TRANSFORMERS TOYS AND MERCHANDISE SECTION

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Cliffjumper's review: Quickswitch

Initial draft was just the fragment "Quickswitch? Quickshit, more like..." repeated 200 times.
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Name: Quickswitch
Function: Assault Warrior
Sub-Group: Six Changer
"A confused enemy is a defeated enemy."

Completely unpredictable. Changes his mood as often as he changes his mode. Can be compassionate, merciless, friendly, hateful, happy, or angry, depending on what time of day it is. Equipped with 6 different modes: robot warrior, assault hovercraft cruiser, jet-propelled laser pistol, assault beast with stealth shielding, armor-piercing drill tank, suborbital fighter jet. Armed with twin photon blasters.

In 1987, Hasbro began desperately began adding whatever gimmicks they could think of to Transformers - Headmasters, Targetmasters, Clones, Duocons, a Double Spy... No idea was too ludicrous for the hapless execs charged with recovering from the commercial suicide of killing off Optimus Prime and replacing him with a boring, moping version of Hot Rod. One of the ideas they came up with was for a Six Changer. Never mind that the Triple Changers had been a mixed bunch, and that most of the figures with just one alternate mode were pretty poor, we were getting Sixshot anyway.

Hasbro were never ones to let a bad idea die, so as well as getting a 1988 line full of smaller versions of Headmasters and Targetmasters, we also got a second - similarly smaller - Six Changer, the Autobot Quickswitch. The character got his own animated commercial, but made little impact elsewhere, his appearances limited to being the straight man to Darkwing and Dreadwind in a single, five-page UK strip, and being in a Ladybird storybook.

A version with a different colour scheme was released in Japan as Sixknight, appearing in a bit of alleged Transformers Anime series Super-God Happy Teenage Awesomeo Power Bukkake Gaijin Masterforce. He stands out a bit through being a Transformer. Surprisingly, TakaraTomy haven't selected him for Encore yet.

Alternate Modes:
So, Quickswitch has five alternate modes. Something that complex obviously requires some sort of compromise so the engineering and flexibility can actually work. Some figures concentrate on a single alternate mode, and then have a second one added largely as a bonus. Some result in two slightly flawed alternate modes. The compromise the designers of Quickswitch opted for is all five modes are utter shit.

There's not really a huge amount of point going through the modes in particular detail - look at the pictures, you can see exactly what's gone wrong here... My example is missing one of the photon blaster rifles, but I seriously doubt this is taking much away. The puma looks like a road accident; the jet is a flying brick; the gun is the hovercraft mode with the lasers stuck on the front and a weak excuse for a handle on the bottom... The closest to success are the drill tank and hovercraft modes. The former is let down by a main body that looks like what it is - a pile of surplus parts. The latter achieves the relatively lofty status of just being poor - there aren't any massive design faults, it's just ugly. Hasbro also overcame the problem of finding a colour scheme that would work for six diverse modes by picking one that looks equally awful on them all - a horrid turquoise/red/pale grey collision.

Robot Mode:
It's not like they even got the robot mode right either. Considering most Transformers suffer to some extent in robot form due to the nature of their alternate modes, it's no real surprise that Quickswitch reflects his five weak disguises - it's a compromise form that fails to succeed. There is a certain amount of charming blockiness to him if you look at him from the right angle and distance (i.e. side-on from about three hundred yards). But it's all wrong...

The head has a giant hinge underneath it, the legs come out of his hips (giving him a comically large groin, while the giant, blocky shoulders just make the arms look silly. He doesn't even have real hands - the puma's paws are just flattened onto his wrists. There is a fair amount of articulation due to the multiple moving parts - hips, knees, shoulders and elbows - and the all-plastic toy has good enough balance to make use of it. The only problem is that posing him only serves to highlight the bad design of the robot mode.

Transformation: 1 - None of the modes are close to taxing, most being largely reliant on turning the toy over.
Durability: 10 - He's a block of plastic. You hit someone on the head with this, they will die.
Fun: 1 - Excluding using him to bludgeon people to death, after the curiosity and general amazement at just how poor Quickswitch is has passed, you will never look at him again.
Price: 1 - He costs a couple of pounds. Sure, that's cheap compared to a proper Transformer, but you can get a house brick for around the same, and at least those are practical.
Overall: 1 - Everyone involved in the design, production and release of this figure deserves to be herded into a hole in the ground, and have the world's supply of unwanted Quickswitch figures (that's all of them) emptied onto their heads. Absolute rubbish.