Bandai - Morphing Minicar Series - Mazda RX7 and Nissan GT-R

This is a transformable Mazda RX-7 into a robot mode (or sort off) from "Morphing Minicar Series" produced by Bandai. The scale is at about 1/64 to 1/65. The price is about USD 10.00 and this is actually from the video game and anime series of "Chō Soku Henkei Gyrozetter" (超速変形ジャイロゼッター) translation "Super High-Speed Transforming Gyrozetter" produced by Square Enix.

First, let's have a look a the Mazda RX-7...

The packaging;

Out of packaging - in car mode:

The car mode is quite decent, nothing fancy beyond what you can see, the detailing is there and they even have the brand and model name as well as the logo on the car. Simple and decent.

And now the robot mode;

In my opinion, the robot mode doesn't look great honestly, yes we can see the "robot" standing tall but when you look at it from "mecha design" point of view - it's just a pretty simple robot with less charisma. Then again, this is when we must understand that Bandai is not really great with "transformation" engineering if compared to the likes of Hasbro (and/or Takara Tomy in Japan) who are quite fluent in this kind of thing thru their Transformers toy lines.

Articulation wise, what you see from the picture below is all that you get:

And again, another look in "car mode" which I think way much better than the "robot mode":

OK, now let's have a look at the Nissan GT-R (R35)...


The packaging;

Out of packaging and in "car mode":

The Nissan GT-R looks decently detailed in car mode, nothing fancy beyond what you can see from the picture above - it is GT-R, simple as that. I guess this car is in between 1/65 to 1/68 scale because the size (in car mode) is almost the same as the Mazda RX-7 above.

And now the "robot mode";

Nothing spectacular about it, it is a "robot" right? The articulation is no more than from what you can see in the picture below;

Again, another look in "car mode" as Nissan GT-R;

Overall, both model seems to look better in their "car mode" rather than in their "robot mode" - or at least that is my personal view on this. The painting finishing and the car detailing work is good, the transformation process is extremely easy - I can do it without looking at the manual at all. However, the "robot mode" seems to be a little dull or maybe I would say the design is quite poor. The articulation is not great either but in fact this are more or less the same as those basic Transformer toys from Hasbro at around almost the same price bracket. I guess the main objective for Bandai is this item can transform from car to robot mode easily. On the other hands, probably that is how the robot look like the original series so Bandai have to stick with it.

You can see the trailer of this anime from YouTube as below;







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