Ransack

Height: 11cm tall in Robot Mode, 11cm long with 13cm wingspan in Vehicle Mode.

Articulation: 13 points total- double-joint neck; 2 points each arm: ball-joint shoulder, swivel elbow; swivel waist; 3 joints each leg: ball-joint hips, hinged knee, hinged foot.

Colors: Molded gray, tan, and maroon. Painted silver, red, gold, brown, and black (wing markings).

Accessories: None.

Release Data: Released May 30th, 2009 with the first assortment of ROTF Scouts at an MSRP of US $7.99.

Author: RAC

(more...)


Part of the lure of the Revenge of the Fallen line for me has been vehicles and objects that have never been Transformers before. A forklift! A toaster! An ice cream truck! And Ransack here is a biplane, which is several times more appealing to me than a transforming forklift, and almost as good as a toaster.

Back in the distant past of Cybertron, when flight was a new technology, Ransack was first of the flying aces. He was a ruthless combatant, blasting his opponents out of the sky and then strafing the helpless troops stuck on the ground without cover. He may be past his prime and equipped with outdated weapons now, but there was a time when Ransack was the most feared name on Cybertron.

So, yeah: Ransack's the Red Baron. I kind of wish his "outdated" weapons were specifically Musket Lasers, but you can't have everything. And for a WWI biplane that's a bit too outdated, after all...


Robot Mode

The movie styling is unmistakable, with his not-quite-human appearance and bits of exposed frame under and around his armor plating. With the wing sections forming his shoulders the way they do, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see a recolor as Movie line Powerglide somewhere down the line. Though if they did that they'd have to do something about his piercing, beady little red eyes and skull-like face. The arms are a good match for the face, looking extremely skeletal themselves. I don't really like how the legs are put together- the cockpit area of the plane slides down to be closer to his knees and it just looks off. I assume it's supposed to look somewhat like the pants of WWI military uniforms, the ones that flared out at the hip and then ended just at the knee, but it's hard to align them in a way that looks very good. The wings hang down behind him like a cape, or possibly an enormous scarf.

The transformation joint in his neck adds a bit of expression to the head's overall range, but the angle of the joint means that Ransack's can really only look forward or straight up. You can turn his head upside-down if you feel like it, though. The shoulders are touchy, as I touch on in Transformation; they like to fall off a lot. They don't move any further than the 90 degrees out from the body I'm getting on Basic Beasts, and the shape of the socket makes it painfully easy to lever it right the off of the shoulder.

Thanks to the transformation he has a swivel waist, which is completely unrestricted in its movement. His hips are pretty close together, and the shape of the wireframe upper-legs puts the thighs even closer. It also doesn't help that his hip joints are a bit weak- you may want to bring out superglue or nail polish for this one. His knees are simple hinges which bend about 70 degrees front or back. Go ahead and give him reverse-joint legs if you like, it's not like he can get any weirder looking. His feet are wide, which helps the hip problem a good bit, and while they're a bit loose, the joints on the tailfin feet do hold him up. The jointing's also a bit different on each foot, so he can lean much further into the ankle that lacks the vertical stabilizer. You can pick which side you'd prefer- the instructions and packaging disagree on which side it should be on. Having the wider part of his finfeet towards the back, with the stabilizer on Ransack's left. helps counter the weight of the wings, though.

Speaking of instructions, Ransack has a Battle Mode that I almost missed: swing his scarfcape up and back into wings behind his shoulders, and fold the arms with the pieces of the biplane's lower wing so that those pieces are perpendicular to the main wing. Hey, weren't we just talking about that wing configuration? I kind of like it- it's no more or less impressive than your average Transmetal's third mode, and it keeps the wings from just hanging behind him in Robot Mode being useless.


Transformation

It's actually a lot easier to figure out how to change him from plane to robot, so it's a pity Hasbro decided to package Scouts in Robot Mode. Going from robot to biplane, getting the wing portions to line up and the arms locked down is the biggest challenge. The arms like to pop off a lot when you're doing it, too. There are a pair of struts on the robot torso that both lock the upper wing down in Vehicle Mode and connect the shoulder joints in Robot Mode- there's something somehow elegant about how that works.


Vehicle Mode

TFWiki lists him as an Albatros D.III, and since WWI fighters are not at all within my usual range of trivia, I'm taking their word for it. Unsurprisingly, Google Image search doesn't show Ransack's markings as matching any existing planes that I can find, even discounting the Decepticon symbols interrupting the crosses on the wings. Another thing you may notice, if you go looking like I did, is that nowhere in photos of the D.III or replicas thereof will you see it with guns on one wing and bombs on the other. Good reason for that: there's no way it could fly unbalanced in such a way. The guns on the real-life aircraft were located between the cockpit and propeller, right where there's a big chunk of transformation jointing on the toy. And would be practically invisible at this scale anyway. So I can see why they'd want to move the guns. Fun comes before accuracy on nearly any toy, and this ensures that Ransack has weapons in both modes, so it's a fair move, I think. The framework that the weapons hang from also become Ransack's arms, so since they already had some new parts mounted there, they may as well add some neat weapons.

The wheels don't turn, but the propeller does, which is surely the more important part. Impressively, the only part of him that betrays his identity as a robot in this mode are those hands on the underside of the wings. Not a lot of detail to the cockpit, but again, scale. What is reproduced faithfully, among other things, is the staggered series of plates and hatch covers on the nose. Nice!


Closing Remarks

I'm still not sold on the ROTF looks, but Ransack is a solid toy with a fun, unique Vehicle Mode. After years and years of pretty similar-looking cars and jets turning into pretty similar robots- even the original Movie Bumblebee's transformation doesn't deviate from the G1 Prowl model by much! -why not something neat like a biplane? And he's Very Good to boot. I don't know what else I'm going to wind up owning from the ROTF line, but if all the other oddball toys are as good as this, Ransack will not be alone.

-RAC