Voltron Vehicle Force
This Voltron Vehicle Force is the ninth release in the Mini-Action series by Action Toys, They are smaller, usually plastic renditions of your favorite Japanese robots, usually with full combination gimmicks at an affordable price. This is my first Mini-Action toy, and of course it’s one of my favorite robots.
The box is small, thin, and light. To be clear – there is no diecast in this and the combined figure is only 6 inchest tall. The mini in Mini-Action is literal. Inside the parts are in thin clear plastic tray.
Even at the small size, it breaks down into the individual 15 vehicles, and can form both the three teams and the combined Voltron Vehicle Force.
Let’s break down all the individual vehicles first.
Air Team
The helicopters don’t do much, but the propellers turn. Most of the movement in these is reserved for use in robot mode.
The head ship is nice and pointy.
The chest ship is nice and angular, but pay attention to the vertical fins on the wings. They are just plugged in with friction and can come off easily.
The chest block vehicle has the feature where you can fold out the little launchers on the side, and pull up the red band part in the back. The tank tread segment does not have wheels, but does rotate. The part is held in by friction only, so it can come off when handled.
The combined Air Team looks good! Due to all the joints in the component parts it takes a bit of finesse to get everything straight.
Sea Team
Unlike larger versions of the toy, none of these vehicles have wheels that turn on them.
Due to their size, connection points that would have had panel doors on them on larger toys have been left exposed.
I was used to the way the tower looked from the toys, but I guess it looks more like this in the anime. My only concern here is the big hole for the pin that is used on the abdomen crunch in robot mode.
The team combines just like the original toy – almost. There are white spacer parts on the hinge sections of the large submarines that have to be removed before they can combine with the smaller submarines. These spacers fill the gap when they are in their individual ship modes.
Land Team
The big takeaway here is that none of the wheels on the Land Team move at all. It helps with stability, but I do wish they turned.
The roofs of the foot cars have very obvious pegs that flip up for connection to the Land team or the legs of Voltron. Again, the grooves for the metal pins are large and obvious. Also note the paint smudge on the front of the black vehicle. This was only noticable with the macro lens, so don’t sweat it.
Combination is just tabs into slots, it all holds together very well.
Forming Voltron
I’ll summarize here, but watch the video to see the combination. I had a big issue with the combination, and I had to learn a tough lession that I want to share with you. Start with the black waist ship and the upper legs. Open the upper legs and swivel the nose cones around to reveal a peg that fits into a hole underneath the black ship. On mine, the red peg would not go in all the way, and only in this disassembled state was I able to give it enough force to hear the click of the joint. I actually disassembled the joint to see why it wasn’t going in, and it really came down to using a tremendous amount of force to get it in place. Once you hear that click, you are good.
For the rest of the combination, there is some parts-swapping to be done. The cover on the head ship needs to be removed and replaced with a faceplate. The tails of the helicopters are removed to reveal the connection joint for the hands. The hands have back panels that need to be removed to create the access point for the elbow joints. The chest ship tabs into one of the white connectors on the blue chest module. The other chest piece slots into place, but make sure the tower is pointing to the right so the ab crunch is in the right place. Finally, connect the lower leg sections, and then peg the feet into the exposed holes. Despite the feet having flat tabs, the legs have circular holes they connect to.
One neat feature is that the thumbs are on a slide joint and must be pushed up to expose them in robot mode. This keeps the car mode of the fists flat, and adds depth in robot mode.
Once I got the transformation sorted, he’s pretty solid, and very poseable. He’s so poseable in fact that it can be a challenge to do a neutral pose.
However, this is an ACTION figure, and we want ACTION poses!
There is a TON of articulation packed into this little toy. Ball jointed head, hinged shoulders (up and down), rotate and hinge shoulder joint, rotating biceps, elbow joint, wrist joint, ab crunch, waist swivel, hip rotate and swivel out, thigh swivel, hinge knee, ankle rocker and rotation! Some nice touches are that the chest ship is on a hinge so it can get out of the way for the ab crunch, and that there’s a secondary extending joint in the wrist to give more space to the hands. If there was any omission, I would mention that the feet don’t tilt forward. Also, the knee joint is tighter than the hinge that reveals the peg in the upper legs, so what happens is when you bend the knee it tends to separate and bend at the hip first, requiring you to hold that joint in place. Overall though, it’s fantastically poseable.
For weapons, you get the Blazing Sword that can be held in the variant hands, but you can also use the propeller blades as weapons. There are variant hands that have holes for holding the blades, but the great thing is that the section can be removed to just make them dynamic posing hands!
Overall, I like him. I got super frustrated when the leg would not connect, and was ready to return it until I figured it out. I don’t like that the red ship fins pop off, and I don’t like that bending the knee disconnects the upper leg panel. However, the price is great and they pack a lot of fun engineering and articulation in a little package. He looks pretty good next to his brothers as well.
