During the Transformers’ hay day, no character was as popular as the best friend of Spike: the little underdog, Bumblebee.
In his toy release, Bumblebee’s figure was one of the highest selling Transformers mainly due to the fact that he was a mini-bot and thus was cheaper than the larger scale toys.
In the same series, we got Cliffjumper.
This was a very similar figure, but was painted red. A lot of kids thought Cliffjumper was Bumblebee and vice versa. This snafu could have been a confusion because of the paint opts. For some unknown reason you would get a red Bumblebee
and a yellow Cliffjumper.
For collectors nowadays, owning both are prized possessions. You tend to pick up both figures for your collection.
One unique figure in the line that came out looked a little (for a lack of a better term) odd! It was this guy..
who was either packaged as Bumblebee and/or Cliffjumper.
Being that he is neither, the Transformers community lovingly refers to this mini-bot as Bumblejumper or Bumper
for his combined look of both Bumblebee and Cliffjumper.
Bumblejumper was part of the Microman Microchange line.
There has never been an official release of Bumblejumper nor has Hasbro ever explained how he ended up on the shelves.
What I believed happened was that Hasbro got so many molds from Takara that this guy was just overlooked or forgotten. When he was produced, he looked so similar to the other two that they didn’t realize he was a different car entirely.
FYI: Bumblejumper is a Mazda Familia 1500 XG.
Sidenote: In South America Bumblejumper or “Robocar” was released in the Transformers line in white. He does not sport any stickers that identify him as an Autobot or a Decepticon.
He has now become part of Transformers lore due to his appearance in Dreamwave and IDW comics continuity.
OK hit up the forums at Pop Culture Network to tell me what you think and thanks for reading.
”Till all are one!”
Thanks to www.tf-1.com,www.toyarchive.com and boltax.blogspot.com for some of the bumbleJumper images.
