Power of the Primes Novastar

(Femme-Bot Friday #64)

I suggested, back when I wrote about Moonracer, that buying the repaints I already knew about was all but a foregone conclusion, and here we are... On the upside, I knew ahead of time that this figure was going to be disappointing. Even so I have to say straight away that I rather wish I hadn't bothered with this one, and now probably won't buy the new War for Cybertron version of Chromia, or the Combiner-enabled Greenlight with its Battlemaster partner, let alone the yet-to-be-announced fourth version of this mold, which will create a new official gestalt for Elita Prime.

So let's get Novastar out of the way, shall we?

Vehicle Mode:
On the upside, I like Novastar's vehicle mode paint job a lot more than Moonracer's. The red is vibrant, the orange and grey stand out pretty well... She may not look especially sporty, but the colourscheme almost seems like it's intended to suggest an affinity with Hot Rod rather than Inferno, her traditional masculine equivalent. With the Prime Armour fitted at the back, while it looks tidier with the thumbs folded into the space at the rear, they can be splayed out to (very vaguely) resemble a chunky Hot Rod-style spoiler.

One aspect of the paint job is a bit odd for two reasons - the stripe down her side is a strange, faded yellow that doesn't really fit with the rest of her colourscheme and, on the subject of fit, it doesn't follow the size/position/angle of the raised panel it covers. I'd also quibble the use of grey paint rather than silver - it doesn't look bad, just a little flat... And grey paint for the headlights looks ridiculous. Even so, Novastar is a great example of how these 'Cybertronian' vehicle designs can look significantly different with only a few changes to the paint layout. Her front windscreen is smaller and placed right on the nose of the vehicle, with no 'bonnet' to speak of, while her 'passenger' section is larger and squarer than Moonracer's. The orange blocks on the front section of roof almost look like a lightbar, and the robot's torso blends into the back of the vehicle slightly better, even though it's just as much on show as it was with Moonracer. Strangely, my favourite aspect of the paint job is the simple fact that the hubcaps are painted grey, so the wheels don't show off the cheap-and-cheerful construction of the toy quite so blatantly as they did on Moonracer.

Of course, in the light of more images (not to mention at least one video review) of the new War for Cybertron: Siege version of Chromia, one has to wonder why the 5mm port at the back was sculpted on the back rather than on the top of the vehicle. It would have made no difference to robot mode, but enabled Novastar's chunky gun to be pegged into the top rather than the side of the vehicle, or one of the extended thumbs of her Prime Armour. As it stands, there's no really worthwhile place for the gun - it looks weird sticking out around her rear wheels, and just plain terrible sticking out of the mounted Prime Armour.


Robot Mode:
While the only mold change on this figure, versus Moonracer, is the head sculpt, the new colourscheme manages to make her look almost entirely different. Even the use of grey paint for her lower waist and the grey plastic of the vehicle parts behind do a better job of showing off the stereotypically feminised shape of the torso, and the grey panel in the middle of her chest kind of reminds me of the panels on HeadMaster toys that concealed their Tech Specs readouts. While the little flashes of orange on her collar could have been a bit more extensive, they do at least break up the red plastic and offer a bit more definition to her details. She ends up rather more sparsely coloured than Moonracer, with no paint on her forearms or shins. Amusingly, her backpack actually helps make her look more like her G1 animation model, which had a much larger 'collar', set further back on her shoulders.

As with just about all the Deluxe class figures, the Prime Armour adds nothing to Novastar, and just ends up looking like a jetpack that's been attached to her front rather than her back... because there's just no room on her back. It blends in well enough, being molded in her main colours and having a colourless, transparent plastic cap over the Prime Master slot, but it's really nothing special.

Her handgun, meanwhile, is bizarrely oversized, like a kind of stockless Cybertronian blunderbuss with a normal-sized gun stuck on top for good measure. Molded in black plastic, everything but the grip has been painted grey, so the details really pop out. It has some hollow channels cut in to the back of the gun, above the grip on both sides, but the front is nicely done, with a super-deep gunbarrel.

One of the things I really hated about the 'Female Autobots' from the G1 cartoon was their outlandish and ill-proportioned heads which were drawn inconsistently, with various parts changing size and orientation during the course of a single scene. All things considered, a remarkable job has been done in realising Novastar's noggin, but it still looks daft - almost like something out of the wacky Sci-Fi movies of the 1930s. It's not just a new helmet around the same face as Moonracer - the whole thing is different, with less overt poutiness to the lips and narrower eyes. It's still not exactly robotic, though, and more than a little spoiled by the ridiculously-shaped and overly detailed helmet - it's almost as if a whole bunch of panel-lining was added in an attempt to compensate for the daft shape - and a central crest which reminds me a little of Scourge.


I have to confess to a certain amount of buyer's remorse here... Novastar is a lazy reuse of a lazily-designed figure which, bizarrely, has been carried over (with minor retooling) into the War for Cybertron line. What's truly baffling is that the proposed Elita-Infin1te gestalt will be superseded by 'Orthia', who will be a combination of PotP Elita-1, Moonracer and Novastar... with two further Femme-Bots based on this mold, but released under the War for Cybertron banner... While the retooled WfC Chromia has lost all its combiner parts.

Adding to all that nonsense, my Novastar is afflicted with some seriously floppy leg joints - the hips barely support the weight of her upper body, and at least one of the knees is almost as bad. Coupled with the awkward ankle joints, this makes her very difficult to stand, and I lost count of the number of times she fell over backwards while I was trying to photograph her. Issues like this are very much a "your mileage may vary" thing, and mine is almost certainly not indicative of the quality of every single copy. Conversely, her arms are remarkably tight - both at the elbow and the shoulder - and the ball joint in her neck really doesn't like to turn, to the point that I'm a little concerned I'll accidentally decapitate her if I try to move her head too much. She can tilt her head forward and back only because of the separate, pinned joint at the base of her neck, and there's no sideways tilt.

One feature which is not officially documented - as far as I could see - is that Moonracer's handgun can actually plug into the barrel of Novastar's creating a much larger, rifle-like gun... though this does leave the other Femme-Bot unarmed, except for the Prime Armour slot cover 'guns', of course. It has been suggested that this gun is actually intended for Elita-Infin1te or Orthia, though.

I think I can safely say I won't be buying WfC Greenlight & Dazlestrike unless (a) I get a new job before she becomes widely avaiable and (b) suffer a catastrophic failure of judgement. Part of me would like the full set of 'true' G1 Femme-Bots, but that same part of me would actually appreciate it if Hasbro actually put a bit more fucking effort into this iconic team. If this and Greenlight are any indication, Hasbro is being utterly lazy, and the new figures just won't be worth the money.

Or the shelf space.

Had they used the opportunity presented by WfC to create something unique and interesting - particularly as these characters never went to Earth - they might have been worth a look... as it stands, the last two will be an easy pass, and I can happily live without Orthia.