MakeToys Hover

Prelude: Legal stuff first as always. This little figure here is not an official Transformer from Hasbro or Takara-Tomy, he’s a third party product from MakeToys. He’s clearly meant to be Seaspray, but can’t be called that for legal reasons. Also, many thanks to Lucy of NTF-Archive.de who loaned me this little guy for this review. I really feel bad about having to send him back, though. He was just starting to lose that cigarette smell, now he’s got to go back into tobacco hell, poor little fellow. ;)

Robot Mode: First off, if you ever had any doubts who Hover was supposed to pay homage to, a simple side by side comparison will erase them. Hover is Seaspray, plain and simple. He’s a tad bigger and his upper chest looks a bit different, too, but those differences are truly miniscule. He’s somewhat closer to the animated character from the G1 cartoon than the actual G1 toy, but again: minor differences at best. This here is Seaspray, no matter the name.

The biggest change to the G1 toy is, of course, articulation. Hover has it, Seaspray didn’t. Well, he could swing his arms at the shoulders, but that was it. Not so with Hover. Everything except the elbows and the head is ball-jointed, so he can adopt lots of dynamic poses without problem. His big feet give him a fairly stable platform to stand on, so no balance problems at all. Detailing is pretty good considering the size, though I’d have liked to see paint apps where G1 Seaspray has stickers. Finally, the head is a very close match to the noggin’ of the cartoon character, so no complaints there, either.

Bottom line for the robot mode: a nicely updated version of the classic toy, nothing more, nothing less.

Transformation: Just a quick word here. Hover transforms almost identically to Seaspray, but there is one tiny difficulty here. Moving the yellow assemly with the rotors on top past his shoulders is very difficult to do without popping off the arms. They don't pop off as easly as they do on Hover's box-mate Bomber, but I've not managed to transform him even once without at least one of the arms coming off.

Alternate Mode: Hover transforms into pretty much the same blue, white and yellow hovercraft that G1 Seaspray does. The two vehicles are very nearly identical, only Hover is a little bit larger, though actually a tiny bit less detailed than his G1 predecessor. The differences are so miniscule as to be unimportant, though. So yeah, it’s a blue, white and yellow hovercraft with spinning rotor blades out back, that’s it. Nothing more to write.

Remarks: Seaspray appeared regularly during the second season of the original Transformers cartoon as the Autobots “Naval Combat Expert” (as coined by Megatron doing a little exposition / toy advertising during an episode). He’s most (in)famous, though, for once turning himself into a Merman by way of a magic well in order to do the romance thing with an alien Mermaid (the TF cartoon was really weird now and then). He was recently reincarnated in the “Hunt for the Decepticons” toyline as a Voyager-class figure.

Much like Bomber / Powerglide, Hover is nothing more and nothing less than an updated version of a G1 Minibot. A tad bigger, better articulation, more faithful to the cartoon character, but basically the same. And much like with Bomber / Powerglide, you can choose between an official big version, the HftD Seaspray, and the more G1-faithful MakeToys third party figure to bolster the ranks of your Classic Autobots. Personally I don’t like Hover quite as much as Bomber, but then again, I don’t like Seaspray quite as much as Powerglide. So I’ll probably stick with my HftD Seaspray. But still, this is a good little guy and if you’re looking for a faithful reincarnation of the G1 Minibot, you won’t go wrong here.

Rating: B