Being brought up on the Transformers comic, Goldbug is much more relevant to me than Bumblebee. His (mis)adventures with Blaster and the rivalry with Grimlock is one of the most important arcs in the comic, and I always felt there was an interesting dynamic with Goldbug, a small golden robot, replacing Scrounge as Blaster’s friend.

Like with many of my customs, Goldbug is the repaint I had waited for that never happened. The Classics Bumblebee was released in 2006 and has received a huge number of repaints, but always as different variations on Bumblebee himself. There’s even Goldbug-coloured versions of the Alternity and Legends figures, although they both use the original head. With Hasbro happily making new heads for repaints, I had thought Goldbug was a given. Apparently not.

So I bought a second Bumblebee and set to work. There has been a few third-party castings of a Goldbug head, but I wanted to make one myself. Both because none of them really captured his looks, and because I didn’t feel like spending another $20+ on this figure. The head was built on the original one, with the entire face sawed off. The new one is built from scratch using styrene and a small strip of transparent plastic. Having bought sets of thinner and grooved styrene, I was able to make much better details than my earlier custom heads (Blaster and Smokescreen). The smaller size was also an interesting challenge, especially with the nose.

The colour scheme is entirely based on his Universe profile in the comics, which is also why his eyes are clear. I didn’t bother with a gun since Goldbug never, from what I can remember, used a gun in the comic, even when going up against Starscream.

This repaint didn’t take long. The head took about an evening to finish, and all the painting was made on a sunny day after that. In the same time I also produced an add-on kit for another figure, but that’s for another time…