The Longarm of the lore… pt2 (A Mini-Con Toy Review)

This Longarm is a Mini-Con that belongs to the ‘Giant Planet Mini-Con Team’. This group seems to align on the side of destruction and the Decepticons, which is fairly fitting, considering how Longarm here is mainly green with a touch of purple as his main colours, much like the Constucticons of G1 fame (*).

As he is, Longarm here isn’t all that bad a figure. He has some decent paint applications on his feet, legs and chest and looks like a sturdy lad. Articulation is not bad for a toy of his size, (robot mode stands about 6 cm tall) as he has bending knees, swinging hips, a rotate-able waist, rotate-able shoulders and up down movement on his arms. Balance is very good, aided by his kneecaps, which can be form a walking pose. The downside of course being that if he was real, his kneecaps would scrape on the ground when he walked.

The cab of his truck forms his feet and knees, whilst the rear forms the rest. Transformation is simple and quick and although the whole figure is pretty basic, it seems to work together very well. The moulding of the figure is mainly details for the vehicle mode and it is well done, with little steps for a “driver” to get into the cab, doors, windows and fuel tanks to point out just a few.

His head is well done, with a nice no-nonsense face that has a serious mouth and a helmet styler reminiscent of cartoon G1 Megatron for some reason. I quite like the way that he has been given a nose, mouth and eyes, as opposed to the normal Minicon face, which is usually some weird visor-looking thing. It’s effective and looks nice. The only facial paint applications is red which works well and they would have been hard pressed to add more, as it is so small.

Longarm’s alternative mode is a double crane construction vehicle. I guess since most of the Galaxy Force/Cybertron toys were all futuristic vehicles then this fits well as the crane has two cranes on it. One is the standard hook to a pole type that one would normally imagine for a crane, and the other seems to be a shovel. The hook is on the back half of the vehicle and the shovel in the front, behind the cab. Interestingly, the instructions have the hook at the front with the shovel behind. They are both rotate-able with a little bit of raising/lowering ability, but the hook can’t hook and the shovel can’t reach anywhere near the ground. However, no one is likely to want it to be that realistic, so imagination is the way to go here folks.

Details for the vehicle mode are again, pretty good and this is where they all come together nicely. The cab has windows, an engine grill and even windscreen wipers, moving back, the body of the truck has six wheels (which all roll), a nice bit of paint work and in the middle of the underside is a Minicon attachment port. Overall, what we have is a very nice construction vehicle.

I must admit that I haven’t tried it, but I think this guy would look pretty good power-linked to one of the Transformer toys from Armada. The vehicle body is thin enough so as not to get in the way and the cranes look like they would make a good “enhancement” for one of the bigger fellers. Now I am going to have to dig out some of my armada figures to try it out.

In the end, Longarm is a pretty good Minicon figure with some nice detailing and a cool vehicle mode. Coming from the Giant Planet (Gigalonia in Galaxy Force or Gigantia in Cybertron), one would expect a construction vehicle and he is the only one in the Giant Planet Minicon team, which are a good set of toys, only let down by Overcast.

* (Longarm’s construction vehicle mode is also reminiscent of the combined form of Stonecruncher and Excavator from the 1991 Decepticon Micromaster Combiner Construction Squad, although they were in yellow, grey and red - a better colour match for Astro-Hook, the Master Collector’s Transformers Collector’s Club 2007 recolour of Longarm released as a part of the Astrotrain Set) - edits by Ark-Ivor