Transformers: Combiner Wars Chop Shop

The first of my C2E2 gets is the brand new, never-before-seen-in-stores-by-me Legends class Chop Shop, a repaint of Generations (I think….?) Shrapnel sans Minicon Reflector. Chop Shop is the same figure as Shrapnel, but with a new head, which is pretty amazing, given that this is a Legends class figure.

The mold itself is a pretty good one, and I often find myself fiddling with Shrapnel, even after all this time. The insect mode and robot mode are both perfect for Shrapnel, and both work terrifically for Chop Shop as well. I find this a little surprising, as the standard reuse plan for the Legends class seems to be just repaint this into somebody else, and don’t worry about it. Thus, that Legends Optimus Prime because Nemesis Prime, and then Huffer, and then Pipes. Essentially because they’re all trucks. Huffer got a new head at least, which then also became Pipes.

Anyway, Chop Shop is surprisingly strong for a repaint, and the new head sculpt looks like his G1 head to the letter. They could have just used the Shrapnel head again, and most people probably wouldn’t have cared much, with this being a Legends wave at the end of the Combiner Wars line anyway; a wave containing Shockwave and the first of the Titan Returns toys, Buzzsaw, making the wave fillers like Chop Shop figures that many could do without in the first place. But I’m glad that the figure turned out as well as it did, because I was/am hoping for a full set of Legends class Insecticons, a hope that was born with Shrapnel and furthered by Bombshell, felt a renewal with talk a while back for a Kickback and then was briefly nudged back to a wakened state by this Chop Shop.

As a Legends figure, Chop Shop has some limited features, but with all the joints being ball joints, he’s fairly posable. The colors are so much nicer in person and in hand that they look in pictures or even in theory. The orange of the chest is nicely complimented by the dominant brown, and he’s a lot more eye catching than he probably should be. Insect mode is surprisingly aggressive looking, and I don’t know if this was intentional or not, but the rivets that hold the shoulders together look like silver eyes for the insect, and I find that, by accident or design, to be kind of cute. 

  Over the last few toylines, the Legends class has provided some real surprising figures, and Chop Shop is one of them. So many people bypass the Legends class for a variety of reasons: I myself generally pass over multiple Primes and Bumblebees in the same toyline, and you know, recently, there’s been more than one of those guys in each size class. Chop Shop being a repaint at the end of a line and a real nobody of a character and not a very appealing looking toy at a fast glance is going to cause a lot of people to skip him. That’s a shame.