Transformers: Reveal the Shield Special Ops Jazz

Here’s another figure I never saw in stores, and wound up tracking down on eBay.

Reveal the Shield was an effort to restart the Generations or Universe 2.0 line after the Revenge of the Fallen toyline, releasing Classics styled toys with the ol’ Generation 1 rubsigns. The line overall was comprised of a number of smaller toys, Legends essentially but pretty simple and cheap. A few of these toys were clearly Classics versions of characters, and so we got excellent toys like Tracks.

Jazz is a pretty good figure, doing a number of pretty interesting things. First off, his legs do that thing where they fold up into the back half of a car, thanks to the accordion style thigh and calf construction that would become more and more common on toys to come in the post-2010 years. This allows for taller figures with more compact alt modes. Some strategic angles in the thigh and calf pieces allow for this accordioning without compromising the stability or solidness of the legs themselves. The only drawbacks as they were come in the forms of smaller vehicle modes, which is a toss-up honestly in terms of whether it ‘matters,’ and a concern that, since the legs are basically three parts that all have a joint in them, they will eventually wear out or become unstable. This second thing is a common enough issue with more recent figures even directly out of the packages, as manufacturing issues or slight discrepancies in plastic tolerances have led to a number of disappointing Transformers over the last six or so years. My Generations Trailbreaker has one shoulder ball joint that is so loose he can’t hold his arm up at all, it just swings down to his side. I have an Age of Extinction Slash (the teal raptor) who can’t even stand in robot mode because his balljoint hips are so loose they won’t bear his weight. Of course, over years and years, figures and their joints wear out as well, so it is an inevitability, really. However, acknowledging the issue doesn’t eliminate or solve the issue, and I don’t think it’s an unfair thing to bring up.

                                                                         

The robot arms swing up underneath the large chest hood part, just like so many of the original G1 Autobot car toys. This Jazz is a nice and faithful rendition of the original toy, which is again something that I really love about the general “Classics” style of Transformers. The big hood chest and the door wings are hallmark features of characters like Jazz and the Datsun trio, so figures of them really do need to have those in order to be taken seriously as representations of those characters. I passed on the Fall of Cybertron Jazz largely because it didn’t look like Jazz at all, and that mainly due to his missing the door wings. Without them, the figure just looked boring and plain: it would turn out that my assumptions of boredom with the toy were not unfair or unfounded, as I eventually bought the ‘more exciting’ Sideswipe repaint and found it to be…..boring and plain. And hollow and thin. Where was I? Oh. The head sculpt is very clearly a Jazz as well, and something that I didn’t notice until I’d transformed the figure back and forth a few times was that his legs are 100% Jazz legs. Upon realizing this, I sat back and said “This is a G1 Jazz with better joints.” I apparently said this out loud, because my wife asked me what I was mumbling about, and I said “Nothing.” 

Hey guys, remember that one time...

So, if this is such an updated, faithful 2012 version of 1984 Jazz, what’s new and different? Actually, a fair amount. The car mode is still a sporty car, but this is not the old Porsche that OG Jazz was. This is some kind of suped up street racer, a pretty nice update from the Trapper Keeper-ready Porsche 911 from the old days. In the 80s, that Porsche was indeed a fancy and desirable car, but by now it’s over the hill: this is the same type of vehicle upgrade that Universe Prowl/Silverstreak/Smokescreen all got, where one look tells you who the robot is and what the car is and throws back to the original so strongly that you don’t even question if the car is a different car, despite knowing that it clearly and noticeably is. A pair of speakers fold out and over the car windows in both car and robot modes, a reference to some G1 cartoon episode where Jazz uses his powerful speakers to do something, mainly because his G1 tech spec bio said he could do that type of thing. These speakers also attach to his gun via C-clips to add some dimension to his weapon, although that’s more of a preference thing than anything really important or useful. The speakers peg into the inside of the car doors to keep them stable, which is nice: I don’t feel much need to flip them out, so they pretty much stay hidden at all times, and I’d rather have them secured than flopping around or needing to be removed. I flipped them out once for both vehicle and robot mode, thought “huh, that’s kinda neat,” and then put them back. Little touches such as this are always cool, and usually pretty nice, but in the long run for me, they don’t have a lot of staying power. I generally think of them as being, like, nice nods to something, a fun reference if you catch the wink from the designer, but generally nothing mandatory or truly enhancing the overall figure. The gun itself folds up and then pegs underneath the hood in vehicle mode, and that is something that I always appreciate. Well-integrated weapon storage is an absolute positive. 

 

If I have to list a complaint, it would be that Jazz’s chest hood does not peg on to anything, so it is generally floppy. If you were to pick the figure up by the chest or shoulders, the whole chest hood part is going to move, and by ‘move,’ I mean come completely up from its resting position. My heart wants to say that this is not too uncommon an issue for hood chest-formers, but my brain is having a hard time landing on another example of this in the modern era. Also, for all the joints in the legs which allow for them to fold up more compact, there is no joint of any kind in the ankle, and so standing the toy is occasionally a little more involved than one would feel is necessary. It’s not a problem really, but Jazz tends to tilt to one foot more than stand on both, and this kind of stability issue could probably have been solved with even just a slight pivot in the ankles, or a slanted foot like the Combiner Wars Aerialbots have, so that they can stand in the A stance but have both feet flatly on the ground. Combiner Wars Leader class Megatron(s) got a similar complaint from me a while back. 

At the end of the day, Reveal the Shield Jazz is a good and faithful update of the G1 character and figure, and that determines whether anyone has any interest in it. I have a real love for the Classics style figures and try to get all of them that I can, and I’m fairly certain that this is the first Jazz in my collection, outside of the Botcon 2008 Shattered Glass version. I’m not an appreciator of Jazz. Since there are not many other Jazzes on the market that would fit in the Classics style, this one tends to be a bit expensive on the secondary market: Jazz, bizarrely, did not get a Combiner Wars upgrade, and there have been few figures made for such a beloved character, so there is some competition for the ones that do appear. I’d always wanted to get this figure, but again never really saw it in the wild, or for a price I found acceptable on the aftermarket until recently.