Transformers: Collectors Club Depth Charge

In 2006, Botcon had a pre-Beast Wars focus, imagining the crews of the Axalon and Darksyde prior to their rough landing on prehistoric Earth. The resulting boxset, the generally highly regarded Dawn of Future Past, gave five takes on Cybertron-mode Beast Wars characters. The core Maximal cast of Optimus Primal, Rhinox, Cheetor and Rattrap, along with then-Predacon Dinobot, were all repainted from Cybertron toys, complete with Cyberkeys painted like the Golden Disks. This pre-Beast Wars  idea, like the similarly excellent Shattered Glass storyline, became a concept that FunPub and the Transformers Collectors Club would return to seemingly whenever they had no strong idea for the coming convention or subscription service, producing some winners and total duds along the way. So, if you’re really invested in this concept, there are Tigatrons and Airrazors and Waspinators and a fantastic Megatron and multiple Tarantulus’ among others to help fill out your displays.

Similarly, the live action movie toylines can generally be said to produce some good toys and some bad toys. The base mold of this Club exclusive figure is the Revenge of the Fallen/Hunt for the Decepticons Terradive, a sleek and stylish fighter plane that has some roots in reality yet looks futuristic and space age-y enough to scratch the fantasy vehicle itch in all of us. It was the Revenge of the Fallen-era toys that hit these new heights of complexity, displaying engineering that was until then unrivaled in the Transformers brand. Terradive was repainted from his pretty reasonable color scheme into Space Case, a G2 Cyberjet reference with a new head, general translucence in alt mode, and Cybertronain tattoos, similar to those sported by ever movie era Starscream from Revenge of the Fallen onward, because. I think this tattoo design concept sucks. They look like someone tried to convince you they could write in some pictographic language, like Japanese, and when you called them on it and told them to prove it, they drew these things. 

Depth Charge is a Maximal bounty hunter, tasked with bring the murderous Protoform X to justice in the Beast Wars storyline. Coming to Earth after the Transwarp explosion to end the first season of the show, thus automatically granting him Transmetal status with all its privileges, Depth Charge crashes into the ocean, and takes on the beast mode of a manta ray, which is pretty damn cool. This also grants Depth Charge a rough vehicle mode, a jet type thing. While not as front and center a character arc as some of the other, (in my opinion) less interesting Beast Wars spotlights such as Silverbolt and Blackaracnia, the times the Depth Charge and Rampage – the named version of Protoform X – get together are some of the best in the series, and their final showdown is one of my favorite moments in the entire series.

This figure is intended to be Depth Charge in his pre-Earth form, and the jet alt mode gives a bit of background to his Transmetal third mode in Beast Wars. The figure comes with a trident, which fits because Depth Charge takes an aquatic alt mode, but that’s a little bit of a reach for me. The original Depth Charge came with a shark rifle that fired a pair of missiles, so there is some precedent of odd weapon choices for the guy, and I’m fine with the trident. To be honest, this weapon is one of my favorite melee weapons for Transformers in the past few years or lines, because it is so different. Not a sword (quickly become the standard melee weapon….) or a hammer or other bludgeoning weapon, the trident is different and allows for some cooler poses: the figure can hold it or two-hand it, they can point it at someone; it coverts ever so slightly into a giant tipped spear, so there’s another deployment option. It’s a cool piece. Additionally, the way the hands transform is be splitting the forearm and rotating the airplane engines inside, exposing the hands. Not doing this gives the figure blaster hands, after a fashion, and is a cool armament option.

The paint on this figure is excellent, yet strange. It does a good job of incorporating all the colors of the original figure, but the combination is slightly hard on the eyes. The nose of the jet mode even has little yellow eyes painted on it, aww. The base figure echoes so much of the original toy: the big round forearms, the wings sticking out behind the shoulders, the head. Oh man, the head. While it is not a 1 to 1 match, the head of this figure hits all the Depth Charge cues. The toy is a good match to a previous iteration of the character, which I think is an important quality if the desired effect is to depict a character in an early form that evokes the more known one. This is a much better job than some other attempts at pre-Earth mode figures, or examples where there’s something about the mold that is supposed to be a shout out to the character or toy being references. Botcon 2006 Dinobot comes to mind here, a repaint of a Cybertron figure who transformed into a construction vehicle. That doesn’t really have anything to do with anything that Dinobot would become in the Beast Wars narrative. Or Rhinox of the same year, also a Cybertron construction vehicle, a repaint of that lines’ Landmine figure. The only real Rhinox connection found there is the notion that Rhinox is the big, bulky tough one, so this earthmover more or less fits that bill. Or let’s not forget the Botcon 2016 Tarantulus, a repaint of Combiner Wars Rook, because an armored SWAT vehicle simply screams “When I get to Earth, I’m going to be a spider because I’m sneaky and devious and manipulative!!!!”

Yet, for all the ways this toy fits the original so well, it is overall too small and slender a robot. Depth Charge was one of the larger Maximals, and was real bulky particularly in the chest. The base toy here is very slender in robot mode, which by itself is not a bad thing. I don’t own the TFCC Protoform X figure, but it uses one of the Megatron molds from Prime, and that design, with its broad chest and thick legs, represents Beast Wars Rampages’ body excellently. The Terradive figure comes from the dawn of the era of making Transformers that were not vehicles that sprouted limbs, which had always been the norm. You knew what someone turned into by looking at them: look at a classic design like Masterpiece Bluestreak or a newer one like the Leader class Seekers and tell me you don’t know what they transform into. The post 2010 world of Transformers has steadily been moving more towards a true disguise, a recognized ability of a toy to turn from robot to vehicle and back without betraying in an obvious fashion what the toy is in which ever mode it is not in. This figure, in jet mode, looks like a jet; lines between parts give away the fact that there is possible movement and separation, and a view from the underside shows the robot legs but not much else. This much is to be expected from a Transformer. But the fairly amazing thing is that not as much of the jet mode is betrayed in robot mode, compared to something like the Leader class Seekers. This is a design aesthetic thing, not a condemnation of older figures. Personally, I’m not a big fan of the movie designs, as they may be cool and different and all that stuff, but they do not maintain my interest for very long, and that has been a constant over the last nine, almost ten, years of movie toylines. This figure is one that I do retain an enjoyment of, which is rare. 

Looking at the toy from almost any angle aside from straight on shows a huge hollow space right in the center of the figure. The jet mode basically folds up into the robot torso, but winds up being just a collection of panels and stuff. It’s a bit disappointing to see, but it doesn’t compromise the overall look of the toy in my mind. This is still a good looking robot and jet, and an interesting yet very fidgety transformation and ultimately a fidgety robot. Moving limbs around for posing means that something is going to pop out of its designated place, so the wings attached to the legs or the shoulders or the wings on the back are almost always in a state of movement. This may just be my toy, or it may be an issue of mold wear, as this figure has been reused a few times now, but I do own three versions of it, and all of them have this issue. That’s a real shame, as this is a really satisfying toy to transform, but then once it’s in robot mode, you sort of don’t want to touch it for fear of it coming undone. 

 

In the end, this Depth Charge version of the figure is a nice addition to a variety of collections. If you’re a Beast Wars fan or a Botcon or exclusives collector, or if you like the Dawn of Future’s Past concept, this is a nice piece. If you’re a fan of the live action movie toys or designs, or just complex yet fun transformations and engineering, this is a nice piece. I find it somewhat odd that this toy can generally be found as cheaply as it can be on eBay, given that it is an exclusive. I would personally rather the movie toys not be used for things like Botcon figures, and with their aesthetics being so removed from ‘standard’ Transformer toys they don’t fit as well with established sets, like a Botcon set from 2006, as well as other, ‘standard’ toylines do. That’s mainly a personal matter though, and it is certainly not enough of a thing to lower the enjoyment of this figure.