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Auntie Slag's review: Battletrap

Name: Battletrap
Allegiance: Decepticon
Sub-group: Duocon
Function: Assault Team

“We’re only halves of a whole, but double the trouble”.

He's the wrestling tag team of robots. Likes to trap his foe between his jeep and helicopter vehicles and have "fun" with him -- knock him back and forth a bit -- before finally destroying him. Jeep maximum speed of 90 mph, range 600 miles. Helicopter maximum speed of 780 mph, range 1200 miles. In robot mode, carries double-barreled assault missile launcher with leaf-imaging for night-firing capability.

Now here’s an odd one; what kind of person decides to purchase Battletrap? rabid completists no doubt! However, twenty years ago, I was just a little Slag, and little slag’s like me always had a tendency to root for the underdog (British self-esteem issues in full-flow by age 10, Woot!). I never liked being on the side of the best football player at school, see. Much better to annoy the hell out of him with vicious tackles & generally make his smug bastard life hell. I entertained being a proper ‘last line of defense’ in a Metroplexy-Omega Supreme kind of way, my life has been a one-dimensional tech-spec bio ever since.

Nevertheless, it was for the same reason that I purchased Battletrap, because I knew no-one would go for him. As an aside, I remember walking into the playground and seeing Flywheels for the first time. It was always a novelty when someone brought a transformer into school, and Flywheels was a novelty Transformer. A novelty can be described as a simple thing done well; that’s a Duocon, that is.

Um, done well in Flywheels, that is...

See; Flywheels is cool. There was a reason why all the kids bought Flywheels; He was a tank and a jet plane. Battletrap is a jeep and a helicopter, a simplified jeep & helicopter. Flywheels is a simplified tank and jet, but he gets away with it because tanks and jets are the cool military vehicles in a kids eyes. I’m sure sales figures of the two would have borne that out.

But I didn’t care. No-one else had Battletrap but me. In fact, I may be the only person in the world with Battletrap! (yeah, well I’ve got to exercise my ego somehow). If you were an Autobot, you probably wouldn’t look twice at Battletrap. Being attacked by a slow moving Jeep and a dodgy helicopter doesn’t instill quite the same level of fear as a Fighter Jet and Tank combination. Not even Bumblebee would get out of bed for that (and I mean cartoon Bumblebee, not the cool one from the 2007 movie).

Vehicle Modes:

So um, a jeep then. There’s nothing wrong with Jeeps. Hound is possibly the coolest Jeep in the entire Universe (apart from Mindy’s, and that guy in M.A.S.K. and Trailbreaker/Hoist if they count). But a plasticky blue jeep with plasticky blue wheels is Battletrap.

Exceptional details on this toy go as far as a single sticker for the headlights and grill! The lame sticker-windows are unusual in that er... they’re pink! Maybe Battletrap’s trying to tell us something about his orientation? Whatever, it didn’t really bother me at the time, and I don’t think my screen name should be taken as a sign either. I’m all horny hetero-dinosaur don’t you know!

We’ve established that Battletrap’s jeep mode fails to strike fear into Autobots, perhaps a mini-Autobot or two, but then; a reasonably happy ‘My Little Pony’ on it’s way to a charity auction for sick grandmothers with nothing more violent on it’s mind than strawberries and daisies drenched in cream and sugar could do that.

Let’s add further insult to injury by mentioning one of only two appearances Battletrap made in the Marvel UK comic run. Who can forget his pivotal role in the ‘Time Wars’ saga, as he valiantly stood stock-still whilst Galvatron rammed a hand into his chest and smashed him against a wall? No doubt auditioning for the Mayhem Attack Squad circa 1988 must have been an exceedingly simple affair. He probably answered the door to every Church of Primus rep, and personally lost thousands in phishing scams too. The Muppet.

So is there anything else to be said about his jeep mode? Well, you can attach his dual-cannon attachment to the roof. In the world of TF weapons it’s not particularly impressive, and being Battletrap’s weapon it probably shoots milk. Lukewarm milk, mind. UHT.

Moving onto the Helicopter mode, this is reasonably cool (& I mean ‘reasonably’ in a G1 toy sense, which is no great accolade). The rotor blade spins freely! This was a big thing for me, as I also owned Blades and Springer. Blades for example, is a very intriguing character; having garnered attention from Simon Furman enough to distinguish him as more than mere generic gestalt-limb fodder (see. ‘Ancient Relics’ & The G2 saga as part of a Firestormer). However, for all his pluses; Blade’s rotor’s didn’t move, very annoying, as the central column would rotate on ‘teeth’, so as to make the blades sit neatly fixed in a V-shape against his back when transformed.

Springer on the other hand had the free-love hippy swing-blades ethic, and fortunately so does Battletrap. I’m still this anal about such details now, and why not? Everybody sees the details, some choose to cover it up by pretending to be blasé and faux non-anal about it. You make me sick you gutless ****ing frauds! Anal all the way, that’s what my T-shirt says.

Other than that, his colour, styling & shape put him firmly in 8-bit video game territory (think Ikari Warriors, Contra (Gryzor in the UK), Midnight Resistance and everything else with a gun in it, which was everything else... except Pac Man).

Robot Mode:

I reckon that 68.53% of the fun of a Transformer comes in the transforming. So how much fun is a Transformer that transforms itself? Your mileage may vary for this, but because most of us were childish boys at the time (I still am), the gimmick of auto-changing proved gimmick enough to sell to a shallow cheap shill with externalised self-esteem issues like me.

If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if a horse and a zebra got together, or a whale and a giraffe, or a woman and a... well, the idea with Battletrap is you that mount the helicopter onto the jeep, the two halves slot together which initiates an anticlimactic (in that it’s dull and over incredibly quickly. How many times have I faced the same criticism? and that’s mostly against myself!) ‘transformation’. You end up with this kind of bastardised, web-footed clump of a Transformer that should only be allowed near crayons. Maybe that’s the reason there were only two Duocons, you don’t mess with nature. I’m sure in Jhiaxus’ world Duocon’s were ten-a-penny. Thank god for Swarms eh?

In fact, now that I think about it, Duocon-ing is more a poncy flowers-in-their-hair Autobot-style idea. I could see them going for it in a big way. Maybe not Wheeljack, he’d be disgusted, and Prime would bitch-slap the idea point-blank, and so would Point Blank. But you could imagine Huffer and Beachcomber voting for it whilst painting their hacienda’s and bottling their own elderflower wine, as long as the results never came back to haunt them... damn Guardian reading Autobots. Does Guardian read ‘The Guardian’ I wonder?

Getting back to it, perhaps the only nice thing to say about Battletrap is that he has a very nicely shaped head (no sniggering you lot). The detail of the face, the helmet design, the wraparound shades (I love transformers with wraparound shades, it’s so quintessentially transformer-like). The head is everything a proper transformer of the 80’s should be.

Everything else is shit.

Marks out of ten for the following:

Transformation: 1 - One piece clicks on another, he springs up. The end. Sex jokes be damned, I’m going for faux-mature until the end of this sentence.

Durability: 5 - He’s a blocky mess of blocky plastic. You could go totally retro and chew the ends of the rotor blades whilst waiting for Ghostbusters II on the speccy to load, I suppose.

Fun: 5 - Again, because I’m so overwhelmingly shallow I still enjoy the Duocon gimmick. Some things never die, ask Belinda Carlisle; she wrote a song about it (although it was clearly album filler guff).

Price: 2 - Who would want this? If you’re that desperate I’ll give him to you. In fact, if you want him CJ, he’s yours, because i’ll know he’s going to a good home and his hardest opponent would be a Battle Beast (which Battletrap would face head-on with a tried & tested unbeatable standing-still non-violent attack. That’s proper Mayhem, that).

Summary: Expect temperatures to drop to around 11 overnight with some light winds coming in from a south westerly direction. Expect some fog early morning, which will give way to clear skies and a sunny afternoon with highs of 20 degrees. That’s all from me, have a very good evening.

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