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I wish we were joking...here we have a standard Bumblebee with his wide head...and a variant Bumblebee with a NARROW head! To paraphrase Zobovor: "The 'ears' are noticeably thinner, as is the general width of the head. The wide-head (standard version) is from a Bumblebee I picked up in 1986 (the same assortment that included Wheelie and Hubcap). I don't know about the origins of the narrow-head version beyond that it came from a U.S. Transformer and not a knockoff or Microman toy. The G2 version is the same width as the wide-head version, incidentally."
   ...Well, by god, Frank has some ideas! To paraphrase him, he says that the foreign Volks all come with narrow heads. The way to tell them apart from a standard TF release is in the headpegs: "Pins. All the South American heads are male (that is, have 2 pegs on it to hold it to the support plate)...with the support plate being *female* (with 2 holes for the pegs on the head). All other (NON-South-American) versions (to my knowledge) are the opposite - the pegs are on the support plate and go into the holes on the back of the head."
 Sooo...looks like Volks come with the narrow head. Does this solve the mystery? Hard to say. As far as I can tell, yes...BUT: what if Zob's narrow head is still the standard TF version? Maybe Hasbro/Takara cranked a few out, then sent the mold to South America for their minis. Or maybe american narrow heads don't exist at all; it's a fluke that the head looks narrow. As usual, we await further info...and I may yet have to convince Zob to dissect his once again. :-) |