Flame Toys FuRaiModel Kit Arcee

(Femme-Bot Friday #88)

So, after enjoying the Windblade kit, it was a foregone conclusion that I'd want the Arcee kit as well. This model kit seemed to take a while to arrive - first revealed back in 2022, it wasn't available (in the UK, via my usual channels) till late 2023, at which point I snapped her up and, unlike with Windblade, started building her soon after she arrived... and, instead, this draft has been sitting around waiting for me to complete it for more than two years now.

Just like Windblade, Flame Toys' second Femme-Bot kit met with a mixed reception but, Arcee being dearer to the hearts of fans of a certain age, it was perhaps even more vitriolic. It's a strange thing to observe, frankly, that the 'mom/babysitter' character from the 1986 animated movie - who was clearly designed with the male gaze in mind - is somehow not 'allowed' to be sleek and feminine, even though Hasbro's most recent versions of her have been precisely that, just with an entire car shell stuck on her back.

As I've said before, the very idea of non-transforming TransFormers is anathema to me, but it's been apparent for some time that Hasbro themselves - and even Takara Tomy, to a degree - are incapable of designing good Femme-Bot figures, and it's really been up to the Third Parties to innovate. And, while this isn't a Hasbro or Takara Tomy product, it is officially licensed... and, because I really enjoy model kits, they've become an exception... as future Femme-Bot Fridays may continue to demonstrate.

For the moment, though, let's take a look at this new interpretation of Arcee, to see how she compares to other depictions of the character.

Unexpected Challenges

Back in March, my girlfriend took the opportunity to go travelling around Europe. Over the last year or so, she'd had two complicated bereavements within the space of just two months, a toxic situation had developed at work at much the same time and, all the while, she was working on her Masters degree in Space Science and Technology. When she received her results (pass with distinction) she handed in her notice and started planning in earnest a trip she'd fully expected to have to put off till she retired.

This presented a useful opportunity for me to get some work done on our flat, since I'd only have to worry about my own (in)convenience. I've needed to get the ceilings redone ever since the roof got fixed about two years ago, so that was the main job I wanted to get done. Courtney and I had also discussed redecorating the bedroom, so I was even able to tag the redecoration onto the end of the ceilings refit, once I had her preference for paint colour.

But what has this to do with TransFormers, you ask? Why is this momentous enough to warrant a blog post?

Well, because I ended up transforming a bunch of my figures into vehicle mode for the sake of portability (also to pass the time while work was going on in another room), and completely empty an Ikea 'Detolf' cabinet so it could be moved without the contents falling over (or out).

And the figures in this cabinet were largely Masterpiece and 3P MP-analogues, with a couple of exclusives.

So, while work progressed in the lounge, I had the cabinet temporarily in the bedroom, with its contents spread out on the bed and, in every case, the instructions stashed away in the boxes which were, naturally, inaccessible... Some of the figures were notoriously breakable, or had complicated or fussy transformations, while others were simplicity itself... Here's a quick breakdown:

Retro G1 Brawn

After struggling through my write-up to Retro G1 Gears toward the end of last year, I intended to fast-track this one, to get it out of the way and - with any luck - prevent any ruminating. Thing being, Brawn was always one of my favourites, partly because of the early Marvel UK strip, The Enemy Within, in which he basically gets a blow to the head and goes nuts, then has to prove his loyalty in a battle to the death with Starscream, who's on Megatron's naughty list due to his scheming. The fact that his G1 toy was, let's face it, a little on the goofy side - lanky, with short arms featuring tool-like claws rather than hands, and little 'wings' on his shoulders - just added to his appeal.

The one glimmer of hope I've had for my continued collection of Hasbro's output was kicked off by the last two War for Cybertron chapters, Earthrise and Kingdom, which brought back some of the original, first year Mini Autobots in Deluxe class form. It hasn't all been great - Cliffjumper was a partsformer, and Huffer had the animation-style head - but the most recent bone Hasbro have thrown their GenX audience has been the Retro G1 line as an alternative (and presumably the eventual Retro G1 Huffer will use the toy-accurate sculpt which made its debut as the Go-Bot Road Ranger in a Generations Selects 2-pack).

Their failure to create a new toy-accurate head for Bumblebee meant I had no reason to acquire that one, but Gears got a decent update to the G1 toy's head sculpt, though the toy as a whole was somewhat disappointing (leading Courtney to name him "Gears Starmer"). I've been keeping my eye out for new Retro G1 releases since then, and the second pair came out in the late Autumn/early Winter of 2025, coupling Brawn with... Seaspray, a wholly new take on a figure from 1985, just as we're getting a new Deluxe class Windcharger, the last of the 1984 Mini Autobot set, as part of Studio Series '86.

Brawn is, for better or worse, a retooling of the Studio Series '86 toy which, despite being leagues better than the Titans Return toy, didn't interest me in the slightest due to it having another ugly, animation-style head sculpt. Once again, the question here is whether or not the new, toy-inspired head sculpt is enough of an improvement on this mold... so, let's find out.

Unique Toys R-09 Red Destroyer

The moment I learned that Unique Toys were planning to develop Stinger for their line of Masterpiece-analogues, my curiosity was piqued. After all, this was a nonentity who dissolved into a flying cloud of metal cubes rather than transforming. When the first grey prototype images appeared, I was instantly hooked. My experience with Unique Toys products thusfar has been uniformly positive: their engineering has always been clever without being overly complex and their QC has yet to disappoint. However, in terms of screen-accuracy, particularly on their head sculpts, they've never been 100% on the mark, which resulted in some of their more recent figures later being 'fixed' by cheaper knockoffs.

Their strategy for this figure was to cut down on paint applications to reduce the retail price as far as they could, in the hope that people would buy the original rather than wait for a KO, and they teased the release of a Camaro Bumblebee with much the same robot mode as additional motivation - the suggestion being that the reception of Red Destroyer will determine whether the yellow Camaro goes into production. Their paintwork has almost always been considered lacking by fans and, coupled with the eyewatering prices of some figures and inaccuracies in their sculpts, they've given the KO merchants ample room to make improvements in the past. Dialling things back even further seems like the worst decision to me. As it turned out, they revealed images of the Camaro remix within a month of Red Destroyer shipping.

But let's see how Red Destroyer stands as his own product, before anyone has the opportunity to reverse engineer it and produce a cheaper option.

2025 Retrospective

Well... What a year.

Toward the end of 2024, I was contacted by both of my regular/annual freelancing clients, with the expected jobs: updates to a website for one, updates to a printed booklet for the other. Both would normally gear up during January, but it's good to be forewarned, and get the question of payment out of the way in advance... At least, as far as possible, where one of them is concerned...

Retro G1 Gears

Given that Hasbro have been recycling G1 now for almost five times longer than G1 actually existed, back in the day, it became increasingly baffling to me that each new iteration - particularly from the Prime Wars trilogy onward - that the focus has been wholly on the G1 cartoon rather than the G1 toys. Sure, the argument rages on, that the cartoon is the main reason TransFormers exists as a brand, but that's a particularly American point of view, and has me questioning whether some of these people are actually TransFormers fans, or simply fans of a TV show they view through nostalgia goggles, and afflicted with a compulsion to buy branded merchandise.

However, about 20 years after the Classics reboot, which brought a fresh new look and contemporary engineering to the old-favourite characters, Hasbro seem finally to be acknowledging that some TransFormers fans actually want familiar-looking, contemporary remakes of their old G1 toys... and so we have the Retro G1 line.

Essentially, it's a mix of latecomers in the grey area of an ongoing line that is War for Cybertron, Legacy and Age of the Primes, and including toys which, for whatever reason, are popping up first in the Studio Series '86 line. Their plastic colours and head sculpts are more toy-accurate, but it's like something the TransFormers Collectors' Club would do: a repaint with a new head, packaged under its own brand... only this is specifically targeted at the 40- to 50-something nostalgia hounds rather than the Premium Collector bracket. The inaugural pair were - to no-one's surprise - a repack of the War for Cybertron: Earthrise Bumblebee (which, having been a Netflix exclusive to being with, has since been repainted about a billion times already) that kept the animation-style head, and Legacy Gears.

Much as I might have wanted a new G1-style Gears, it wasn't just the ugly, animation-style head that put me off buying the Legacy toy... So let's see if this cynically-marketed re-release is enough to make me change my mind about an entire mold.