Then, this figure turned up on The Entertainer's website for £35 and change - pretty close to half the RRP in the UK, and basically what I considered to be an acceptable price for a figure that hadn't received particularly good reviews. I ordered it, collected it in-store a couple of days later, and had pretty low expections, but ended up leaving a very positive (4 star) review on the website.
Curious to know what I liked about this toy? Read on...
Vehicle Modes:
My main reason for not wanting to buy Evolution Rodimus Prime was that it wasn't so long ago that I bought Titans Return Hot Rod and felt no real impetus for replacing him. That one I'd picked up because I realised I'd already bought several other Animated Movie characters in their Prime Wars continuity forms, and he was better than I'd expected, which didn't make for a compelling reason for buying another Hot Rod figure around a year later, regardless of this toy's dual purpose as Hot Rod and Rodimus Prime. Plus, let's face it, compared to the sleek curviness of the Titans Return vehicle mode, PotP Hot Rod is hideous and angular. Some of it admittedly harks back to the G1 toy - particularly the way the toy looks from the side - but it's still significantly uglier than the TR version, if not the old Classics version as well. In a lot of ways, it actually has more in common with the 12-year-old Classics version than any of the more recent ones, simply because the back end features a wide space between the robot's legs, which are simply tabbed into the rear section of roof. At least the older figure had its weapon plugged into the back to fill the void... this one just kind of hopes you won't notice.
However, where the Classics version at least looked like some sort of concept car, this one has much more the late-G1 feel of being completely artificial and highly unlikely. The sculpt is virtually featureless, very squared off, and it honestly looks like some sections of his exhaust pipes are missing. His spoiler is large and angles upward as it sweeps out from its central mounting point, so it looks a bit more interesting than some in the past, though not as wing-like as the Classics version. It also features more sculpted detail - in the form of a few perfunctory panel lines - than the rest of the car put together. Aside from the headlights, what little detail is sculpted into the surfaces of the car seem like a half-hearted attempt to make it look a bit less square and basic, but it feels as though it was done by someone who doesn't really understand what makes a car look good. Probably the worst aspect of the sculpt is that there's a hole running right the way through the vehicle, from one side to the other, directly under one of the cockpit hinges. I've long since given up on hoping that Hasbro would add paint to the tail end of their main line car toys, but Hot Rod doesn't even have the usual sculpted detail... and, given that the black parts at the back of the car end up on Hot Rod's heels in robot mode, they could easily have added his traditional 'booster' details in there, even if they weren't going to get painted.
Even on the car alone there are signs of the plastic and paintwork colour matching issues that will be more egregious on the car/trailer combo and the upgraded robot, with most of the car made up of a nice, saturated red, but with the central portion, where the cockpit sits, made using a darker, almost burgundy shade, with the frame of the translucent blue cockpit painted to match. The bonnet is a bright orange with Hot Rod's traditional flame burst painted in yellow. Weirdly, he has some sculpted detail just in front of the windscreen that should, theoretically, serve the dual purpose of being the visible chunk of engine that most other Hot Rod toys have and also Rodimus Prime's collar... but it's painted orange rather than silver, suggesting that the latter purpose was considered the more important of the two. Even then, the collar would tend to have some red and/or silver to highlight certain parts, so this looks more than a little lazy.
Another whinge I'd add is that the black plastic wheels are attached to the car via red plastic clips. It really feels as though the hubcaps should have been painted over to disguise this a little, or they could have followed the Masterpiece figure's example, and put a silver cap over the wheel hubs... Though that would obviously affect the parts count and/or paint budget, if not add another plastic colour into the mix...
Attaching the car to the trailer involves partially transforming it - swinging the exhaust pipes forward, exposing Hot Rod's thighs - then pegging it into the front of the trailer via two tabs on the rear of the car, which attach to slots in what will become Rodimus Prime's knees, tabbing the trailer's spoiler section into a slot in Hot Rod's roof, then closing the sides of the trailer around him and tabbing the extended exhaust pipes together. The final stage is the only tricky one, as the tabs and slots are on the inside, so small fingers are an advantage. Once together, he holds together very well, without even a hint of wobble or any inclination to come apart without manual intervention.
By and large, I do like the look of the combined vehicle mode, and I appreciate the fact that it actually uses Hot Rod's vehicle mode appropriately, rather than cheekily attaching it backwards then covering it over with a faux-vehicle shell like Takara Tomy's Masterpiece version. While it does look like a somewhat believeable and cohesive vehicle, I have to wonder about the thinking that went into the original 'Space Winnebago' back in the 80s. I get the idea that Prime-hood endows one with an upgraded, more powerful body (though the mechanics of that process remain a mystery), and I understand Optimus Prime having a trailer because he's a truck, and the trailer is also a battlestation/repair bay... so why should a futuristic sports car get a trailer? On Energon Rodimus, it might make sense (except that he has enormous rocket engines and a spoiler getting in the way of attaching a trailer), but on almost any other Hot Rod? In Cybertron/Galaxy Force, when Hot Shot/Exillion was revived and upgraded by Primus via the Omega Lock, he simply became an armoured car rather than gaining a trailer... Still, you work with what you get, I guess... and, thanks to one of the many quirks of a 30-year-old animated movie and its questionable character designs, Rodimus Prime will forever be a 'Space Winnebago'.
There are a few points that reduce its effectiveness, some of which could, I think, have been fixed with another couple of months in development. First and foremost, the car's exhaust pipes just don't connect up with the trailer's extensions in a believeable, functional fashion. The former tab onto an unpainted block that sticks out of the side of the trailer, while the latter swing down to tab into the same part. There's no overlap, and the sculpting of the pipes implies they remain separate unless there's supposed to be some convoluted internal connection. Indeed, if you examing the insides of the hinged sections of the trailer, there are continuations of the pipe sculpted in there, leading to a point just behind Hot Rod's rear wheels before angling upward. Next, while the lower section of the trailer has been (mostly) painted orange, it seems to be a lighter shade than Hot Rod's bonnet, and there's an ugly seam halfway down where the transformation hinge has been left unpainted. Also, given the amount of sculpted detail on there, the blanket coverage in orange does it a great disservice. On a related note, the flame patterns on the upper section, while positioned neatly behind the exhaust pipe extensions, are applied as the infamous Titans Return-style stickers, and so they immediately start to wrinkle around the hinge. While I dislike the sculpted flames of FansProjects' Protector armour and DX9's Carry, I can't say they weren't a better method of adding these flames, especially since the sticker flames on the G1 toy were (a) nowhere near any moving parts and (b) printed on better stock than these. There's also the fact that the larger robot's fists are not remotely concealed within the overhanging section at the front of the trailer, and there's a great void between Hot Rod and his trailer occupied only by the trailer's partial faux-spoiler, not to mention a clear view through the middle wheel wells to Hot Rod's knees, within the body of the vehicle. Finally, the back end of the trailer is somewhat messed up by the presence of Rodimus Prime's barely disguised feet. It's great that they made his heel spurs red, so they'd blend with the trailer a little better, but the main bulk of each foot is still black, and just hangs off as two inexplicable chunks of indeterminate purpose.
Two handguns are provided with this figure, and the roof of the trailer features a pair of 5mm sockets for attaching them. With very long grips, both attach firmly and without any difficulty, but the fact that they're different makes them look unbalanced and, while it's in service of Rodimus Prime's traditional weapon, this is one of the few times where I dislike the asymmetry of the result. The roof of the trailer is a bit of a mess generally, but I'm inclined to give that a pass because it's made up of the combined robot's arms and two halves of his waist, and features a couple of Prime Master/Titan Master pegs in addition to the sockets for his accessories. Curiously, there are no 5mm ports on Hot Rod, so the trailer acts as storage for the weapons even for the smaller vehicle.
The bottom line is that, for me, this is neither a great representation of Hot Rod nor Rodimus Prime's vehicle modes, but it could so easily have been - it just needed a little more refinement, and the attention of a designer who was less into right angles. Nevertheless, I think it does a better job of being Rodimus Prime than the Masterpiece figure, and it's actually a lot of fun to switch the vehicle mode between its two forms.
Hot Rod Robot Mode:
Hot Rod has always ended up as an odd-looking robot. The G1 toy, aside from looking nothing like his animation model, ended up with only four points of articulation - two at each elbow. He was so different from previous G1 figures and vehicles that he didn't even really look like a TransFormers toy... That said, the same could be said for a lot of later G1 toys...
This version's robot mode simple deepens the impression that additional development time was required for this toy. He's a much less tidy figure than the Titans Return version, not to mention bulkier in some ways. TR Hot Rod's chunky arms gave the impression of a slimmer body, but this one has a bulky torso and a crotch flap, as well as the whole of the vehicle's roof stuck on its back and hanging down almost to his knees. Both toys have vehicle shell on their wrists, but it actually protrudes beyond his hands on this version, making the arms look longer than they actually are. The lower legs are somewhat less bulky, and the chest - being entirely faked, with the vehicle's real bonnet is concealed by the spoiler section of roof on his back - is nicely shaped, though it does seem to dip down a little too far onto his waist area. As with vehicle mode, there's not a great deal of sculpted detail - just a few panel lines here and there, the ridges on the tops of his shoulders, faux-headlight detail at his waist, and the traditional Hot Rod collar. Weirdly, Hot Rod seems to flout the usual TransFormers leg proportions, with thighs and shins that seem to be approximately the same length, and I like that the knee area is closer to the animation model than any previous figure, with the upper leg tapering inward toward an almost spherical-looking knee joint. It does feel as though the shin should have been extended somehow, to make more of the orange plastic visible right at the top, just below the knee joint, but it works well enough as-is.
Decoration is similarly sparse, with both paint and stickers on his shoulders - the latter being his traditional chevrons, and mirrored with larger stickers on his shins - and a duplication of the flame pattern from the vehicle's bonnet painted onto his faux-bonnet chest, with a large Autobot insignia tampographed in the middle. I like that the orange plastic used for his hands extends into the raised, curved detailing on his cuffs, but the contrast is a little harsh, and some additional paintwork would have improved things - not least a coating of grey paint on his fists. One of the issues with the construction of this toy is that it has forced certain details to be smaller than they should be, so Hot Rod does have his usual waist-level headlights, but they're tiny, unpainted depressions in the central red section of his waist. He ends up looking really unbalanced and plain - a callback to the G1 toy in the worst possible sense.
While Hot Rod is always armed with his triple exhaust pipe blasters on his wrists, the versions featured here are large, squared-off, clumsy-looking and the hollow underside is on display in robot mode. Thankfully, he also comes with two additional handguns that seem closely modelled on the guns provided with the Masterpiece figure. One, therefore, resembles one of the guns from the original G1 toy, with its anglular, almost spacecraft-like design, wings at the back and some sort of dial on top, while the other is a long-barrelled pistol with a pair of rounded tanks and the back and fins protruding from either side of the nozzle at the tip of the barrel. Both look great, though they are, of course, entirely unpainted, and lack the moving parts of the Masterpiece weapons. The biggest problem with them is that the 5mm pegs used to attach them to his fists are so far forward that the guns knock about 45° off his elbows's range of movement.
The head sculpt is surprisingly similar to the Titans Return version, with a few tweaks to certain details. The face is less squashed-looking, but has a far more prominent chin, a less expressive mouth, and a harsher expression in the eyes. The details of the helmet seems softer, with less prominent cheek guards and slightly larger bulges for 'ears', while the central crest is more finely detailed and painted silver. It feels like a fairly logical progression in terms of the apparent age of the face... but, then, he's lost his former Titan Master partner... which was obviously a necessity of the new toyline, but it doesn't seem to make narrative sense...
Rodimus Prime Robot Mode:
This new version of Rodimus Prime strikes me as a bit more logical, overall. The problem with G1 Rodimus Prime was that he was the result of a 'pattern' established by the animated appearance of G1 Optimus Prime - a vehicle with a trailer that magically vanished when he transformed into robot mode. This was all in line with the G1 toy, because neither the TV show nor the animated movie ever made use of the trailer's battle station mode. Consequently, the G1 Rodimus Prime toy was designed to be entirely separate from his trailer, which also transformed independently into a combat deck that he never used. This meant that the Rodimus Prime toy was smaller and simpler even than Hot Rod, so it's good to see this remake take a different tack - it almost feels as though the Evolution concept was created with Rodimus, rather than Optimus, in mind. The entire 'Space Winnebago' vehicle mode turns into the Rodimus Prime robot mode - albeit with copious partsforming and no small amount of wastage in the backpack - and this should make him, in my humble opinion, more of a Masterpiece than even Takara Tomy's complete Rodimus Prime, let alone the cut-down version Hasbro released. The only other official TransFormers interpretation of this character to be all-in-one was the awful Titaniums version, and this version is superior to that by a very wide margin.
Of course, that's all true more in theory than in practice... because the completed, upgraded Rodimus Prime is incredibly clumsy. Ignoring the partsforming for a moment, he certainly cuts an imposing - properly Leader class - figure, but the horrific boxiness of Hot Rod's vehicle mode ends up front and centre as the upper part of Rodimus Prime's torso. Again, a curvier vehicle, more closely resembling the Titans Return version, would have worked wonders for his appearance, but the squared-off bonnet - to me, at least - seems to emphasise that Rodimus Prime is very much a robot of two halves rather than the single, contiguous, combined form he could easily have been with a little more time and effort. The arms are hugely bulky, even before you see the chunks of the trailer's overhang that are flipped onto the undersides of his wrists...
The legs, by contrast, are nicely sculpted with close reference to the animation model, but sadly still fitting within the more squared-off, bulky aesthetic of the trailer. It's interesting to see that Hasbro have managed to give him his animation model-style dark lower legs and feet, where most other mainline figures have settled for red and occasionally painted in a black/grey panel on his shins. However, while they've sculpted in some of the layered, boot-like effect, there's no supporting paintwork to differentiate the lower part of the lower leg with the part that meets the knee, which would normally be either red or orange.
Where, on Evolution Optimus Prime, the Matrix of Leadership was accessed via the traditional method of opening his truck window chest, on Rodimus Prime, it's a matter of partially transforming him. The car bonnet chest actually clips into place, at several points, over the Matrix chamber, which is a fairly deep hollow in the trailer-made section of his body. This means that the entire front of the vehicle mode - Hot Rod's arms and all - have to be lifted up, concealing Rodimus Prime's head, to access the Matrix. It's a functional, but utterly inelegant solution, necessitated by the Hot Rod's simplistic - and mostly cheated - transformation, and basically reveals that most of Rodimus' upper body is Hot Rod doing the splits.
Hot Rod's pair of handguns peg together to form Rodimus Prime's traditional Photon Eliminator, and it works far better in its combined form than it did as separate handguns. With Rodimus Prime's limbs and hands being that much larger than Hot Rod's, the position of the 5mm grip on the rear half of the gun makes more sense, and the butt of the gun doesn't interfere with his elbows. The completed weapon very closely resembles the version packaged with the Masterpiece figure, albeit molded entirely in black plastic and without any detail paintwork. On the upside, it doesn't feature the wobbly, spring-loaded/geared 'transformation' gimmick, so it stays together more firmly and doesn't flop about.
Rodimus Prime's head sculpt is a larger, more gaunt-looking version of Hot Rod's. He doesn't look older, as such, just a little unhealthy, with more angular cheeks and narrower, sunken eyes. The helmet is rather more squared-off at the back and has more defined crests over his eyes, but is otherwise pretty much an upscaled version of the smaller robot's helmet, even down to the minimal paintwork. I know the original Hot Rod and Rodimus Prime both usuall have grey faces, but I'd have preferred silver paint on this one, particularly with the silver paint already being used on their central crests.
Hot Rod's transformation is almost insultingly simple, with the only consistently fiddly part being levering his legs into position to peg into the section of car the spoiler is mounted on. This is mostly forgivable because of the need to also turn the car into Rodimus Prime's upper body. Aside from him feeling a little half-arsed, my only real complaint about Hot Rod individually is that the head reveal - opening up the chest, pulling out the bumper section, rotating it 180° then pegging everything back together - seems to cause undue stress on its joint, as the base of the joint shows the beginnings of fracturing on mine. I do occasionally find Hot Rod's shoulders can be reluctant to peg back into their vehicle/Rodimus Prime mode position, but not to the point where I feel the need to trim the tab or widen the slot.
Turning the trailer into Rodimus Prime's legs and arms does involve partsforming, but I don't object to that and it's reasonably well-handled. The only real problem is that the arms are molded in the darker red, while Hot Rod - and thereby Rodimus Prime's chest and shoulders - are scarlet, so the mismatch is a little jarring, visually. Given the convoluted and frustrating transformation of Masterpiece Rodimus Prime - not to mention its whole other level of partsforming, whereby the 'Space Winnebago' was mostly complete as a vehicle mode even without the addition of Hot Rod in vehicle mode - I think this one is actually the best official rendition of the upgraded vehicle, even if it's not as elegant or compact as some of the Third Party offerings, nor as well decorated as it could have been. While the large flaps of vehicle mode remaining on the robot's back are puzzling, the weirdest part is the additional, separate section of spoiler that sticks out from the front of the trailer, as it doesn't connect especially well with the car, nor does it connect at all with the car's spoiler, and then it simply sits on Rodimus Prime's back, below and behind the main spoiler, completely invisible from the front, when he's in robot mode. When I first got this toy out of its box, I found that the shoulders - that is, the part of Rodimus Prime's shoulder that's Hot Rod's leg below the knee - wouldn't peg into place (a slot clearly visible on the inside of the lower leg) as there was too much resistance. Shaving off a little plastic from the top and one end of the tabs on the underside of Hot Rod's knee joints solved this problem, and there's now a satisfying click as they move into their shoulder configuration.
Despite his weird proportions and some choices in how the joints function that are 100% in service of Rodimus Prime, Hot Rod is quite poseable in and of himself. The shoulders are ball jointed a little higher up than they might normally be and, coupled with the transformation joint within the torso, he's able to raise his arms out to the side quite a way before the shoulders finally collide with the head. The upper legs seem a little limited in that there's no hip rotation, but there is a rotation joint just above the knee instead. Joints inside the groin give him forward/backward movement limited by the hinged groin panel at the front and the windscreen at the back, the knee bends a little less than 90°, but the ankles have a greater range of tilt than I'd expected due to their transformation. If only he'd been given a bit of sideways ankle tilt as well, he would have gone up in my estimation considerably. The traditional elbow is a ball joint, but there's another joint - centred on the wheels on his arms - that acts as a secondary elbow and increases his range of movement dramatically.
In his upgraded form, it becomes clear that all the decisions pertaining to articulation were made with Rodimus Prime in mind, as almost all his joints have a far greater range of movement. Additionally, he has wrist rotation and sideways ankle tilt, making him both more dynamic and more stable in a wider variety of poses. Like the smaller robot, he has a hinged crotch flap to facilitate the forward movement of his legs, but nothing can be done to remove the limits imposed on their backward movement by his trailer panel backpack short of opening it out, which then looks a little ridiculous. The way the shoulders move is actually pretty good, but he starts to look rather odd when his arms are lifted up to the sides as they're articulated by Hot Rod's hips, behind Rodimus Prime's head. This means they lift in a really awkward and unnatural-looking way... but, then, this is a robot, so 'natural movement' is a relative term. Both robots have heads that only rotate, and both have their movement restricted by a combination of their raised collars and protruding chins.
The first two 'Evolution' Leader class Autobots from the Power of the Primes line are both clever and innovative toys, but Hot Rod/Rodimus Prime feels more than a little unfinished compared to Optimus: Hot Rod's vehicle mode is less sleek and refined than the Titans Return toy that came out previously and, while the gimmick of combining him with his trailer to form Rodimus Prime works well, a good chunk of the trailer ends up just hanging off his back. Build quality also feels a little iffy in places. Hot Rod's legs can pop out when attempting to unplug him from Rodimus Prime, for example (pull on the body, not the shoulders!), the entire roof section of the car can pop off at the rotation joint occasionally, and some of the joints can be loose, but not to the point where he falls over under his own weight or can't hold up his weapons. The stickers - particularly the flame stickers on the sides of his trailer - are prone to peeling or crumpling through usage, but that's been true of all the stickers since they were reintroduced in Titans Return. On a positive note, articulation is surprisingly good for both the smaller and the larger robot, and the smaller robot's two handguns combine into a great-looking rifle for the larger robot. The combined vehicle and robot modes both hold together very well.
While he doesn't come with a Prime Master mini-figure of his own, Rodimus Prime's Matrix of Leadership (stored in the larger robot's chest) can be removed and the crystal part replaced with any Prime Master from the toyline.The use of a Prime Master in place of the Matrix crystal has no real effect on the toy or the way it functions, it's just part of the main gimmick of this particular toyline, and is probably the most effective usage of the mini-figures.
As I mentioned above, flawed as it is, I personally reckon this is probably a better Rodimus Prime than the Masterpiece released by Hasbro a few years back... or a better Rodimus Prime toy, at least. It's certainly sturdier, less fussy to transform, and the two robots' heads are more distinct. Coincidentally, I bought the MP version at a discount, too, and didn't feel that was a recommended purchase even at a knock-down price. This one fares better in that respect, at least. It's certainly not one of the best figures in the Power of the Primes line, nor is it really worth the average RRP, but many of the PotP figures have been disappointing in one way or another... Almost as if the design team shifted focus to War for Cybertron without properly finishing their work on the Prime Wars trilogy.
No comments:
Post a Comment