body, and the exposed inner workings. Unlike a lot of them, he doesn't have digitigrade legs, but rather normal identifiable feet and and knees. Feet and knees with jagged armor plates sticking off them. The chest is fairly narrow, but looks large and imposing thanks to the way the truck kibble pokes off it like a dangerous breastplate. The arms are held very far away from the body, creating a light, hollow look, and the hands (which are really just two sharp fingers) are permanently pointed down, because there are only hinges in the wrists, not swivels. The toy is so wide, Mixmaster is partially unassembled in the box. He's sold in robot mode, and you have to attach the upper shoulder armor and the truck's cab - which just hangs off the back of the robot as a huge, unbroken piece of kibble - before you can play with him. Fortunately, this time there are no major mistakes in the instruction booklet like there were a decade ago, so turning him into a truck is easy to do. Also unlike the toy from a decade ago, this one has a fully licensed altmode, not just becoming "a" cement mixer, but a real Mack Granite truck - which means that, just like Megatron, he gets the Decepticon bulldog hood ornament, not just a little triangle lump! Yay! The truck isn't perfectly screen-accurate (no additional load-bearing wheels raised up by the top of the drum, for instance), but it's close. It's not a very colorful toy in either mode, just lots of black, greys, and silver. The old Mixmaster had a third form, a stupid "battle mode" that kind of turned him into a cannon... platform... thing? That's not present here, thank Primus, but the Studio Series Constructicons are able to combine into Devastator, so he does still have a mode beyond just "robot" and "disguise." Mixmaster forms the big guy's head, but it's kind of an inellegant process. Remember the truck's cab, that had to be attached earlier? That's just used to cover the full, unbroken face. You remove the cab entirely, and plug it on elsewhere. That's a bit of a cheat, isn't it? Even before you consider him as part of a combiner, Studio Series Mixmaster is better than the previous robot version. He has some serious kibble in both his forms, but converting him between them is fun and, while the colors are bland, the body is true to the film. Rampage | Scrapmetal | Long Haul | Hightower | Mixmaster | Scavenger | Scrapper | Overload -- 01/14/20

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