Alternators Optimus Prime

As previously mentioned on this blog, any Optimus Prime mold is fair game for later reuse as Nemesis Prime, so it was a bit silly of me to write up the repaint first... Or was it?

Because, for one reason or another, I ended up with two other iterations of this mold: the Alternators Nemesis Prime figure I've already dealt with, and the Binaltech version, Black Convoy, which turned out to be a bit of a lemon. I picked up the Alternators version of Optimus because, for a while, it seemed as though he wouldn't get a Binaltech release... but he did eventually show up in the much-maligned Kiss Players subline, replete with die cast parts and a unique paint job, in 2006. He also saw a release in under the original Binaltech branding two years later.

Of course, with three iterations of this mold in my collection, is there anything particularly interesting to say about this?

Vehicle Mode:
While pickup trucks are one of the few vehicles on the larger end of the four-wheeled spectrum that actually have a defined purpose, I've always found them quite ugly and the Ram is no exception. Sure, it looks powerful, but the muscle car front end and the load-carrying flat bed at the back just don't gel in my opinion. Worse still, whatever nutcase designed this vehicle saw fit to add a spoiler to it, which seems like the ultimate in excess.

Being an Optimus Prime figure, it's no surprise to see that the dominant colour is red... but the absence of blue as well as his distinctive silver (or white, depending on the version) stripe feels a little disappointing, and one has to wonder if it was at the insistence of Dodge, as part of the licensing agreement. Then again, splitting the paint job on a vehicle like this in the style of a traditional Optimus Prime would leave him looking as though he was cobbled together from two different pickup trucks. The alternative would have been to either split the paint job vertically, with horizontal bands of silver/white and blue, or going the route of the live action movies and adding some sort of pattern to the paint job, the way Hasbro did with the Alternators release of Skids... And, much as I liked the look on movie Optimus Prime, I think that would have just looked sad on a Dodge Ram.

That having been said, I'm not overly impressed with the plastic here. The red is a little weak and orange-y - not as anaemic as some of Hasbro's more recent Optimi, but it's certainly a tomato red rather than the bold, punch red one would tend to hope for. Making matters worse, from some angles and in direct sunlight, the density of the plastic becomes questionable. In the rear angle photo below, the walls of the truck bed appear almost translucent, allowing light to pass through when there's only a single layer of plastic on the walls of the truck bed, which are not painted on the inside.

On the upsde, what paint is there looks rather nice. The translucent plastic headlights are coloured appropriately, and the headlights at least are chromed on the insides. The grille has a mixture of black paint on the backing and silver on the grille itself. The hubcaps and exhaust pipe are painted silver, and the window frames, door handles (including the one for the truck bed) and vents on the bonnet and bumper are all painted black. All of the appropriate decals are painted or tampographed on, and look nice and clean. Aside from the overall plain and unimaginative colourscheme, the main disappointment here is that his numberplate is so basic - just a white panel (with some feathering and overspray on mine), and Autobot insignia in red on one side and the other labelled 'Cybertron' in a scripty red font (it may actually be Brush Script) and 'PRIME' in a fairly nondescript font.

As with the Nemesis version, the interior is nicely detailed, and the engine/weapon naturally stows the same way, with a massive, gaping chasm below it. The 'steering' function is a little wobbly - the front wheels are connected by a rack which is collapsible as part of transformation. Unfortunately, the slider joint doesn't clip into its extended position, so moving one of the wheels is as likely to start the rack collapsing down to its robot mode length as it is to just turn the opposite wheel.


Robot Mode:
Oh dear... While this mold kind of works as a Nemesis Prime because its big, lumbering bulkiness feels somehow appropriate, as Optimus Prime, it just looks like a mess. Given the enormous, pointless and largely hollow shoulder mass, made out of the bumper and the front wings of the vehicle, I might have had an easier time accepting this mold in white or silver and blue as (Ultra) Magnus... but almost nothing about this robot - other than elements of the colourscheme - feels appropriate to Optimus Prime. The absence of any paint on the sculpted detail on the underside of the bumper makes him look unfinished but, to be fair, Takara's two separate takes on this mold (Binaltech and Kiss Players) only added a bit of chrome to some of the raised 'framework'.

The (horribly truncated) legs are black below the silver-painted hip joints, with a few applications of blue paint on seeminly random patches of the sculpted detail. Make no mistake, the detail does look like it's trying to evoke Optimus Prime's shins, but the patchiness of the blue just doesn't work. It extends over parts of the feet, but never really sells itself... and the additional presence of unpainted red plastic on the lower legs - visible from almost every angle - hurts it even further. Takara's versions both had entirely blue shins with the vents toward the bottom and the sculpted pipework picked out with silver paint, which improved the look considerably.

Then there's the weird decisionmaking regarding the bonnet and the vehicle's grille... The idea was to flip the grille round on its hinges to present something akin to Optimus Prime's traditional bumper-belt... but it's unpainted red plastic here, with a blue hinge connecting it to the bonnet, and it sits in front of the hips and pelvis, making his upper legs look even shorter. On both the Binaltech and the Kiss Players versions of Optimus Prime, this panel was painted silver with the two grilles painted black and the 'light' details surrounding them picked out in yellow, so this version looks unfinished by comparison. The figure looks marginally better with the grille remaining in its vehicle mode position, since it gives the torso a bit more depth and frees up the hips for posing without knocking the entire waist and chest out of position. Even then, though, the massive red plate of the bonnet doesn't evoke Optimus Prime the way the more usual 'window pecs' would.

Next, you have the bizarrely weedy arms, which could surely have been bulked up if transformation had used them to fill in the space below the engine, rather than simply laying back under the doors. Some effort has been made to match the traditional Optimus Prime look by having the tiny shoulder chunks and forearms in red, with the weedy bicep section in grey - mimicking the silver/white stripe that normally appears around his upper arms - but the black plastic elbow joint and vehicle mode seats on the undersides of the forearms look out of place. Blue plastic for the hands helps, and makes this one of the few Binaltech/Alternators figures to use anything other than black plastic for the hands. Probably my least favourite aspect of this mold is the way the doors just hang off the shoulders at an angle, further restricting the movement of the arms and occupying additional shelf-space.

The engine transforms into quite a neat little pistol, and I'd say that this was probably one of the best weapons from the entire Binaltech/Alternators line - it's a decent size (though not a patch on Optimus Prime's traditional laser/ion blaster), albeit with too long a grip, so it never looks as though his finger is anywhere near the trigger. It's also got one of the more interesting transformations in and of itself - folding in half, then the silver-painted outer sections fold forward on another set of hinges to create the barrel, with the main folding hinge ending up looking like a laser sight mounted on top of the pistol.

Other than the cool gun, the mold's only redeeming feature is an excellent head sculpt which, if anything, looks like a simplified - possibly even cartoonified - version of the movie Optimus Prime head sculpt, despite appearing debuting most of a year before the movie. It has all the traditional features, but wears them with a harder-edged look, almost better suited to the Nemesis repaint. I personally quite like the more angular style of Optimus Prime heads and, even though this still skews closer to the look of the 80s cartoon, the brow piece feels like a development of the G1 toy due to the way it protrudes at an angle, rather than looking like a short brim from a baseball cap.


This figure is a bit of a mess on many levels. Just in terms of articulation and poseability, the bizarre proportions of the legs coupled with the floppiness of the knees aren't particularly beneficial for either.  The fact that the thighs are barely long enough to clear the groin, and the knees are sunk so deeply in the lower leg means that you can barely tell if he's stepping forward or standing upright. Add to that, the awkwardness of the feet - ball-jointed 'toe' sections coupled with the truck bed door as a 'heel', supported only by the spoiler - doesn't give him the most stable base for dynamic posing. There is waist articulation, but the folded up cab on his back gets in the way, and the movement of the arms is hindered equally by the way they're mounted and what's placed around them.

The colourscheme is pretty drab, woefully incomplete and, aside from the head sculpt, there's really not a lot about this that sells it as the Autobot leader - in a lot of way, I think it was misguided to include Optimus Prime in the Alternators/Binaltech line, and it's almost a shame that Hasbro's switch to a laser-focus on Bumblebee came a year or so too late. Had the movie series debuted a year or two earlier, perhaps Hasbro might have been able to get Volkswagen to agree to the New Beetle Bumblebee, and the Dodge Ram could then have been used for whichever mystery character it had originally been intended for... Considering Swindle was supposed to be effectively a body-snatched Trailbreaker, I wonder if the Ram might have been a bizarrely premonitory Ironhide, before the movies made him a GMC Topkick...

About the only thing I can say in this figure's favour is that vehicle mode looks good, for what it is - an ugly vehicle with a bland, insipid colourscheme - and some aspects of transformation are quite impressive... but even this is outweighed by the sheer amount of empty space in the toy - both under the bonnet and as a result of it being a pickup truck - and the scarily tight thigh extension joints which, just like on the Nemesis version, make it worryingly difficult to extend or compress the legs during transformation.