JediTricks wrote:You can be irked by the facade chest on Dlx Smokescreen all you like, but the reality is that the show design makes it impossible - the fenders would have to shrink, split in half, bend in several new directions, and roll up onto the chest sliding over the hood while staying connected to the torso. The designers could have used the real fenders on the chests, but they'd have been about three times as big as they should be and it'd look nothing like the character. Anyway, you can say a lot of things about Smokescreen, but lazily-designed is NOT one of them.
This is a major problem I've had with TF designs lately, particularly from WfC/FoC and Prime (though the Movies had issues here as well), in that there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of teamwork between the fiction people and the toy people to make the designs work across both mediums. Ignoring the fact that I personally feel that TFs should be designed as toys first then have the fiction adapt those designs accordingly, it comes across as a big disconnect when you see stuff like Smokescreen and wonder if the exchange was like:
Toy Guy: "Hey, uh, that design simply isn't going to work in action figure form, we can't make parts just shrink and warp like that in real, physical space. Could you maybe redesign it to be more workable?"
Show Guy: "Fuck you!"
I dunno, it always goes back to that story of the Japanese dude who was one of the lead designers for the first Movie line, and how he didn't even understand how Starscream's head worked *until he saw the movie*. How little was provided for him to work with?
I can almost forgive stuff like the similarly-situationed IDW Bumblebee that's coming out soon, given that whoever designed that version of Bumblebee (Chee? Don?) probably didn't expect it getting a toy anytime soon (even if Don does have a reputation for being able to make new designs for TFs that would totally work as toys). But with something like TFPrime, which they know is going to be the main, flagship arm of the franchise, you'd think they'd know that they'd need designs that could be functionally consistent across all mediums, rather than having to cheat as much as they have (stuff like the unpainted fake wheels on the backs of FE Cliffjumper's legs is utterly ridiculous).
Say what you will about Animated, but its toys didn't cheat nearly as much as TFPrime has (Bumblebee and Sentinel Prime are the only ones that come to mind, and you can only sorta count Bumblebee, since his show model cheats too!).