Morphbot

October is here, and we’re bringing the pain with a month of bootlegs, monsters, and downright scary toys. First off – the terrible Morphbot!

I picked up this guy when KB was going out of business. I only paid a few dollars for it, and I bought it knowing it would suck. I thought it would be fun to chronicle it, and then maybe pass it off to my kids.

The box is pretty large, with a nice die-cut window and a try-me feature. One side of the box has a beveled edge for some reason.

The box has the usual photoshopped graphics, but I was surprised to see that this was licensed by Ford. Of course just because it has a logo on it, doesn’t mean it is actually legit. Perhaps in the great automotive industry, this application got overlooked.

Morphbot is a 1/12 Ford GT sportscar. It looks like it belongs to the Roadbots toy line, but i couldn’t find it. They have a ford GT, but it doesn’t look like this one.

In vehicle mode, the GT is almost a foot long. It’s big, and the vehicle mode actually doesn’t look that bad. The wheels are hard plastic, and nothing opens.

The size is about the only redeeming quality of this thing. The material is a toxic, crayon-like plastic. I swear, if I get cancer someday, you can blame this. I felt like I needed to sterilize my hands after handling it.

Transformation is simple in theory, but because the molding is such crap it basically starts to transform as soon as you pick it up. Nothing in this toy is precise. All of the joints are ball joints that have too little friction to hold any pose.

So there is the transformation as depicted on the box, and then how I think it was supposed to go.

If you go by the way it looks on the box – forget it. It looks atrocious. The nose of the car is flat down, and the doors have to be removed and re-clipped onto the back. ugh.

However, you can get a manageable robot mode out of it by pulling the nose up and leaving the doors attached like a classic G! transformers style.

Articulation is good in theory, but the joints are too loose to do anything but stand up.

Morphbot comes with four weapons: A battery-powered rifle with sound and light action, a spear, a small gun and a shield (made from the roof of the car). All are lame.

After the review, I gave this to the kids. They thought the robot mode sucked, but they liked the car mode for the few minutes it held together. In minutes, it was in parts across the floor, already forgotten.

Off into the trash it went, to join its brethren in landfills across the world.