As a kid, I loved the Buzz-Off action figure. The colors were bright and appealing, the articulated wings were a unique feature (and looked a lot more flight-worthy than Stratos’s arm-feathers), and the claws were cool…to a kid. But I’ll admit that the 200X Buzz-Off was possibly the best redesign of the entire line, pushing the insectile aspects to the limit. MOTUC is meant to invoke the original line, not 200X, so I’m going to review Buzz-Off compared to his MOTUC brethren and the general concept of the line.

As much as I like Buzz-Off, he’s one of the MOTU characters whose name I see as a potential stumbling block to getting a movie taken seriously. As “codenames,” this sort of thing works in G.I. Joe; it works in Transformers because the Autobots are ostensibly replacing their Cybertronian names with Earth names that fit their character in some way. But I really can’t come up with an even remotely feasible fannish explanation for names like Buzz-Off, Two-Bad or Clawful. I suppose Mattel may be trying to get around that by using the “real names” on the bios, but if so, they’re not trying all that hard, since–well, see for yourself. (more…)