"Did you eat a lot of paint chips as a kid?"

It’s time to talk Dark of the Moon Bumblebee! Originally, we discussed doing this figure for the Buzzworthy bumblebee program, but with the amount of tooling we were modifying, we wanted to ensure that everyone had a chance to get him. TF3 Bumblebee is by far my favorite design from the Michael Bay films, call me biased, but when I co-oped for the Transformers team back in 2010, I remember getting a glimpse of this vehicle design and absolutely loving it.

I think this is where the 5th Gen Camaro really got the opportunity to shine. With widened and scooped rear fender arches, a vented hood, machine-faced split 5 spoke wheels, decklid spoiler quad exhaust tips, diffuser galore, and an excess of carbon fiber, it felt like a long-overdue refresh for the car. The existing mold plan for the vehicle mode allowed us to totally overhaul the body panels while adapting some of the bot mode alterations to the chest. Everything on the vehicle except the clear molded panels were completely redesigned. Kunihiro at Takara was such a fantastic design partner on this item, and helped to ensure that every detail down to the fender badging was captured in the sculpt.

The remainder of the robot mode remained relatively unchanged. With the alterations to the vehicle and the revised chest plate, there were several visual differences from past releases. I wanted a bit more warmth out of the yellow for the vehicle to further align it to the more “ambery” sunset paint that we see in the film. Originally we treated the windows in a darker tint, but the darker base color was making the yellow paint appear green, so we had to lighten it. Once again, I chose to treat the robot’s exposed mechanical parts in a darker grey metallic to help enhance the sculpted and further align them to the entertainment. Lastly, we revisited the unmasked head to further differentiate it from its most recent SS release.

’m thrilled to have had the opportunity to work on this version of the character and look forward to plenty more Bumblebee figures in the future. Be sure to check out all the details. I’ll add more in-depth visual comparisons between TF1 -TF3 in the turntables.

What are your thoughts on DOTM Bumblebee? Is he a must-have? Or do you already have enough of these in your collection?