Charlie Clone

Welcome to Charlie Clone's All Action Figure Revue at SWAFT.info! I'm your host, Charlie Clone!

Well, it had to happen eventually. My first bona fide DEFECTIVE dollar store toy: the Transformatrix Magnitic [sic] Action Figure. Oh, Dollar Tree, you minx! You lured me in with your promises of plastic bounty, only to leave me richer in the knowledge of your deceits! The honeymoon is over, readers. Materialism's promise of worldly bliss has proven a fraud. If you should find a typo in the lines below, it is because my heavy tears have struck my keyboard. I lament. Sigh. My heart is broken by Greenbrier International, Inc. of 500 Volvo Pkwy Chesapeake, Vespasia 23320 who distributed this malformed plaything, forged in the bowels of crafty China. As noted previously, this toy perpetuates a rather dangerous trend to publish conflicting age warnings. The upper right hand corner indicates that the toy is not suitable for children "under 3 yrs." The upper left hand corner professes, "Ages 6 and Up."

Transformatrix Magnitic Action Figures: Combining all the cybernetic coolness of giant, shape-shifting, alien robots, the reality-bending Gnosticism of the Matrix, and the mystical power of Magnites! How could such a toy line possibly go so horribly wrong?

I'm not quite sure what mystical power a Magnitic being possesses, but I'm sure it is far more numinous and awesome than a merely "magnetic" action feature.

In "construction toy" aisles, there are a plethora of such less inspiring "magnetic" action figures on the market nowadays. In theory, the magnetic joints should make this toy beyond super-articulated. He should be hyper-articulated or ultra-articulated, capable of performing poses beyond the wildest imagination of even the most-ball-jointed Microman.

Unfortunately, the pull on these magnites...er...magnets...is so weak, that the figure is lucky if it can retain a pose for more than a few seconds.

Obviously, the concept behind this toy...like the toy itself...totally falls apart if one of the metal joints falls out during shipping and becomes lost...as, in fact, occurred with my figure. Fortunately, it was only a shoulder joint. This meant that I could opt for displaying a "battle-damaged" one-armed robot. Or, since the wrist joint was still in place, I could still give him one shortened arm, and hope that the other robots wouldn't look at him awkwardly in the schoolyard.

Featuring the ability to be dismembered and reassembled in variously deviant ways, these toys are supposed to be highly poseable and have interchangeable parts. If you ask me, it sounds like a recipe for developing young minds into the twisted mad scientists of the future. Since this Transformatrix figure appears to be some kind of robot, one can assume he can be disassembled without experiencing any personal physical discomfort. But I'll talk more about this concept under the features section.

There were two different molds of Transformatrix robots, each available in a translucent red or orange color. My particular figure appears to have a flame emblazoned on his chest and shield, so I assume he's aligned with some kind of fire elemental. Whether he is meant to cause fires or eliminate them depends on one's tendency towards sociopathic behavior or sense of civic duty.

ACCESSORIES:

The robot comes with a gun and a shield. The gun fits in either hand. The shield, however, has a nasty habit of falling apart where the handle connects to the target. The handle itself also also spontaneously slips out of the robot's hands. Maybe it's his firey personality that leads him to reject defensive measures.

Of course, since the robot can be disassembled and reassembled in a variety of ways, I suppose just about every body part could be considered an accessory. And so I ponder, what do we define as the core being of this action figure? Does his essence reside in his brain? His torso? How many or how few body parts does he need to be considered a complete being? If Jason's men must replace every timber of the Argus in the course of their journey so that not a single splinter of the original ship remains by their journey's end, is the ship they return with still  rightly called the Argus?

FEATURES: Pretty much the only feature this toy has going for it is the potential for creativity. Here are some random reconfigurations I came up with...

PLAY VALUE:

Okay, so Mr. Butt-head-mode was mildly satisfying to create in a puerile, prep-school boy kind of way. And the "Super-D-mode" almost looks cool (in any event, the toy is much easier to handle in this configuration). But, other than that, the reconfiguration feature has fairly limited play value, unless your child has a perverse imagination.

Basically, this toy is designed to do one thing: fall apart. And it does it very well.

This would be great if you have a kid who is a smasher, basher, or crasher. I imagine that you could line a bunch of these up, launch some kind of Nerf-missile at them or drive Optimus Prime through them, and be fairly satisfied with watching their body parts scatter. Unless, of course, it was a die-cast metal Optimus Prime...then he'd have all kinds of random magnetic body parts clinging to him afterwards...

Until next time... --Charlie Clone