Power of the Primes Moonracer

(Femme-Bot Friday #56)

There's an awful lot of the G1 TV series that I missed out on due to its irregular scheduling on British early morning telly back in the 80s. One episode I only became aware of after I got back into collecting as an adult was 'The Search for Alpha Trion', which revealed that a group of six Femme-Bots acted as a resistance group on Cybertron, and featured Shockwave uttering the immortal line "Female Autobots? I thought they were extinct.", which was basically all the explanation ever given both for the existence of Cybertronian Femme-Bots and their absence in the preceding (and subsequent) episodes.

Terrible writing of a kids TV show designed to sell toys aside, it's taken Hasbro more than 30 years to create toys of any of that group... which is hardly surprising, given that they never appeared in the show again after that episode. That said, one of them was part the BotCon 2005 boxed set, Descent into Evil, as a repaint of Energon Arcee with a new head, while another was an additional souvenir figure for BotCon 2009, and several have apparently appeared in other fiction intermittently over the years.

One such Femme-Bot was Moonracer, who now appears as one of the Combiner Wars-style figures on the final chapter of the Prime Wars trilogy...

Vehicle Mode:
I'm really not sure how to describe Moonracer's vehicle mode... Clearly - like her cartoon equivalent - she's some sort of Cybertronian ground-based vehicle but, while not quite so nondescript as the terrible animation model, she's really not much to look at... In fact, plug a Titan/Prime Master into either of the roof-mounted foot pegs, and she does a passable imitation of an oversized skateboard. Being generous, and given that the windows - in some form - extend most of the way down the vehicle, one might suggest it's a Cybertronian stretch limo... but that doesn't really make sense as she wouldn't be carting around other robots.

The front end of the vehicle at least looks like some sort of vehicle - it's comparatively narrow, with the headlights taking up most of forward faces of the front wings, and a curiously-designed central section that features a couple of the robot's articulation pins - which could be look on as lights if one was feeling generous - either side of one of the figure's combiner ports.

The back end is a disaster area of visible robot parts and a general impression of incompleteness - Moonracer's arms may peg into the rear wings of the vehicle quite tidily, but they're neither covered nor disguised at the back - her hands simply fold inward and just sit there, below the underside of the stowed collar/head section. This can be mitigated, barely, by plugging in the Prime Armour to the 5mm port up at the top, but then there's a nondescript block of tech-something hanging off the back and not entirely covering the problem. Granted, one of the thumb sockets can then be used to mount Moonracer's gun, rather than using one of the sockets at the back of the rear wings, but neither option really looks truly functional. It's a real shame because, from the sides, Moonracer actually looks pretty cool and sleek. She's angular rather than curvy, but there are still elements of Arcee's silhouette to the side view.

Considering the amount of translucent blue plastic on this toy, it's no surprise that the paint job is both very extensive and unfortunately bland. A huge amount of it has had to be painted to match the minty green plastic. Weirdly, though, the rear wings are minty green plastic that's been painted white for no discernible reason - since the bulk of the wings simply fold round to form part of her backpack and the smaller part is on the robot's minty green forearm, I think they could have put the paint budget to better use elsewhere, and perhaps with a different colour. She has a small patch of white on her bonnet, surrounding an Autobot insignia, the headlights are painted yellow (with the minty green showing through in the recessed details) and a couple of lavender patches on the roof - one across the midpoint, the other on the roof of the rear section, clearly in service of robot mode rather than vehicle mode. Probably the strangest parts are on the front edge of the white rear wings and the sides of the green mid-section, where the bulk of the parts are painted one colour, with the other colour painted over the top. I can understand the white paint over the green on the mid-section because it's on the translucent blue plastic, but why paint green over the white paint on the green wings, rather than simply leave that patch unpainted?

Moonracer's handgun can be plugged into the rear wings or the 5mm port on the back of the vehicle, but it really doesn't look good wherever it goes... Partly this is because of the bland, unimaginative, somewhat retro design of the gun - based heavily on the animation model's generic sci-fi pistol, albeit much larger - but mainly because the positions of these ports was so poorly thought out - it's as if they just placed the 5mm ports on autopilot, without any real thought about what they were doing and why. None of the ports are especially useful for her Prime Armour either. It might almost work as a booster, plugged into the rear, but for the fact that the transformation joint on the piece it has to plug into is quite wobbly, it doesn't fully obscure the problems of the back end, and just makes her look even longer and more awkward as a vehicle.


Robot Mode:
You'd have to applaud the designer for trying to make a feminine robot out of the brick of a vehicle mode she was given... if only it didn't look more as though they started with a Femme-Bot action figure and then tacked on vehicle parts however they could, regardless of what the eventual vehicle mode would look like. Hence, her windscreen ends up as the soles of her feet, the front wings protrude forward out of the sides of her lower legs, while the central part of the canopy and the rear wings just end up folded into as an ugly, oversized backpack. To be fair, a good chunk of the backpack exists only to accommodate the combiner peg which, rather than being on the same rotating part as her head, is an entirely separate unit on her back. Had Moonracer not needed this throwback gimmick, she could have been made far sleeker.

As with vehicle mode, Moonracer's robot mode is split between minty green parts and white parts, with a few touches of lavender paint on her shins and waist, and bands of yellow on the sides of her 'belt'. The large, translucent blue window on her torso is simply an unpainted block, though this is a feature not present on her G1 animation model... Since it adds little to vehicle mode and makes her robot mode look a bit weird, I don't understand why the front of the torso was even molded in translucent plastic... Likewise, of all the tertiary colours they could have chosen, I can't see why lavender was used, since its appearance on the animation model is restricted to her face and hands, and even there it's a very pale/pastel shade. There's a fair bit of molded detail that refers to aspects of her animation model, but the position and proportions have been altered to fit in with the toy and its transformation. It all looks really good - being a similar level of detail to Generations/Legends Arcee - and it's nice to see that the superfluous spikes and shoulderpads of the - very 80's - design have been omitted.

I've yet to see a Power of the Primes toy where they Prime Armour actually looks good on the robot but, to be honest, using it on Moonracer just comes across as a weird, ill-judged parody of pregnancy. Rather than using the combiner wrist connection peg, it connects to her torso - very loosely - via tabs on the thumbs and grooves in the sides of her chest, meaning it sits comparatively low on her body, with the top around the mid-point of her robo-boobs and the bottom very much at groin level, so the Prime Master socket is directly in line with her belly. With the translucent blue socket cover/spare gun in place it looks bulgy enough... with a Prime Master installed, it looks downright peculiar even before you consider that these blocks transform into little robots when removed from their sockets. In Moonracer's case, it's probably going to be best to consider the Prime Armour to be a large buckler, and plug it into her arm instead... at least, that way, one can pretend the vent-like details in the bottom are some form of weapon.

Moonracer's handgun is probably about twice the size it needed to be - only a little larger, and they could have made it a rifle. It's disappointing to see such a generic-looking handgun with a TransFormers toy, but it's not as bad as the bizarre thing packaged with PotP Jazz, which appears to be a hybrid of the G1 toy's handgun and shoulder launcher. I guess part of the rationale is that kids should be using the Prime Master/Pretender shell/TargetMaster weapons most of the time, but I'm not sure that really excuses a design that looks like a Blue Peter job, made using a washing up liquid bottle and the tube from inside a roll of kitchen foil. It's also a little odd that Moonracer should get what amounts to a pistol, when she's usually described as a sharpshooter... OK, sure, this gun has something that could be a telescopic sight on top, but wouldn't a rifle be better? Maybe something with a Prime Master socket to boost/alter its power? Isn't that supposed to be part of the play pattern here?

The head sculpt is an absolute gem. I'm not convinced of the paintwork, but the sculpt is an excellent interpretation of the wonky G1 animation model. The helmet part is more refined than its inspiration and wouldn't look out of place on a movie figure (it reminds me of Sideswipe, albeit perhaps in need of a few more panel separations to fully fit the movie aesthetic), while the face is pure, simplified, organic/humanoid G1 style, and designed to appear as feminine as possible. The helmet features three spots of yellow - one on the crown, one on each 'ear' - and the front rim is painted white, while the face is painted a very pale lavender and the lips - a little inaccurately, no attempt made to match the contours of the sculpt - in the full-strength lavender used elsewhere on the figure. The eyes, naturally, are Autobot blue, though it seems as though the head may have been designed for light piping before it ended up entirely cast in opaque, minty green plastic.


Most of Moonracer's transformation is straightforward, to the point of being rather dull and simplistic, the only complication being that the large canopy section has to be rotated round the body independently of the upper and lower halves, but her chest will only open to allow access to her head when the canopy is over her front. I mentioned above that her vehicle mode looks incomplete, and that attaching the Prime Armour to the back end will cover the worst of it... No matter what you do, though, she looks like a turbo-charged skateboard-of-the-future... And, accurate though this may be to the G1 cartoon's source material, it really feels as though something better should have been done. Unfortunately, in robot mode, she ends up with quite a lot of redundant vehicle parts on her back, making her very top/back heavy.

On the upside, Moonracer's articulation is exacellent - hips, shoulders, elbows and neck are ball-jointed, with the neck having an additional hinge at the base, the wrists being hinged for transformation and the hips featuring the usual rotation joint just below the ball joint. The knees are double-jointed, though the lower of the two has fout stopping points built into the joint - one for standing in robot mode, one for folding the legs up into her gestalt leg formation, and two points in between. While this joint can be used for posing, it's clearly not intended that way. The ankles are hinged for transformation, but their range once in robot mode is quite limited due to the bulk on the heel which, unfortunately, extends upward more than it extends back, thus bringing them into contact with the pegs used to secure her into her combiner leg configuration. They also have a minute amount of sideways tilt, but the fact that they're so flat means they balance well enough on the edges. The only real problems in posing her are the massive backpack and the lack of heel spurs - in many poses, she has to be leaned forward to prevent her falling backwards.

I have to admit that the only real reason I have for liking Moonracer is that she's a Femme-Bot... She's quite lazily designed, particularly as there was absolutely no need to emulate a 30+ year old animation model. Chromia was in the same episode, yet her first toy was based on the TF Prime Arcee mold. I'm glad they didn't try that trick again but, when given essentially free reign to create a character from scratch, it's sincerely disappointing to see a Femme-Bot given such a disproportionate backpack, and then still have her transforming into a brick on wheels.

The most frustrating thing about it is that I'll probably buy Novastar... and there's a chance I'll end up buying the new War for Cybertron Chromia as well, despite minimal improvements to the transformation and the egregious added panel lining. There are times, dearest reader, that I hate my own collecting habits and compulsions...