Since I'm not actually watching the current Robots in Disguise TV series, the figures I've picked up thusfar haven't really followed any pattern beyond me thinking "Ooh, that one looks cool" and then trying to figure out if it's something I have to import, buy online from a UK retailer, or that I could pick up on a chance visit to Toys'R'Us or The Entertainer when I'm off to the nearby cinema with a friend. Once in a while, something I've put on my Amazon wish list is ordered by a friend or family member, and I get a surprise dose of plastic crack over Christmas or on my birthday... one such dose this year, courtesy of my sister, was Fracture.
Vehicle Mode:
One can only imagine, but if Prince had ever gone through a Hell's Angels/1960s drifter phase in his illustrious career, he might well have chosen to ride a monster like Fracture. Coming in a couple of shades of purple - each with a subtle sparkle - Fracture is a retro-futuristic take on the 'chopper' style of motorcycle, with massively elongated forks and a sort of robo-ram skull detail on the front, with the handlebars as its horns. It's an absolute beast of a bike but, like so many transforming motorbikes, the body ends up almost as wide as it is long, to accommodate oversized robot limbs.
Despite being ostensibly Fracture's terrestrial disguise, the only significant difference between the appearance of this motorbike and his Cybertronian version is the presence of wheels - on his home planet, and when he first arrived on Earth, Fracture would float above the ground rather than trundling along it. The 'Deployer' version was intended to represent his Cybertronian form, but didn't manage it very well. This version at least accomplishes the task of resembling the overall impression of the right sort of vehicle. One curious detail is that the overall shape, and particularly the 'ram skull' feature, seem to hark back to TransFormers Animated Oil Slick.
The colours are a little mismatched compared to what I've seen of the animation model, using the lighter plastic on parts of the rear that are clearly supposed to be darker, and with red and silver paint added seemingly at random rather than to try to match Fracture's appearance in the TV show. In particular, the silver and red on the spikes at the back of the bike are completely wrong, though the red appears to have been applied in an attempt to look like tail lights. The front of the bike should have had some gunmetal (or even black) paint applied to the forks, with silver at the wheel end, and the red should have been on the tops of the part where the forks connect to the mudguard rather than on the top of the mudguard itself. There should also have been silver flashes on the bike's flanks, but vehicle mode displays an awful lot of bare plastic. Takara Tomy's version actually isn't much better in terms of its overall paintjob, but its plastic colours seem more appropriate overall. Both, I think, would require some of the Reprolabels stickers to make the best of the mold, if not a little extra paintwork here and there.
The use of the weapon as the bike's exhaust pipe harks back to Energon Arcee and, much like that figure, there's only one position and configuration for the weapon, despite using a standard 5mm peg. Even folded up, it's a rather bulky attachment, so it's understandable that it would only connect to the side featuring the kickstand. Going by the animation model, the exhaust pipe should have mounted closer to the leg, but there was just no way to replicate the overlaps required in plastic form, so what we have is a decent compromise.
Robot Mode:
Fracture is an extremely angular and spiky robot, and surprisingly skinny given the bulk of vehicle mode. He also has a huge shoulder span - not quite equivalent to his height, but enough to make him look like an elaborately illustrated letter 'Y' when standing to attention.
One of the curiously typical things about TransFormers motorcycles is that, aside from a wheel hanging off their backs, they often feature very little vehicle mode detail in their robot modes - I'd still say the First Edition version of TF Prime Arcee was the best in this respect - and Fracture carries on this tradition. Since most of his vehicle mode was made up of panels and spiky bits that weren't traditional motorcycle detail, he kind of gets away with it, but I find it a little odd that his crotch seems to be modelled so closely on the front of the bike with its horn-like handlebars, though this doesn't appear to be mirrored in the animation model.
Purple is still very much the order of the day, though the central part of the chest features a block of charcoal paint and some seemingly random blobs of red. No attempt has been made to match the colour/panel breakdown of his chest to the animation model, though he is one of the few RID2015 figures to have the little slits in his armour painted in, both on the chest and just below his silver kneecaps, though not on his forearms.
While the folded-up forks and front wheel make for a rather large and unsightly backpack, it does come with a rather useful feature in that the side of the wheel facing outward has a shallow 5mm socket molded in where the wheel is pinned, meaning Fracture can holster his weapon on his back, just like he does in the TV show. The socket is just barely deep enough to accommodate the peg that sticks out of the bottom of the gun, and it basically just gives him an even bigger backpack, but it's a neat detail nonetheless.
One thing that becomes strangely apparent in robot mode is how cheap some of the plastic feels, notably the lighter purple plastic of the shoulders and forearms, but also the black plastic of the upper arms, hips/thighs and feet. Part of it is certainly the lack of appropriate paintwork, but the feel of it is somehow unpleasant - it's not rubbery, just lacking definition in the detail, thus seeming 'fuzzy' and poor quality. Another thing that doesn't help the feeling of cheapness to this toy is all the gaps. The forearms are empty to accommodate his hands in vehicle mode, but there's also an opening behind his elbows and the shoulders are virtually hollow. One tends to expect, in this day and age, that a TransFormers toy's legs will probably be hollow, and it was only with Combiner Wars that a new way was found of extending the legs during transformation while keeping them fully enclosed in both modes. There was really no way to accomplish that with Fracture.
The bike mode's exhaust chunk unfolds into a strange sort of weapon - a combination rifle and quarterstaff with three differed 5mm pegs for gripping. While it can fit into his hand to be held like a rifle, the back end is long enough that it restricts his elbow movement. I get the impression it's meant to be held with one hand on the rearmost peg and the other in the parallel peg in the middle... but the arms and hands aren't quite mobile enough to make that work and he ends up holding it very close to his body and at a weird angle. In and of itself, I have a concern about the weapon, because of the way it clips together in either mode. The hinge in the middle clips very firmly into the vehicle mode configuration, while the tab and slot arrangement at the back seems quite fragile, so I'm half expecting one or the other to break at some point.
The one interesting thing about the new TV show is the curiously animal-like heads on the Decepticons - almost as if they're intended to represent the Decepticons' evolution toward becoming the Predacons, though it seems unlikely that was the thinking behind it. More likely the people behind the series wanted weird looking, comical, animal-influenced robot modes that still managed to have vaguely believable vehicle modes - TransFormers: Robots in Disguise is, very self-consciously, a kids TV show, so the bad guys aren't really intended to be truly threatening. Fracture's head isn't specifically animal-like, but it does have a rooster-like comb on top. He has a fairly featureless face, set in a look of grim determinations, and with TF Prime-like eyebrows sitting above his eyes. The paintwork is typically minimal, the eyes are slashes of red, the face is silver. In theory, the face should be a very pale purple - going by the screenshots of the TV show I've seen - but then, the collar should be either gunmetal or silver, so that's even more inaccuracy. What's really odd is that the head is molded in two parts - as if it was intended to feature light piping - but none of the back section actually feeds through the front section... Weirdly, I see a sort-of resemblance to Beast Wars Terrorsaur in the head sculpt, though this one seems rather more dynamic, and has the TF Animated/TF Prime-style protruding chin.
I'm a huge fan of motorbikes, though they don't often translate well into transforming robot toy form. Early TransFormers bikes tended to be large bricks with a couple of wheels tacked on, but they've become a bit more refined over the years, with different styles of bike and more elaborate transformations leading to better looking robots (I'd even include the three RotF wheelsnakes in that statement), though it's still common for at least one of the wheels (normally the front wheel, since there's not a great deal of vehicle mass around it) to end up just hanging off the robot's back. Fracture very much follows this pattern and, in some ways, comes across like a simplified version of TF Prime Arcee, but with the head reveal tied to the front wheel rather than the waist. Like most of the RID2015 line, it's very simple - ideal for the younger fan, but not as much fun for the adult collector. Everything pegs together securely in vehicle mode, but the tab-and-slot arrangement that links his lower legs in vehicle mode is designed to be slid into place rather than pushed into place, while the way the wheels come together tends to resist that movement, and it only really works because the way they're connected at each ankle is so loose. Nothing really clips into place in robot mode, but nothing really needs to, except perhaps the transformation joint for the shoulders - given that the arms can swing very close to 90° outward just above the biceps, and that the shoulder rotation is inhibited by the chest if the transformation joint is used to raise the arms any higher, some sort of soft tabbing would have made them less likely to move in ways that were not intended.
Fracture has all the usual joints that we tend to expect in a Deluxe class figure, but not quite enough range to really make the most of his weapon. He's lacking waist articulation but, given how little there is of him at the waist, that's not entirely surprising. I've mentioned that the arms and hands aren't quite mobile enough to make good use of the weapon, but if you're willing to fudge the positioning of his hands relative to the pegs on the guns, he can pull of some decent poses. The legs are of the 'awkwardly short thigh, ridiculously long shin' variety, but he can still just about kneel, and the feet are able to move beyond the range required for transformation, meaning he can stay firmly planted on the ground and perfectly balanced in some quite extreme poses
While a very simplistic toy, very clearly designed for the younger fan, Fracture is full of character and good fun to transform and pose. Like virtually every Hasbro release in the RID2015 line, the paint job is miserly and poorly utilised, but the figure still manages to look decent. I kind of wish I'd held out for the Takara Tomy version, but I'd have felt guilty if anyone other than me had forked out for the import version of a figure this basic. Some of the problems with the paint job can be fixed with the Reprolabels set, though whether I'll go that route or attempt some changes of my own with a paintbrush remains to be seen. Robot mode may not be the most inspiring toy in the line, but the vehicle mode is exceptionally stylish, and it's always nice to see motorbikes represented in the toyline, even when they end up underachieving.
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