Yes sir, I still really dig the packaging for Prime. I wouldn’t have thought that a largely white deco would have been a good idea, but these cards look great on the pegs and make me want to buy them. Hot Shot has some particularly nice character art on the oversized card and he is packaged in his vehicle mode, with a bio blurb on the back of the card. Not much new to say here, so let’s move on to the figure.

Out of the package and it’s amazing the differences that a simple repaint can make. Of course, it helps that Hasbro put a lot more effort into Hot Shot’s deco than Bumblebee’s. Hot Shot’s car mode is blue with some stylized flames tampo’d on the sides and the hood, which looks loads better than BB’s bare yellow plastic and sloppy black paint. The windows and headlights here are translucent blue plastic and Hot Shot even has painted tail lights. The differences here aren’t just about color and design preference, Hot Shot just features better workmanship. Seriously, standing next to this guy, Bumblebee just looks like a bad custom job. I love the way this guy looks and with a little tweaking, he could have made a nice  homage to G1 Tracks.

In robot mode, Hot Shot sports a brand new head, which features flip down goggles. They’re a cool nod back to the visor on Armada Hot Shot and they offer a little variety on how he can be displayed, although I still prefer him with them up. His robot deco introduces grey plastic and red paint to the mix, and the resulting combination really makes this figure pop. I’m still far behind on watching the show, so I know nothing about the character, but I do know that this guy looks a lot better than Bumblebee standing on my shelf. Oh, did I mention that already? Well, it’s worth mentioning again.

As a repaint, Hot Shot features the same articulation as Bumblebee. His arms rotate and have lateral movement at the shoulders and swivels and hinges at the elbows, but no wrist articulation. His legs are ball jointed at the hips, with additional swivels just below those ball joints. He’s also hinged at the knees and ankles. There’s no torso articulation, but the head is ball jointed at the neck, and as already mentioned, his visor can flip up and down.

Hot Shot comes with the same blasters as Bumblebee. I love these things. You can mount them on his arms or combine them into one big gun. They can also be plugged into the engine socket when Hot Shot is in his alt mode.

Hasbro really won me over with this sculpt when I bought Bumblebee, but lost me with all the cheap cuts and sloppy work on his deco. Hot Shot really fixes all of those problems and shows how much better this mold can look with some quality paint. It makes me question why Hasbro would put so much effort into Hot Shot, while leaving one of the main characters to scrape by. I will admit that I would love to see this mold repainted the red Rodimus style deco that Hot Shot got in Armada and Energon, but this one is still plenty good. In fact, the only bad thing here is that Hot Shot, along with Bumblebee, is still clogging all the pegs and keeping the other Deluxes from making it out of the stockrooms.