Generation One Series Ratchet

Height: 13.3cm to top of head.

Articulation: 24 points total- Swivel neck; 6 points each arm: universal shoulder, hinge elbow, forearm swivel, double joint wrist; swivel waist; 5 points each leg: universal hip, mid-thigh swivel, hinge knee, ball joint ankle.

Colors: Molded white, red, black, and transparent blue. Painted red, white, light blue, silver, blue (lightbar) and yellow (license plate)

Accessories: Blade/"Medical Dispenser"

Release Data: Released March 2009 in the United States with an MSRP of US$10.99

Gallery: 20 images.

Author: RAC


Back on Cybertron, Autobot Ratchet was the best mechanic and machinist around. The only thing that kept him from true greatness was his constant partying. Years of war and a series of tragic encounters with Megatron have tempered his good nature, leaving him with a melancholy edge and a sour bedside manner. He's still the finest medic the Autobots have at their disposal, but these days he's more distracted by his bad memories than his late nights.

As ExVee mentioned before, Ironhide was one of the rare cases- two, counting Dinobot -where we sought out Takara's release of a figure due to its superior color choices. In truth, Ratchet would've been the third for me, despite his Henkei color scheme not being exactly what I'd choose. But I just couldn't bring myself to buy this mold for $30 twice. What was a bonus here, besides more than $20 extra in my pocket, is that Universe Ratchet's bio and license plate tie him into the G1 comic continuity.

Seriously, look at this. He ends up dealing with Megatron as much as most Optimus Primes do and he's died at least as often. Who wouldn't want a toy of this guy? Even if it has to be this one?

Vehicle Mode

Ratchet's Vehicle Mode is mostly a Cadillac Escalade, in that lovely not-quite-close-enough-to-be-legal-trouble way. He's physically identical to Ironhide but for the lightbar, which is mounted to a plate that takes the place of Ironhide's sun roof. (Which never looked like a sun roof to me so much as a "Ratchet's lightbar goes here" plate. Unfortunately, he also shares Universe Ironhide's light-blue side-windows, which do not match the transparent blue plastic on the front or back at all.

As with Animated and Movie Ratchets, Universe Ratchet has the EKG-inspired design running down the sides of the vehicle- I guess that's now the permanent replacement for the red crosses that can't be used on the toy for legal reasons. I'm fine with that- I like that Ratchet has some kind of recognizeable symbol franchise-wide. There's also some red deco on the hood, stripes that connect and meet in a plain red shield in the center. It's the perfect size and shape for an Autobot symbol, but strangely, there isn't one. I guess they wanted to leave the Vehicle Mode unmarked, and I tend to support that on the basis of plainly-marked Autobots not being much of a disguise. Lastly, there's the license plate, "H3L PU2"- a reference to the "HELP US" sign held by Ratchet/Megatron on the memorably grisly cover for "The Price of Life!" It's a close call, but I think I like this better than Universe Hot Shot's "JAAM" license plate. For one thing, it IDs him as Marvel Ratchet, as I mentioned above, and secondly, it makes him the first Universe toy in a while to potentially tie into the post-G1 Classics continuity. ExVee and I had a lot of fun puzzling out Universe Galvatron's history, and it's nice to see another toy reference this continuity after several assortments of much more generic writeups.

Okay, now for the technical stuff. It at least rolls well, and you can make out the details of brake drums behind the front wheels, which is neat! But the positive qualities of the Vehicle Mode pretty much end there. That lovely stripe on the side with the Official Ratchet Symbol in it? You will probably never get it lined up properly. There's something like a dozen seams running down the sides of the SUV, and not one of them has any relation to the existing lines and contours of the design. From the side, this is one ugly toy. It also doesn't help that the frames on the clear windshield bits are painted, and white paint never matches white plastic no matter what you do. It'd probably be less of a thing on another toy, but once you look at the sides, it's hard to fight off the urge to nitpick the thing to death. But one upside: the paint isn't tacky, so that's one-up on Prowl, Henkei Ironhide, and a couple other toys released in the past 12 months or so!


Transformation

I've found that with a good Transformer, you can pick it up years later and you'll quite often be able to transform it on the first try. It's very natural. You just know how to do it. With other, more complex figures, it takes a bit of time to jog your memory. But I completely lost the knack of transforming this toy in the five months between getting Ironhide and Ratchet. (Be sure you save the instructions!) It's another case of the overcomplication that large amounts of Universe 2 and quite a few Movie toys displayed: nothing here is intuitive.

...actually, I take that back: the arms work pretty well, despite being the source of all those ugly seams on the windows. I bet the designers could've made it work in a less ugly way, though.

And of course there's the issue of the head: you've seen the alternate transformations, you've seen the directions for chopping out bits of the toy, but even if you get the head to mostly clear the torso, nothing, save putting the toy in the patented, crotch-thrusty Revoltech Slouch, will put him facing straight ahead. I think ExVee's solution of leaving the tires at the hips is probably the best and easiest way to get more head clearance, since it has the added benefit of not making the upper torso quite so exacting to assemble. But I generally leave both Ratchet and Ironhide in factory-standard Robot Mode and pretend that the recessed head was an intentional nod(pun not intended) to the original toys' "head"-behind-windshield configuration.

Robot Mode

As I said before, I'm not particularly thrilled with either Ratchet's deco- while Henkei! Henkei! Ratchet is closer to the animation model, particularly with the black head crest, the other color placements don't line up as well as they did for Ironhide otherwise. Meanwhile, Universe Ratchet is a series of odd choices. While the black bits and red on the legs look odd compared to animation models, this may be a case of the deco emulating the original toy: take away the chrome, and the original Ratchet's colors line up to this toy reasonably well. The head is an exception, largely because the original Ratchet toy didn't really have one, and I can just imagine the screaming if this new Ratchet had a terminal case of Seatface. Ratchet's crest is red here- the only color plastic on the toy (besides clear blue) that G1 Ratchet was never seen crested with. But there's another Ratchet who was, and who also has a fair bit of black in his color scheme too. Animated Ratchet may be as good an explanation for the added black here as the G1-toy theory, I dunno.

Deco aside, the only physical difference between Ratchet and Ironhide is that crest on his helmet, which is sort of weird looking. It's very broad and squat, because it had to fit through the same space on top of the SUV as Ironhide's head. And this mold seriously doesn't need any more head problems.

The head turns as much as it needs to- it stops in either direction almost exactly where the large plate behind his head would obscure his vision anyway. The joints allow for the shoulders to swing forward and back, a somewhat unusual thing for a Transformer. Whether this is a side-effect of transformation or an intentional joint, I don't know, but it's nice all the same. The rest of the arms are oddly jointed- you can swing the arm out to the side, but there's no upper-arm swivel. There is a forearm swivel, but not much use for it outside of transformation, and the elbow doesn't bend very far at all. Because of the transformation/weapon necessities, the wrists are pretty nice, with both a hinge and a ball allowing for plenty of positions, both natural and unnatural. I'd kind of have preferred closed fists, but open hands are probably better for a robot surgeon anyway.

There have been an awful lot of Transformers lately with bodies built around a central support, and Ratchet is firmly in this category. His "waist" is a swivel nestled way up in the torso, about where the ribcage would be. In what is probably some kind of minor engineering miracle, the two plates that the rear tires mount to- the same ones that give me so much trouble even folding Ratchet up in the first place -do not obstruct the waist at all. It turns the full 360, looking really strange the whole way, as the way the parts turn make it obvious his actual "waist" is way up there somewhere and off-center. The universal joint hips work great, and are good and tight, no trouble holding a pose there. There's also mid-thigh swivels, always a welcome addition. The knees aren't quite as good: the shape of the lower leg stops them at a 45-degree bend, though they do bend a little extra the wrong way, which is largely useless. The feet help make up for that- the transformation joint allows Ratchet to lean forward pretty much as far as he wants, and the sideways nature of the ball-joint also lets you put Ratchet in as wide a stance as you like. He can do a split with his feet on the floor, which is the ultimate test of a toy's ankle joint as far as I'm concerned. The little flip-down spur-like objects are neat, but oddly, whenever I flip them down Ratchet seems to get less stable and tends to want to tip over. No idea why, but aside from that the legs are decent- not wonderful, but you should hopefully be able to find a pose or two you like.


Accessory

Well, the package labels the gun end of this big, blocky accessory as a "Medical Dispenser," which strikes me as an odd idea to say the least. It's hard to imagine that Autobots need a lot of chemicals or fluids dispensed in most medical applications. (Lubricant, maybe? Fuel transfusions? We are talking G1 Comics here, so I'm reasonably sure there is liquid fuel of some sort involved.) What does come to mind, though, is that early in the TF comics series Ratchet had (among others) a laser scalpel and a cryogenic freezing device that he tried- quite unsuccessfully -to use as weapons against Megatron. That in mind, I like to think that this is a new, integrated version of his old medical tools that can switch between applications as needed. Whether that was the intent or not, that's the best explanation I can come up with for a Medical Dispenser that just happens to be identical to moldmate Ironhide's gatling gun. In solid red, the same color as Ratchet's hand, it's also a lot more credible as an arm-mounted (and -spawned) weapon in the G1 cartoon style. Of course, not being in bright chrome makes anything look more plausible.

As with Henkei Ironhide's instructions, Ratchet's instructions suggest that you swing the hand back out of the way before  attaching the weapon to the forearm. But the intent was obviously to have the hand inside, as the blade in particular sticks out a lot farther if you have the hand in there. (Really, it just looks pitiful without the hand pushing it out to the maximum extension.) My preferred way of doing things is to turn the hand around backwards, which puts the hinge pointing in the right direction to make sliding the weapon on and off a breeze. I do sometimes have a hard time sticking the hand in the bladed end, though- not too big a deal since the Dispenser end doesn't look quite as bad without a hand in there keeping it in place.

For Vehicle Mode, the weapon is designed to stick up under the sUV. It can be difficult to do if you've gotten the leg panels misaligned when you transformed him. And odds are that you have. But once it's in there, it stays without problems, even if you missed the socket, which I usually do.


Closing Remarks

Ratchet does have a few things going for him- but they're largely things that in pure toy terms don't matter. His bio and his license plate are neat touches, and the weapon is a great idea, but the core toy is ugly in Vehicle Mode, has some serious flaws in Robot Mode, and an overcomplicated transformation to boot. As a toy, Ratchet really Could Have Been Better. But if you want a G1 Ratchet, and you don't have hundreds of dollars to blow on the Botcon version, this is the only game in town.

-RAC, 5/05/2009