Buzzworthy Bumblebee
Buzzworthy Bumblebee is a cross-toyline subline imprint focussing on various incarnations of everybody's favourite yellow Autobot, Bumblebee. Toys from this line began appearing both in stock at online retailers and on store shelves in late 2020 and early 2021, while Hasbro never officially announced the line properly.
With vibrant yellow packaging like the previous Transformers: Bumblebee toyline, and package art prominently featuring Evergreen Bumblebee, Buzzworthy Bumblebee centers around versions of Bumblebee from across the brand's history, as well as his human allies and Cybertronian foes.
The line is exclusive to Target in the United States, and Toys"R"Us in Canada.
Toys
Owing to the... unsystematic layout of the Buzzworthy Bumblebee line, as well as its lack of any advance notice in terms of release schedule, we've elected to delineate this page into what toylines each figure (or multi-pack) supplements. The alternative would be to try and force a structure onto something that plainly doesn't have one, and that way lies madness.
War for Cybertron Trilogy
The War for Cybertron Trilogy portion of Buzzworthy Bumblebee features the majority of the subline's new tooling, including two all-new molds: a diminutive Core Class Bumblebee (retailing for five (or more) bucks more than the regular Core Class, owing to an included Spike Witwicky mini-figure), and a Deluxe Class "Origin Bumblebee", representing the character's Cybertronian mode from "More than Meets the Eye, Part 1" for the first time in toy form. A "Worlds Collide" multi-pack also falls under this banner, and its selection of characters, combined with the volcanic environment depicted on Core Class Bumblebee's card art, more specifically ties these toys to the concurrent War for Cybertron: Kingdom subline in all but name.
Core Class
|
Deluxe Class
|
Multi-packs
|
Studio Series
Tying into Studio Series, this assortment copies that line's packaging design – including the cardboard diorama backdrops – but replaces Studio's ubiquitous red design elements with a friendly yellow. The first Deluxe Class assortment consists of figures mostly redecoed and/or retooled from previous Studio Series releases, with each toy gaining a "BB" as part of its ID number to differentiate it from its mainline release. The 74BB Revenge of the Fallen Bumblebee actually ended up coming out earlier than its "regular" counterpart. 2021 saw the addition of "Battle Packs", comprising of new backdrops and re-releases (or minor redecoes) of Studio toys dating back three years prior, and even a redeco of a toy predating Studio Series entirely! A second Deluxe Class assortment followed in late 2021, now diversifying, like the main Studio Series line, into screen-accurate toys of characters from The Transformers: The Movie.
Deluxe Class assortment 1 (2020)
|
Deluxe Class assortment 2 (2021)
|
Battle Packs (2021)
|
Legacy
The Legacy portion of Buzzworthy Bumblebee, so far consisting of a single release, features a Diaclone-styled redeco to complement the Legacy-branded Generations Selects line.
Deluxe Class
|
Cyberverse
Buzzworthy Bumblebee mostly goes for re-releases to represent the Cyberverse corner of the franchise, with the only exception so far being "Spark Armor" Bumblebee's smaller partner, a redecoed version of Grimlock's partner Trash Crash. In addition to the Spark Armor assortment, this segment of the toyline also includes a boxed set of four unchanged Warrior Class figures as well as an assortment of four equally unchanged 1-Step Changers – the packaging for which doesn't actually say "Cyberverse" anywhere, but we've put them all here for the sake of convenience.
| Spark Armor (2020) | Multi-packs
|
1-Step Changers (2022) |
Robots in Disguise (2015)
Apparently leaving no stone unturned, Buzzworthy Bumblebee reaches into the 2015 Robots in Disguise toyline and brings back some Crash Combiners, now rechristened as "Crash & Combine" toys. These partially automorphing toys curiously make use of "evergreen" designs for each individual character art – though the combiner identities are rendered in the characteristic Robots in Disguise art style. We've elected to keep things simple and put them on the Robots in Disguise characters' pages.
| Crash & Combine (2021) |
Rise of the Beasts
Ahead of the official announcement of any toys connected to the seventh installment in the live-action film series, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, a Buzzworthy Bumblebee product was listed at Target's website that is co-branded as part of Rise of the Beasts, but consists of seemingly unchanged re-releases of figures from the Bumblebee solo film's toyline's "Energon Igniters" segment.
Multi-packs
Larger toys Buzzworthy also features a couple of re-releases of two of Bumblebee's bigger toys for smaller hands from outside of the "Generations" branding, including the surprise return of Age of Extinction's Robots in Disguise line Mega 1-Step Bumblebee, as well as a second showing for Bumblebee's Power Charge Bumblebee. Each toy features the logo and iconography of its respective movie.
Notes
References
|
