Blokees Blokees Transformers Galaxy Version 01 Roll Out Bluestreak Action Figure Blokees, 2024
Day #2,798: December 24, 2024
Bluestreak Mystery Ratio 1/9
Transformers Galaxy Version 01 Roll Out
Item No.: Asst. 00629 Manufacturer:Blokees Includes:Stand, alternate hands, POG card, extra neck post Action Feature:It's a kit Retail:$6.99 $4.97 Availability: 2024 Other: Also sold in Prowl colors
I saw these and thought they were neat, but the rapid-fire release of Blokees makes me think I probably won't go all-in despite the fact these are an amazing value. When I found out Walmart had them for under five bucks, I figured I'd buy two - and the first one I got was Bluestreak! That's good, I don't have too many toys of him, and he looks neat.
Blokees figures come in multiple sizes, but the Galaxy Version ones - not to be confused with the mini Galaxy Version Defender ones - are about 4-inches tall, and are $5-$7. You can build them in under a half hour, some of the shared spots are on frames, and it's so easy your kid can do it. I'd say they remind me a lot of those older BanDai Gundam Wing 1:144 kits that were all the rage about 25 years ago. Blokees are dirt cheap - as in "for a licensed product this is a small miracle" - with prepainted parts and no labels.
Nobody is going to say this figure is the most amazing thing ever - I bought him and Ratchet, and while excellent you can see signs of how they kept costs down. It's brilliant - we saw the same thing in some Gundam kits, where things like hands or joints may be shared between figures. Zoids were also dirt cheap, with some shared parts and lack of paint allowing Tomy to pass the savings along to you. Blokees does some of that here too.
Bluestreak is a 4-inch tall robot figure. There are a lot of shared parts, and reused parts. For example, there's a "hand frame" and a "joint frame" shared between figures. Bluestreak's arms are identical - as are his legs and feet. The torso is a block where you push in additional elements on which to mount the arms and head. Other figures share many of these parts. Prowl is a repaint, but Ratchet has a different head, chest, back, and shins - pretty much every other body part is reused. This is the kind of thing you can't get away with transforming toys or most humanoid action figures, but slghtly-deformed cartoon models of relatively simple robot designs? This works.
His blaster is the same as Ratchet's, but he has some nice extras. Two blasters are mounted on his shoulders, and his painted doors clip on his back. The chest and knees have fairly extensive glossy painted details, and the helmet's crest and eyes are also decorated quite nicely. It feels like a bit of trickery - there's very little paint, but there's enough to make you see each of these figures as unique. Given how similar the proportions are, I have no problem with this.
The figure is jointed very well. The frames include joints for the knees and elbows, and those plug in to the leg and arm pieces. They can bend and, in spots, swivel. The ankles are ball joints, as are the neck and the shoulders. Those shoulder blasters also pivot on ball joints. The waist swivels, too - you're probably looking at north of 20 joints, depending on how you count them. From where I sit, if 2 parts fit together and can move? That's a joint. That means the elbows on this guy have 2 functional joints each.
The engineering is great - nothing gets in the way, and pretty much everything clicks together very well. The one area that seemed a little loose for me was the face being installed on the helmet - it doesn't seem to lock in place. Nearly everything else fits well, articulates nicely, and generally makes you wonder how the heck this upstart can do it so cheaply when everything else you buy costs triple, or more. It makes sense that Hasbro abandoned (most of) the Core class toys - why buy a mini version of Ironhide when you can just buy a little kit at a fraction of the price?
Most toys these days are made to extract collector cash - you get more articulation, more paint, more parts, and just about anything you can do to raise revenues. Back in the 1980s we saw a lot of the other end of the spectrum with more shared parts between figures and a lot of vehicles - especially G.I. Joe - came unpainted and unassembled. You had to put them together and sticker them. Some Joe accessories were even promoted as being things you can paint or color with markers. Lots of brands cut corners. Kenner reused old Star Wars designs and Batman figure molds. McFarlane Toys did repaints of everything. Some lines like The Simpsons in 2000 just made simpler figures with 4 joints each - they still looked good, too. In 2024 almost nobody is trying to make low-cost figures accessible to just about anybody, which is why this figure really surprised me. A lot of other brands could benefit from this shared-part, low-price format - let's hope it keeps going.
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