Power of the Primes Elita-1

(Femme-Bot Friday #48)

Generations Arcee - if not TF Prime Arcee before her - seems to have caused something of a snowball effect. Hasbro have realised, not before time, that one of their biggest boys' toylines is (a) actually appreciated by girls as well and (b) gifted with a fandom that isn't as firmly against 'girl characters' as they had estimated. It really shouldn't have surprised them, given the enduring popularity of the likes of the Baroness in GI Joe, but it goes to show how out-of-touch they were, and for how long.

Elita-1, for example, turned up in the G1 TV series back in the 80s... and, while the name has been applied to several other characters over the years, it's actually taken more than thirty years to get an official, mainstream toy based on Optimus Prime's old flame, with the Collectors' Club getting their version in almost ten years ago.

Was she worth the wait..?

Vehicle Mode:
Based on the PotP Starscream mold, Elita-1 has unique wingtips with strange gaps in them... but, aside from the robot parts (which are clearly not visible in this mode, because that would be silly), her colourscheme and her stickers, that's the only physical difference between them... Which is a little disappointing, to say the least. When finally releasing a character who is, to some of the fans, every bit as iconic as Optimus Prime himself, I'd have hoped they'd come up with a unique alternate mode and, in any case, I'm not sure a jet is quite the right form for her... Particularly this jet...

While she's not quite the awful 'robot stuck to the underside of a jet' sort of TransFormer, it's quite clear that this would be a much sleeker aircraft if it didn't have to worry about the robot's arms, chest and shins. I'm actually deeply fed up with larger size class TransFormers jets where the arms are left visible in vehicle mode, which is the primary reason I've not bought PotP Starscream. There are so many better ways to deal with robot limbs, but this mold suffers from its need to also support a third, combiner torso mode. Thus, viewed from above, it looks excellent... but from any other angle, it looks bulky and inelegant. In particular, the head is clearly visible below the root of the nose section, not least because Elita-1 does not feature the standard Seeker shoulder protrusions, so the additional intake sections Starscream had below the fronts of his wings are not present here. Since the nose would otherwise have clipped into there, it's a little less stable on Elita-1 than it would be on Starscream. The other curious detail is that, with her landing gear deployed - from the very tip of her nose - she rests at an angle, because her feet protrude further down at the back than what appears to be sculpted detail representing wheels toward the rear of the jet. It almost looks as though the toe sections were originally supposed to rotate 180° - allowing them to fold right in against the shin and thus making the wheel detail the lowest point, level with the front wheel - but that feature got budgeted out of the final product.

That aside, I do rather like the design of the jet. It strikes a decent balance between looking convincingly terrestrial and being Cybertronian in origin. There's a huge amount of sculpted detail - panel lining in particular - but, as with Starscream, Hasbro took the baffling decision to cover most of it with stickers. What's really weird is that there's paintwork under most of the stickers, so they only really needed small, detail labels, rather than the enormous things they have, covering almost entire wing sections in some cases. Worse still, as with Evolution Optimus and Rodimus Prime, the stickers are misaligned almost everywhere, and mine had corners peeling straight out of the box. I'm assuming Reprolabels will eventually come out with some replacements... at which point, the crappy, factory-applied abominations will be coming straight off. They do carry some interesting references - the stickers either side of the cockpit - silver blocks on a white and grey background, so that wasn't very well thought out - say "Elita & Optimus", for example. Even more curious, the 'E1' design on the tailfins is a tampograph rather than a sticker, and other tampos are visible in robot mode. Why they've applied a mixture of both stickers and tampos is just one of many mysteries surrounding this figure.

The paintwork is quite shoddy in places, with overspill and feathering being fairly commonplace around the toy. The colours match the plastic quite well, though. One thing that bugs me is the choice of colours - the white and red are too stark a contrast, and remind me a lot of Combiner Wars Scattershot, particularly as both have holes in their wings. With the addition of grey into the colour mix, she also starts looking a bit like G1 Ramjet. Considering Elita-1 is traditionally depicted in shades of pink - more recently, this has been to represent the colour of Energon (as in, equivalent to blood) - so the lack of subtlety in her colours seems like a poor choice. Then, of course, there's the patch at the back of the jet where the inner halves of her lower legs are molded in grey plastic, while the outer halves are molded in red. The afterburner is painted grey on the outer half, but the central portion upper surface at the back of the jet hasn't been painted red to disguise the difference.

Possibly the biggest disappointment in vehicle mode is her weapons - a pair of impossibly weedy, nozzle-like 'guns'. Honestly, you could plug these into casks or barrels and they'd just look like bog-standard spigots. They can plug into the undersides of the wingtips, but they only really look worthwhile when plugged into the robot's shoulders, as they almost look like extensions of the massive armoured panels just behind them.


Robot Mode:
There's no denying that Elita-1 looks more feminine that the Starscream version of this mold, but she's no less cartoonish in her proportions. Less detail to the sculpt, and she could almost pass for a TransFormers Animated character. The overall silhouette is sadly tending toward 'bodybuilder', with a disproportionately wide upper chest and broad shoulders, Popeye-style massive forearms (even though part of that bulk is clearly defined as additional armour mounted on the outsides of the forearms), tiny waist and thighs, and ginormous, clodhopping boots. That her lower legs are significantly narrower than Starscream's barely registers because of their overall size, and the tiny head almost gives the impression of viewing her from a forced perspective, somewhere near her feet.

While the G1 animation model was curvy and feminine in a largely nonthreatening way - that is to say, a lack of defined robo-boobs meant she was not overtly sexualised beyond the typically 80s lipstick - this version has taken the basic structure as implied by the linework and turned it into multi-layered armour with a generally feminine shape. Her chest features a sort of short waistcoat of red armour over a pink painted 'tanktop' with a subtly frilly collar. The white waist appears to be the innermost layer of armour, with hints of exposed workings protruding out from the two central vertical pieces. It does look a little like either the pink should have extended down a little further, or the while come up a little higher, as the sculpted detail doesn't quite support the sudden horizontal cut between colours.

The groin features a mismatch of white and red plastics which really could have used a touch of paint - either red or white - just to pick out those details, if any, that are supposed to be a different colour. The hip joints are molded in red plastic, to imply a continuation of the detail on the sides of her waist, much like the animation model's 'skirts', and the long, slender, white thighs are nicely detailed without being overly busy. The lower legs deviate quite considerably from the animation model, being largely red, rather than white, and with a grey central mass of detail down each shin. The outer face of each shin features a tiny tampograph in pink on a grey painted background, but it's too small and smudged on mine to make out anything but the largest two lines - 'Elita-1' and 'Cybertronian' something-or-other. The white panels on her inner calves look like an error - they should surely have been either grey or red, to match the rest of the lower legs, instead of matching the thighs.

The arms each feature several stickers - two colour/detail stickers on the forearms and an Autobot insigia on each shoulder - while her lapels feature the 'Ariel Evolved' stickers. All of these are quite well applied, and show no immediate signs of peeling, but one on the right cuff of mine appears a little scratched. The arms themselves aren't especially detailed, partly due to the rotating forearm piece, to switch between Elita-1's hands and the combiner ports, but the armour panel features quite a bit of detail, a great chunk of which is painted white.

Colour-wise, the contrast between the red and white is no less stark in robot mode, and the pink used looks a little off somehow - a bit too salmon pink, rather than the cooler, pastel pink of the animation model. It works well enough in context, and is almost a middle-ground between the red and the white... but it probably would have looked better overall had the choice of colours been more subtle across the board.

Her 'weapons' are as disappointing in robot mode as they are in jet mode, if not moreso. They don't fit particularly well in her hands because of the size of her forearms, the pegs barely reaching 1mm into the gripping section of the sculpt. They may as well stay in her shoulders, since that more closely matches the appearance of her G1 animation model. The only downside being that leaves her without any weapons as the spigot-like pistols are her only accessories aside from the combiner feet.

I've always been a bit dubious about Elita-1's head... It looks as though it was designed by committee, with one group wanting protrusions from the sides, like G1 Wheeljack or Sunstreaker, another wanting antennae, and another wanting a wide forehead protrusion (which, in isolation, reminds me a little of the visor of a VF-1J Battroid from Macross) and none of the ideas getting ruled out as too excessive in addition to the others. Seemingly all the committee could agree on is the bucket-like helmet beneath all the protrusions. On the upside, while the proportions of the head seemed to change every time she appeared on screen in the G1 cartoon, this version strikes a decent balance so, while the helmet still looks large compared to her face, it's not completely out of proportion. The overall head also isn't as 'flat' and angular as the animation model, which helps break up the overall shape and make it look a bit more believable. Another plus, for me, is that the 'crosshair' details on either side protrusion are recessed rather than sticking out like ear-mounted robo-boobs. The face is well sculpted and painted over in white rather than the cool, pastel purple more often used in artwork depicting the character. The eyes are cyan, with deep, dark ridges all around them to emphase a colour which otherwise wouldn't stand out well against the white of her face. As tends to be the case with Hasbro's femme-bots, her lips aren't highlighted in any way, despite being very well sculpted. If it weren't for the 'Unification of World Brands' Hasbro started with the PotP line, we could have counted on Takara Tomy to finish off the face properly. If only her head could have been larger, as this seems designed for a figure at least an inch shorter...


Gestalt Torso Mode:
This thing - and the combiner torso mode for PotP Starscream - reminds me a little of movie Starscream, mainly in shape, and perhaps as much from the back as from the front. That torso is basically wider than it is tall, it's similarly angular, and has wing-like things sticking up above the shoulders at the back. It's also a bit of a jumble, though, looking far more coherent from the back than it does from the front due to the sheer gappiness of the folded-up nose and wings. It doesn't look too bad from the front, but even the slightest turn in any direction reveals the massive spaces and awkward layering of her chest.

The plastic, paint and sticker colours don't do it too many favours, either, with the white nose and conflicting angles of the front edges of the intakes standing out awkwardly against the mostly red chest. This may have been less apparent if the toy had followed the animation model for colour, as the legs, partially hidden behind the wings, would then have been white... or pink, at least.

Elita-1 comes with an Enigma of Combination rather than a Prime Master so, rather than a traditional cockpit, she has a section on her nosecone - between the two small forewings and incorporating the rear of the cockpit canopy - which opens up to allow the Enigma or a Prime Master to be plugged in. All things considered, I'm sure it would have been possible to give her a proper cockpit that also functioned as a receptacle for the Enigma/Prime Masters, and the 'gate' effect is a little shoddy-looking. In all honesty, though, I'm unlikely to ever display her in combined mode - even if they were to release four Deluxe class femme-bots, allowing me to make a Victorion-style femme-bot gestalt - so the feature is pretty irrelevant to me. Also, the Enigma itself is molded in opaque grey plastic, with a spray of yellow plastic on the front, making it rather dull compared to the Matrix gem included with Optimus Prime or Rodimus Prime.
The head sculpt is strangely not that different from the smaller version - lacking the circular details in the chunks on either side of her head and with longer, simpler crests, as well as both additional paint and molded detail on the forehead strip. The face is painted much the same way and in the same colours, though the eyes look slightly paler as they're not as deeply set as those of the smaller robot. The salmon pink plastic looks even stranger here, as so little of that colour is visible elsewhere in this mode. Like the individual robot's head, Elita Infin1te's seems far too small for the body, and it would only look worse with limbs attached...


Elita-1's transformation is definitely on the 'insultingly simple' end of the scale - actually not dissimilar to the Deluxe class Combiner Wars Aerialbots, just with less happening with the arms. There are really only two significant differences versus one of the Deluxes: the elbows lock into a straight-armed position (mainly for stability in gestalt torso mode, much like CW Silverbolt) and the upper surface of the jet - nose, wings and all - rotate 180° for the individual robot mode. Getting Elita Infin1te's head out of Elita-1's chest requires the smaller robot's head to be pushed back/down to give the chest flap enough clearance to lift sufficiently high for the larger robot's antennae to clear the insides of the chest. Of course, the way she transforms between her individual robot mode and the torso mode means that Elita-1's chest becomes Elita Infin1te's shapely backside... though that may have been the intention all along. The way the smaller robot's arms turn into the gestalt's thighs is slightly more elegant than the solution offered by Combiner Wars Silverbolt, but that isn't saying much...

As is often the case with TransFormers toys that have enormous lower legs with fixed feet, Elita-1 isn't the easiest figure to pose well. Matters are made worse by the fact that her heels have a circular impression, which is never going to offer good support in anything other than a straight-legged stance. The fixed toes are equally unreliable, despite being sculpted at a slight angle. Everything else is as one would expect, though the lack of waist articulation is at least understandable, due to the way the combiner head accordions out from the belly via a hinge on her crotch. One of the most frustrating aspects of this figure is that the white panels on the inner calves will come unpegged as soon as the knee is bent in either direction. It's no surprise, given how short the connecting peg is and the simple fact that friction will tend to work things loose.

Gotta say, while I'm not specifically invested in Elita-1 as a character, I do find this first ever official TransFormers version of the character to be a massive disappointment, partly due the decision to make her a combiner torso, partly due to the general execution of the toy as part of the Power of the Primes line. I'd have thought that Elita-1 would warrant an 'Evolution' figure - some of her stickers even label her 'Ariel Evolved', after all, and her design reminds me somewhat of TF Prime First Edition Arcee, particularly the red outer plates on her chest and the shape of her lower legs, so a similar sort of transformation for the chest could have been attempted, locking a folded-up Ariel into Elita-1's torso.

For what she is, though, PotP Elita-1 is not terrible. Her proportions are cartoonish, and the issue of robots' heads being too small for their bodies has never been clearer than it is with this figure, given that she basically has two versions of much the same head for her individual and gestalt modes, neither of which seems to be the appropriate size for its body.

It's also disappointing to find that the third and final chapter in the Prime Wars trilogy is going back to Combiner Wars for its engineering and a significant aspect of its concept. Granted, not every character needs or deserves an 'Evolution' figure, but nor do we need any more combiners than we already had back in Generation 1. A new take on Abominus is welcome, an all-new Predaking was certainly worth a try, and I'd have been curious to see what Hasbro would do with a new Piranacon... though none of those are likely to find their way into my collection. Creating a new Autobot combiner - particularly one that's so similar to its base torso 'bot - doesn't seem to make much sense, and I doubt very much that Machinima's animation will offer any useful clarification.

Still, now we have Elita-1 in the toyline, perhaps Hasbro will be tempted to revisit her for the next toyline..? How about reimagining G1 if Elita-1, rather than Optimus Prime, became leader of the Autobots?