Ever since he came back into the franchise in the late 2000s, Bumblebee has been an inseparable part of Transformers. This has afforded him various designs and toys, with a new iteration giving his cinematic incarnation an adorable makeover.
MCT-01 Offroad Pioneer by MachineCat-Toys reimagines Bumblebee’s appearance from his last live-action appearance, combining a rugged alternate mode with super-deformed proportions. He’s joined by MCT-02 Flight Buzz Voltbee, who’s based on a completely different “bug” Transformer from another series. While both are only in the prototype stage at the moment, they offer similar remixes of two robots that have been inextricably linked since the late 2000s.
Bumblebee and Waspinator Create Buzz with Their Newest Toys
MCT-01 Offroad Pioneer is based on Bumblebee’s appearance in the 2023 live-action movie Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, albeit in a much more chibi style. Despite the small frame, his cinematic detail shines through, with the character actually having multiple accessories derived from the film.
These include his arm cannons, two arm-mounted blades and a battle mask for robot mode, along with a can of oil that he can adorably hold. He even transforms into an offroad version of a 1977 Chevrolet Camaro, carrying over his super-deformed proportions to this vehicle mode. It’s easily one of the character’s cuter toys, especially given how he was portrayed in many of the live-action Transformers movies (which drastically altered his usual depiction).
MachineCat-Toys has also revealed the first images of MCT-02 Flight Buzz Voltbee, which is based on Waspinator from Beast Wars: Transformers. As in this 1990s iteration of the franchise, the evil Predacon transforms into a wasp, though, given the grey prototype’s color scheme, it appears notably more robotic than usual in this form.
He has a small blaster in robot mode, as well as a drink cup to humorously celebrate and homage his temporary happy ending in the finale of Mainframe’s Beast Wars cartoon. There’s a lot of insectoid detail on his face, as well as his compound beast mode eyes and wings. Both toys were shown on the MachineCat-Toys Weibo account, but given that they’re in the prototype stage, it will likely be a while before they’re released.
Debuting in different generations of the brand, Bumblebee and Waspinator are largely unrelated, aside from their insect-themed names. This changed with the 2007 cartoon Transformers: Animated, wherein the Autobot “Wasp” shared a body style with Bumblebee, his rival. Going insane and later being given an experimental wasp alternate mode, the now corrupted Decepticon took on the name Waspinator.
The connection between the two was reintroduced in the current Transformers: Age of the Primes toyline, in which Waspinator had a toy that was a repaint of the Transformers: Legacy action figure based on the Animated Universe Bumblebee.