Combiners, do you see them as giants or regular height?

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JediTricks
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Combiners, do you see them as giants or regular height?

Post by JediTricks »

I have my Galvatronus setup on my coffee table holding Shockwave and his giant stupidgun. I mostly think of these combiners as just 4 deluxes and a voyager, rather than the mass-shifted giants; but yesterday I got out my Legends Optimus and Roller, set them up in front of Galvatronus, and it looked like what IDW suggests these Combiners look like.

That led me to wonder what you guys think of when you see your combiner figures. Do you see them as massive titans who tower over the likes of normal bots like Optimus Prime? Or do you see them as they scale to regular figures, standing only a little taller than Voyagers and Leader-class characters?
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Sparky Prime
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Re: Combiners, do you see them as giants or regular height?

Post by Sparky Prime »

I think of them as being in scale to regular sized characters. I've never cared for the idea that the combiners mass-shift when they are already several bots merging together to become a larger robot.
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Re: Combiners, do you see them as giants or regular height?

Post by Shockwave »

I Have Leader class Megatron next to Titan class Devastator and it looks about right. Megatron comes up to roughly around Devastator's waist. The other combiners are still larger than leader class and that doesn't feel especially out of scale either. It does feel out of scale if you just have them in with legends class figures. The merged form doesn't feel out of scale, but it's when you consider the size of the individual bots compared to bot mode legends class characters (ie: Bot mode Onslaught should not be bigger than bot mode Shockwave). Having said that, I LOVE seeing Bruticus wield gun mode legends Shockwave. And bot mode SW next to Bruticus still looks fine, but bot mode Combaticons next to legends bot mode Shockwave is when it looks ridiculous.
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Re: Combiners, do you see them as giants or regular height?

Post by Dominic »

I am not a fan of mass-shifting. But, most Combiners more or less require that assumption to reconcile how the parts fit together. Bruticus is the most flagrant example. But, most of the the Combiners would require a certain amount of mass shifting to work.
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Re: Combiners, do you see them as giants or regular height?

Post by Onslaught Six »

Dominic wrote:I am not a fan of mass-shifting. But, most Combiners more or less require that assumption to reconcile how the parts fit together. Bruticus is the most flagrant example. But, most of the the Combiners would require a certain amount of mass shifting to work.
This is assuming Blastoff's shuttle mode is larger than the other Combaticons, which I've already tossed out as idiotic. I very typically assume that a character transforms into a vehicle that is roughly the equivalent size of their robot mode--if Blastoff is the same height as Brawl or Swindle, then his altmode will be the same size as theirs is--regardless of the actual vehicle's scale. Robots in disguise be damned.

I suspect a large portion of that is growing up watching Beast Wars; everyone in that show worked on this principle, no one shifted size radically to match their altmode. Waspy was of average height and became a wasp about the size of a human. Period. It makes no sense for TFs to regularly have the ability to change size radically. I don't care that a jet is typically waaay bigger than a car; Seekers and Autobot cars should be pretty close to similar sized.

Anyway, I think combiners are good at the height they are as toys. There are very few TFs the same height who aren't a Huge Motherfucker like Jetfire or something. Even Bruty and Menasor are as big as they should be; any bigger and they become shitty.
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Re: Combiners, do you see them as giants or regular height?

Post by Almighty Unicron »

Onslaught Six wrote:
Dominic wrote:This is assuming Blastoff's shuttle mode is larger than the other Combaticons, which I've already tossed out as idiotic. I very typically assume that a character transforms into a vehicle that is roughly the equivalent size of their robot mode--if Blastoff is the same height as Brawl or Swindle, then his altmode will be the same size as theirs is--regardless of the actual vehicle's scale. Robots in disguise be damned.
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Re: Combiners, do you see them as giants or regular height?

Post by andersonh1 »

I suppose I'm influenced by my initial impressions from the old G1 cartoon, but I always tend to see the Combiners as just massive, far larger than they should be given the size of their individual components. I was always disappointed in the size of the original toys. Menasor isn't that much larger than Optimus Prime, for example. At least the Combiner Wars figures make the combiner limbs a consistent size with the other deluxe figures, so the combined robot is impressively large.
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