Hasbro’s Reveal The Shield Transformers have been turning up at Ross stores lately, so I’ve been making more frequent trips there hoping to find Grappel, or possibly even some of the carded Deluxe figures. Last time I found Deep Dive, but I took a pass on him because I already own Seaspray and while I love him, I decided that I don’t need two versions of that mold. Yes, folks, I’m a recovering completest! This last visit I still struck out on Grappel, but I did find Lugnut and decided that he was worth checking out for the price.
I don’t know that I ever saw too many Reveal the Shield boxed figure at retail, but then again I never saw any of the carded figures either. Lugnut comes packaged in his robot form and the box’s design is pretty close to the ones used for the Hunt for the Decepticons toys, complete with the one jagged edge. It’s a nice presentation and includes the figure’s bio on the side panel and shots of Lugnut in both modes on the back. The biggest drawback here is that Lugnut was a total bitch to get out of off of his tray, and that’s even with me not caring how bad I mangled it. I’m going to start out with Lugnut’s aircraft mode, because that’s how I roll…
Lugnut’s alt mode is a fictional heavy bomber with a bit of a vintage twang to him. If you haven’t guessed yet he’s also a direct homage to his namesake from Transformers Animated. Remember when Hasbro re-sculpted Animated Lockdown for the Revenge of the Fallen line? Well, this is the same thing. This design reminds me a lot of what Hasbro did with Hunt for the Decepticons Highbrow and in fact the two figures compliment each other really well in their aircraft modes, although in this case Lugnut comes across as looking a bit more realistic and less like something out of a Capcom game.
Lugnut is mostly military green, and the nose art is a really nice touch, as are the hazard stripes around the engines, which are a direct reference to the Animated Lugnut’s deco. As the name of the line suggests, Lugnut features a vintage-style rub sign on his wing, which reveals his Decepticon logo when rubbed. Lugnut’s registry numbers “LU-6 NU-7” even spell out his name. Cool.
Transforming Lugnut is fairly easy, although there are some spring-loaded elements that just tend to get in the way if you aren’t doing all the steps in the right order. In principal, he transforms very similar to Animated Lugnut, with a little more complexity, and the resulting robot mode is fairly close in overall profile to that earlier figure, particularly with the way the nose of the bomber splits open to form his chest. He also has the same basic proportions as Animated Lugnut, with a bulky upper body, long arms, and shorter, diminished legs.
On the downside, this Lugnut doesn’t handle his back kibble quite as well as his Animated counterpart. The original Lugnut had the option of removing a large piece of his aircraft tail for use as a big weapon. That’s not an option here and so this Lugnut has an awful lot of crap hanging off his back.
I’m impressed by how the wings transform into his arms and appear to get bulkier. His three-fingered claws are a lot better fleshed out that Animated Lugnut and there’s even some articulation in those fingers, which is cool. The huge cartoony bombs from Animated Lugnut are replaced by engines on this more realistic counterpart and he wears them on his shoulders, rather than on his hands. They make for an extra imposing robot form. Yeah, he’s got the proportions of a gorilla, but I think it works in his favor.
Lugnut also share’s his animated counterparts cyclops head and even has a bit of articulation in the mouth.
Lugnut was one of the few Reveal The Shield figures I found at retail when they were first released and I passed on him each time. Finding him for half price at Ross, though, was a different story, and all in all I’m glad I picked him up because I overall I do like him, and I absolutely adore his bomber mode. I have a feeling that Lugnut has one of those robot modes that a lot of people aren’t going to dig so much. It’s not clean, it’s not well proportioned, but it does have a lot of character.
FigureFan Zero 