Generations Bumblebee

Allegiance: Autobots
Series: Generations
Category: Custom Deluxe
Year: 2010

Robot Mode: As has become habit when reviewing custom Transformers, let’s start with how this Bot is put together. The largest part is ROTF Jolt, who supplies everything but the head. The noggin’ hails from ROTF Cannon Bumblebee. Some work has been done on the arms and knees to improve posability and that annoying and completely useless triangle thing that used to stick out behind Jolt’s head has been removed. This figure gets massive bonus points for that alone.

Now this figure is supposed to be Bumblebee, so a yellow coloring for everything that becomes part of his outer car shell is pretty much a given. The truly nice thing about this custom figure, though, is how well it brings out the fantastically detailed sculpting that ROTF Jolt’s body possesses. Looking back at my review of Jolt, I wrote something along the lines of him having a massive amount of detail only visible in robot mode. How much detail, though, only becomes evident here. This figure is a lovely sculpt and now we can actually see it thanks to Limewire’s sterling paint job.

Not much else to write. As mentioned above, Limey did some work to improve the knees and bring out the hands better. So overall this is a pretty good-looking Bumblebee. Stockier than the ones we’ve seen in the Movie lines so far, but still clearly a Bee. Nicely done.

Vehicle Mode: Nothing much has changed in the vehicle mode, of course, except for the color. Now it’s never easy to paint a bright color like yellow over a dark color such as blue. According to Limewire himself he painted no less than 12 layers of yellow on this car to make it look good. The end result is pretty cool. No traces of the original blue color are visible and while the many layers of yellow do cause the various seams to be somewhat more obvious, the complete car still looks pretty good. A black racing stripe or two might have been nice, but apart from that: Solid.

Remarks: Now quite frankly the last thing any Transformers toy line needs at this moment in time is more Bumblebee figures. By my count more than SIXTY figures representing the yellow Autobot have been released since the first movie came out in 2007 and that’s not counting any Japanese versions of Western figures. So really, is anyone still looking forward to more Bumblebees?

That said, what we have here is a very custom figure that makes the most out of an already fantastically detailed mold, fixes its few flaws and... turns it into a Bumblebee. Okay, I could have done without that last one, but leaving my current distaste for everything yellow aside, Limewire’s custom BB deserves a definite thumbs up.

Rating: 2+