Drifter

M.A.R.S. is your Drugstore’s preferred label for cheap robot mediocrities. You’ll find them across the aisle from the dregs of last year’s Ben 10 figures, adjacent to a stepped-on Twist N Change Robot disintegrating in its own package. M.A.R.S. is the kind of toy your well-meaning Aunt gets you for Christmas when you ask for a Transformer. They are uniformly horrible and soulless, and they clog up ebay search results all over the place. I’ve trained my brain to ignore them, but the Converters Drifter got through my carefully-tuned crap filter. And then I bought it. Go figure.

Hap P Kid has added a slate of Alternator-type toys, Converters (not to be confused with Select’s line of transforming toys from the eighties, the Convertors), to the M.A.R.S. imprint . The post-Alternators knockoff is a staple of the discount toy game, and the results range from the terrible Twist N Change bots afore-mentioned, to the surprisingly decent Road Bots. And what about the Converters?

Drifter arrives in a stepped-on window box of little distinction. Notice its arm hanging loose. I took this picture after I had already removed and replaced the figure, but I assure you that the arm was loose MISB.

What caught my attention enough to actually buy this thing was its apparently good-looking robot mode (coupled with its throwaway price point, of course). And right out of the package, detached arm aside, it’s indeed an attractive design. The colors and proportions are fresh. It’s certainly similar to other bots, but feels unique.

But man, those arms. They are terrible. The shoulder joint is a tricky recessed hinge and socket affair which falls apart if you look at it. I would say that I replaced the arms at least sixty times during the course of photographing for this review.

Articulation is present but useless. The thighs can only barely rotate before being obstructed by the pelvis, so the decent knee and foot joints are wasted. The arms feature pin and huggy joints but of course the arms fall off if you should have the temerity to swivel them. So Drifter is capable of very little in the posing department.

Two little nubs extend from the pipes at his forearms.

Transformation into vehicle mode is stupid easy. Nothing innovative here.

The result is something like a cartoon of a classic Corvette. Panel gaps are a mile wide. Paint apps are sloppy. But it possesses a certain goofy charm.

Scale is something in the neighborhood of 1:18, noticeably larger than the 1:24 alternators.

The best thing about this figure is that it made me get out my Alternators Mirage, an exquisite toy whose presence probably fills Drifter with shame.

So a perfectly adequate, somewhat interesting drugstore transformer. It’s no Road Bot, but it’s worth a look.