Or, well, PADDLES!
To provide a super quickie history course… Paddles is the sixth Dinobot. From a UK short story collection. Who turns into, well, not Champ. Not Nessie. But OGO. POGO. A Plesiosaur.
Anyway Venture Bros reference aside, that Planet X did this is pretty cool. He’s a retool of their take on Sludge, only with flippers instead of legs, as well as a new head. And in altmode HOLY HELL IS HE IMPRESSIVE. Like, he’s freaking huge.
Transformation has a couple tricks to it, but is otherwise pretty straightfoward. A lot of the mass compresses into a nice squat bulky robot with some decent posability to it. He looks nifty indeed!
Weaponwise, he’s got a king’s ransom of armaments. Twin giant cannons and a Transmetal Megatron tailwhip are his main weapons. He also comes with some translucent swords that, as I understand it, are meant to go with their Swoop moreso (but he can still hold/store them). But honestly the BFGs are enough… especially given you can plug them in onto his shoulder flippers so they sit above the shoulders nice and stable-y. His own set of side-guns!
In summary… I won’t lie. Paddles WAS a bit of a novelty buy. With BBTS having him for 30 bucks back in December, he was a no-brainer to throw in a box with a couple other things. But he’s a really REALLY GOOD novelty buy.
Anyway hopefully next review doesn’t take as long for me to actually writeup. Meant to talk about him the week after Akane Shinjo, but then got sidetracked.