Impossible Toys Hill Jumper

Series: Impossible Toys
Allegiance: Autobot
Categories: Minibot
Year: 2013

Within Hill Jumper burns the spark of a hero. On the outside he's a paranoid, trigger-happy jerk with impulse-control problems. He utterly hates the Cons. He also hates traitors. And anybody could be a traitor. Therefore, he hates everybody. It's unclear if he hates traitors more than he hates Cons, but it's at least a neck-and-neck thing. He makes a habit of pulling ridiculously huge guns out of nowhere and attacking impulsively despite orders or sanity. Somehow this gets him neither killed nor demoted.

Prelude: Legal stuff first as always. This toy here is not a figure released by Hasbro or Takara-Tomy and thus not legally a Transformer. It’s from Impossible Toys and clearly meant to be G1 Minibot Cliffjumper, but due to legal reasons he can’t be called by that name. So we have Hill Jumper instead.

Robot Mode: Hill Jumper is pretty much a spitting image of the original 1984 Cliffjumper toy with a few notable exceptions. First off, he’s about 50% larger. Second, he has a small gun and the fistholes to hold it. And third, the figure is fully articulated. The figure is ball-jointed all the way through, giving it excellent articulation, especially when compared to the shoulder-swivel only 1984 figure it emulates.

And that’s pretty much it. Hill Jumper is G1 Cliffjumper, just bigger, armed, and articulated. That’s all this robot mode tries to be and it accomplishes that perfectly. The only thing I would have liked to see would have been a slightly bigger gun than that tiny little thing he comes with.

Alternate Mode: There is practically no difference between Hill Jumper and Cliffjumper’s vehicle modes except for the size. Hill Jumper is a slightly less deformed version of the Porsche 924 Turbo, but that’s about the only difference. Still a nice looking little car mode.

Remarks: Since 2006’s Classics line Hasbro has served old school collectors with updated figures that strongly adhere to the G1 cartoon and comic aesthetic. Collectors seem to like that. Impossible Toys, however, figured that collectors would actually prefer figures that looked as close as possible to the actual G1 toys instead. And while some collectors like that, it was nowhere near enough of them to keep Impossible Toys in business.

Anyway, Hill Jumper is a nice ... well, you can’t really call him an update, as he’s pretty much the exact same figure as Cliffjumper, just bigger and with better articulation. So, yeah. I like him. And I got him at clearance. Impossible Toys brought out nine different Minibots in this subline. One of which is enough for me. I can’t really imagine that many people want all nine of them.

Rating: B-