Thrilling 30 Goldfire

 

Robot Mode: Goldfire is a variation of the classic Autobot design in that he has the standard car door wings and a lower body made from the rear of the car, but his torso contains no parts of the car hull. The windshield and hood fold onto his back, while the fenders form his shoulders. Which brings us to the first of Goldfire’s problems: the car door wings are fixed onto his shoulders. Meaning whenever he moves his arms, the wings move also. As long as he stands straight with the arms down, the wings look cool. If he raises his arms, though, it starts looking dumb.

Another problem of this robot: the chest doesn’t lock properly into the hip. As the transformation includes sliding the chest upwards to cover the head, holding the figure by its upper body almost inevitably leads to the chest sliding upward a bit, partially hiding the head.

Third problem: the gun looks oversized and I’m not sure what it’s supposed to be, to be honest. You can split it down the length into two halves for use in vehicle mode or to attach each halve to a forearm (not pictured above), but still: it looks stupid. A simple generic blaster gun would have worked just fine here, but I guess they had to be fancy.

To close on some good points, though: the figure is nicely articulated and well-balanced, so no issues there. The new Goldbug-inspired head looks pretty neat. And the gold and blue paint job looks pretty good, though I’m hoping it will hold up and not fall victim to Gold Plastic Syndrom. So bottom line: a nice robot mode at first glance, but with quite a few problems.

Alternate Mode: Goldfire transforms into a gold-colored sports car looking a lot but not quite like the familiar Camaro of Movie fame. I don’t think it’s any particular model, just a generic sports car. Despite the somewhat bulging hood everything fits together very well here and there are no visible robot parts unless you look from below. No paint detailing apart from red taillights and silver headlights, but overall a nice looking car.

The weapons from the robot mode can be mounted on the sides here, which... yeah, looks stupid here as well. Still say this figure should have gotten a much better weapon. Anyway, best leave the weapons aside somewhere and get Goldfire a generic gun or something. Bottom line, though: a nice car mode. Nothing we haven’t already seen in dozens of Movie Bumblebees, but okay.

Remarks: In the IDW comics Bumblebee first got a new Earth mode that contained many elements of Movie Bumblebee before returning to Cybertron, where he assumed the shape of his War for Cybertron figure. After being heavily damaged in battle, he was rebuilt (see the accompanying comic book for details) using elements of his Earth mode and something called “Goldfire Armor”, resulting in this new figure here. In the comics he’s still called Bumblebee, not Goldfire, but I guess the toy marketing people finally clued in to the fact that the name Bumblebee is maybe a tad overexposed by now.

I mostly got the Goldfire version of this figure because I do have fond memories of Goldbug in the Marvel comics (aka the one time Bumblebee was actually cool) and I was amazed that this toy left out the Bumblebee moniker entirely. Still, objectively speaking this toy is a bit of a disappointment. Several small things (crappy weapon, unstable chest, shoulder wings, etc.) combine to drag this toy down quite a bit. So in conclusion I can only recommend this figure to Goldbug fans or die-hard Bumblebee enthusiasts. Everyone else, there are quite a few better Generation Deluxe figures out there.

Rating: C