We’re back to the Deluxe packaging and I’m still digging it. You get a nice big card with cool character art and a big bubble that shows off the figure in its vehicle mode, with the weapon beside it. One point of contention here is that the character art shows Cliffjumper firing his arm cannon, but the arm cannon is only featured in the First Edition mold and not this one. The back of the card has a bio blurb, which fails to mention the fact that Cliffjumper has been trashed, zombified, ripped in two, thrown down a chasm, and finally blown up. That’s cool, because I prefer my Cliffjumper very much alive. Hasbro has since put out an Exclusive zombie version of Cliffjumper, but that’s another story for another day. Let’s tear him open and see what’s what…

Cliffjumper’s vehicle mode is a 70’s muscle car and that makes me all kinds of happy. We get precious few older cars throughout the history of the Transformers. The last time a 70’s style car was done was back in the Cybertron series with Downshift. As is par for the course, you get very few paint apps showing on the car mode; instead it’s just molded in a pleasing shade of red plastic, with a little silver and black here and there. As always, I dig the clear windows, and the soft steer horns on the hood are a cool little touch. The car mode does have a bit of seaming and some of these are tough to close all the way when transforming him. He’s also got a little kibble, as his feet are protruding down from his undercarriage just in front of his back wheels.

Transforming Cliffjumper isn’t too difficult, and he does use some auto-morphing, which works quite well. His proportions are a little wonky, as he has pretty long arms and short, stubby legs. I didn’t remember him being like that in the show,  but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen the episode with him in it, so I’m sure it’s perfectly fine. Cliffjumper does use a lot of fakery in his robot mode. The blacked out windows on his chest are obviously not the real windows from the car mode, and the horns on his head are not from the actual hood ornament. Normally this kind of fakery irks me, but it’s kind of hard to argue with the results. Cliffjumper’s robot mode looks way too complex to be a Deluxe figure, and that’s kind of cool.

One thing I don’t get about Cliffjumper’s robot mode is the faked out, molded tires that appear behind his thighs. They’re unpainted, so they don’t really stand out, but I’m not sure why they’re there at all, since all four of his real tires are clearly visible on his legs and shoulders. Weird!

Cliffjumper comes with a Battle Hammer, which can peg into two different holes on his car mode. There’s one on the roof and one where the gas cap would be. He can also hold it in either hand in his robot mode. I prefer to have him hold it a different way, at which point it becomes a really big gun, rather than a hammer, because really big guns are better than hammers.

No doubt, Cliffjumper is a cool figure. He gets extra points for being a boffo 70’s muscle car and for having a great looking robot mode. I should take issue with how faked out his robot mode is, but the toy is fun and it’s just hard to hate on him. He’s one of the few Deluxes that I’ve picked up that I wouldn’t have actually minded paying the full $15 that he’s selling for on the pegs, and that’s saying a lot considering he’s on the smallish side and seriously lacking paint apps. I’m pretty torn on whether I like him better than the First Edition Cliffjumper, a figure I do not and probably will never own. On the plus side the FE version has his arm cannon and doesn’t use the window fakery for his chest. On the other hand, The RID version’s chest looks less boxy and more refined. In the end, it’s kind of a toss-up.

And that wraps up Transformers Prime Week. I’ll try to get to what I have left over the next couple of weeks. I’m pretty sure I’m committed to this line now, as I’ve really enjoyed all the figures I’ve looked at so far. Tomorrow we’ll check out this month’s DC Club Infinite Earths figure from Matty Collector. I haven’t decided yet whether or not to take Sunday off, but we’ll see how things play out.