Lockdown

Height: 19.7(!)cm (robot mode); 14cm (vehicle length)

Articulation: 16 points total - Swivel neck, swivel waist, universal joint shoulders, double jointed elbows, swivel waist, ball joint hips, mid-thigh swivel, hinge knees.

Colors: Molded black, grey, clear magenta; Painted green, olive green, yellow, black, silver, magenta.

Accessories: N/A

Release Data: Released early June, 2008 in the United States at a retail price of US$9.99

Gallery: 17 images.

Author: ExVee



Lockdown could care less about Megatron and his grand goals of universal domination. He's in the game for upgrades, pure and simple, and he wears the Decepticon badge because they're the one who can get him the systems he wants. For the right price he'll hunt down any target and bring it in - functioning or not. As a bonus, every new target means new trophies for his workshop wall. he enjoys his work, and he's traveled from one end of the universe to the other doing it, which is why he's got a collection of weapons and functions second to none.

He is the Borg. You will be assimilated. He's also Lance Henriksen, but that's much less important. And you won't be assimilated, as much as you'll get your arm chopped off and glued onto his torso, after which he'll probably hang the rest of you up on a trophy board someplace. It is indeed a brave new age of Transformers, wherein you have evil police cars, vaguely corrupt Autobot government, and a bounty hunter who is clearly portrayed as cutting up his victims for spare parts. Oh, and an eight year old girl explains human reproduction to the giant alien robots. Strange times indeed...





Vehicle Mode


Lockdown is a muscle car, pretty clearly using a conglomeration of late 70's and 80's Corvette styles as a starting point before diving deep into body modifications, and bearing more than a slight resemblance to a Batmobile. There's a massive supercharger on the hood. So massive in fact, that were Lockdown to have a driver, their line of sight out the windshield would be completely obstructed. I'm pretty sure that's not street legal. Lockdown is a definite low rider, with less than a centimeter's clearance between the underbody and the tabletop. The front bumper is a nearly street-scraping outswept "cow catcher" style, fitted with a pair of small spikes below each headlight just for good measure. Spikes seem to be a recurring trend, with one at the center of each hubcap, and two rows of three spikes along either side of the roof. A set of triple exhaust on either side below where the doors would be sweep out from beneath the car. Considering there's an air-ram immediately behind the exhaust pipes, this may not have been the most well thought out placement. The clear windows are molded on the inside with a circuitry style pattern, and while the windows are indeed made from clear plastic, there's no interior to speak of, since the robot head and neck stow in the passenger compartment for vehicle mode. If Lockdown's passenger compartment is to be taken as being equal in size to a real car, then Lockdown's vehicle mode ends up not just wider than a military Hummer, but nearly twice as long as the stock bodies of the Corvettes it takes initial inspiration from. In this case, I think I'd rather take this as a Cybertronian vehicle not built to carry riders. (But then why are there rearview mirrors?) The vehicle mode doesn't really have any action features or special play value, and sadly his transformation does not support deploying his arms in vehicle mode as can be done with some other figures from the first couple waves. The big thing here is that once everything is pegged together, Lockdown's vehicle mode holds together very securely, nothing falling out or splitting apart anyplace. Always nice to have the vehicle mode be an effective toy car all by itself.


Robot Mode

Surely the first thing that comes to one's attention is that Lockdown is tall. Lockdown is in fact so tall that his legs are actually taller than some other previous Deluxe toys. In fact, if sizes are being represented correctly, there's every chance that Lockdown's hip joints are at or above eye level with certain Voyagers from this line. Contrary to the likes of Bulkhead and Lugnut, Lockdown's impressive stature is the result of having a build roughly analogous to a skeleton. Or some depictions of The Scarecrow.

Neither comparison is entirely inappropriate, since Lockdown's depiction in both tech spec note and the cartoon are of a ghoulish bounty hunter who removes trophies from his hits to eventually integrate into his own body. Cripes. The toy supports such portrayal, lending some amount of visual interest to the toy. Both legs feature unique sculpting on the facing side, giving impression of mis-matched components being grafted into his structure. Both upper arms have similar variance in sculpt and color of paint, though it's less pronounced and partially hidden under the shoulder armor pieces. In addition, the figure's right arm can be fitted with a piece of extra armor and a hook which replaces the right hand. This arrangement was adopted for the character's animation model, where he can be seen sporting a similarly colored, hooked right forearm. A chainsaw option comes into play somewhere, though that's not represented in the toy. At least, not yet.

Lockdown's skull-like face seems to go along with this theme rather well, beyond which he's even got "tattoos" all over his face just for that extra little bit of "look at me, I'm a badass". Sadly the one black line that would have really been a good idea was omitted, as Lockdown has no specificly defined mouth. Yes, there's a space that fits the proper placement and shape, but it's practically invisible from head-on (no pun intended) because of the poor contrast of the silver paint against itself. Basically, from the wrong angle, Lockdown looks for all practical purposes like he has no mouth. Lockdown's eyes are lightpiping, at least in theory. The back end is both quite narrow, and where the light would ideally be placed to get the most glow from the eyes, the piece comes to a very narrow edge that is poorly suited to taking in the light to be transmitted in the first place. The neck joint is a swivel, and as result of the unique shape of the figure's neck, the head can only turn 45 degrees in either direction and pitches to a slight upward angle in the process. But he sure does have more spikes along his neck!

There's one major peculiarity with the arms that you have to look out for. The hands absolutely cannot open out as far as you think they should. They'll always be angled inward failing surgical intervention. Though I was thankfully spared from it, I've heard that people have broken off the hands entirely by trying to force them into essentially hyper-extension, presumably without having previously realized this will rip the hands right off the metal pins they're held in place with. The hook piece can be attached to either arm, though only the right arm has the extra piece to trigger the attached supercharger weapon's barrels to deploy. The elbow construction is somewhat awkward, with the forearm attached to a balljoint on an open hinge. The arm can't straighten fully, and while the arm could potentially bend even farther than needed to fold flat against itself, a couple of stops placed along the way do indeed put a halt to such notions. Mostly. The real downside is that it's really difficult to get a good pose with the engine-gun thing since the arm can't straighten fully, and you can't even really pull it off with a natural-looking bend in the arm. The hook itself isn't so adversly impacted by it. Only other problem at work here is that the shoulder armor is perpetually angled downward, since there's basically no cut out to let it slide down onto the posts of the shoulder joints. In the end, this has the shoulder pieces sinking down with posing, to where you almost might as well not even bother trying to keep them opened. The less broad-shoulderedness kind of helps the lanky, skeletal thing he has going on anyway.

The only particular points of interest on the torso are the waist joint, and the small hinged connector where the hook piece can be stowed. I'm guessing this function is where the animation model's "coattails" are sourced from. Kind of like with Blackarachnia, you end up with some variance of positioning for best effect in some cases.

Coming back to the legs - man are they tall. The legs are big and mostly square, and are fixed at a particularly wide distance apart. Mine came out of the package appearing to bear stress marks that could be the result of someone at or prior to the packaging phase squishing the legs together beyond where they're supposed to go for whatever reason. I bring this up mostly as warning, since it seems to me that the legs will quickly begin to act as levers against the hip joints if you exert inward pressure. Snappage is sure to follow, so just keep an eye on what's getting pushed where. Lockdown's knees seem to exist almost as an afterthought, seeming to be there just because the sliding mechanism employed for the transformation can pull a limited double duty. The range of the knee is around 45 degrees. But he probably wasn't going to sit down anyway. See, Lockdown? This is what happens when you start sewing other people's body parts onto your legs. For some reason, I particularly like the execution of the feet here. They're the bumper, tail light, and spoiler section from the vehicle mode, slid around a hinge until they lock in place. Because of the paint pattern on the spoiler, Lockdown ends up almost looking like he has toes. It's possible to move the feet further along the track, bringing the wheels closer to the tabeltop, almost making it look like he could skate on his rear wheels, though it's not possible to actually get both wheels touching the surface at the same time. Or convincingly solo. And now that I think of it, Lockdown looks kind of goofy skating. Didn't work for Iron Man, so it probably won't work for body-part-harvesting bounty hunter, either.


Paint and Deco

There's been a series of tiny chips and scratches in the few areas of color present on the toy - mainly the greens on the chest. But most all of it is suffering this to some extent. Another odd bit is that some areas of black plastic have been painted over with flat black paint. Beats me, but it strikes me that these bizarre paint operations could have been redirected to the obviously implied rear window which as is remains entirely black like all the surrounding plastic. It's really the only place on the toy where it really feels like there's "missing" paint.


Accessories

Strictly speaking, I'd say there aren't really accessories since both of the figure's weapons are integral components of the vehicle mode, but the engine supercharger is probably the closest in spirit to a separate accessory and deserves a little coverage on its own.

As portrayed in the cartoon, this is Ratchet's EMP generator, which Lockdown stole in an encounter many stellar cycles ago...  That the compatibility exists in the toys, while important, is not the point of note on its own. What's really important is that two versions of this accessory exist. The first release has a connector plug with a tiny, spring-backed pin in the middle similar in concept at least to Mini-Con driven gimmickry. This spring is so strong that it would pop the accessory right back out of the port on Ratchet's forearm, generally without even activating the gun barrels. The following releases of the toy came with superchargers with two small, square notches cut into the plug, which fit nubs on the inside of Ratchet's forearm, holding the EMP generator securely in place. It seems that only the earliest examples of Lockdown had the pieces jumping - meaning mostly folks who bought them prior to Wal-Mart getting out of the street date. Any on the shelves today should be the current, properly functioning version.

Only problem is that once Ratchet steals his equipment back, Lockdown has a fairly unsightly cut out in the middle of the hood. Woulda kind of liked some molded detail in there to help disguise how it's essentially just a big hole left behind.



Closing Remarks

Despite some problems, Lockdown still can't be considered the loser of the first group of Deluxes. While the recolor and minor remold due to come along down the line a bit may or may not address some of the more significant issues such as the hands, the toy we have right now doesn't come out half bad, and the stylistic choices help make up for some of the technical shortcomings. In a line that seems built on variety of appearance while keeping everything to a certain visual style, unique character types like Lockdown are welcome additions.

Lockdown gets a strong Good.


-ExVee, 6/14/2008