Unique Toys R-06 Red Dasher

Given his mostly insignificant role in Dark of the Moon and his subsequent off-screen death before Age of Extinction, it might seem strange that I have such a soft spot for a 'character' like Dino/Mirage. Part of it, I suspect, is just that his vehicle mode - a red Ferrari 458 - evokes a certain kind of gamers' nostalgia for me, various Ferraris being staples of many popular arcade and home console games during the 80s and 90s, perhaps the most famous being the Testarossa in Sega's Out Run (or the F40 from Turbo Out Run). While I'm certainly not a 'Car Guy', I will admit to a long-time appreciation of certain sports cars - notably those from Lamborghini and Ferrari - either because they've appeared frequently in videogames or the TransFormers franchise in one form or another.

...And yet, when Hasbro finally released their Studio Series Dino/Mirage back in 2021 (a whole ten years after the film was in cinemas), I didn't bother picking it up. Not because it wasn't a licensed Ferrari - that particular license being owned by another toy manufacturer - nor even because I already have both the Takara Tomy Movie Advanced version and the Alien Attack figure, Firage, but because the whole thing was lacklustre. Typical Hasbro dull red plastic and significant transformation cheats, yet most of the vehicle mode still ended up folded onto the robot's back.

Facing facts, though, the Movie Advanced figure simply isn't a screen-accurate rendition of Dino/Mirage, and the Alien Attack version is a fussy, fragile-feeling little thing whose approximately Deluxe class vehicle mode transforms into a robot mode in a scale that somehow fails to match pretty much anything else, either from Hasbro or other Third Parties...

So, when Unique Toys revealed their take on a (roughly) Masterpiece-scale Dino/Mirage, I was very much on board. Their pattern of basically turning a car inside out - introduced with Peru Kill, refined with DX9's La Hire - made for simple, enjoyable and sturdy transformations and, while their robots have sometimes been accused of lacking the movie CGI's intricate detail, early photos of their Red Dasher looked impressive. Of course, the real question is whether it's as impressive in-hand... So, let's take a look.

Another New Third Party Figure - AKA Not An Unboxing Post V

With my interest in Hasbro's output at an all time low, I've been paying closer attention to Third Party output recently. While that means fewer purchases at greater expense (though Hasbro have become increasingly enthusiastic about decreasing the gap), it does mean I can focus on acquiring figures I really want, rather than just obsessively filling shelf space with products I find acceptable, if not entirely exciting.

Thus, when Unique Toys revealed Red Dasher, their take on Dino/Mirage from Dark of the Moon, that went straight onto my Want List. Hasbro's Faux-rrari vehicle mode for the Studio Series toy just didn't work for me and, while I already have Alien Attack's Firage - the mass-produced version of a custom figure based on Battle Blades Bumblebee - and still think it's a fantastic figure, I'm enough of a fan of Dino/Mirage's design that I felt a MPM-ish scale figure with a simpler transformation had a place in my collection.

And the bonus is that he came with the Collectors' Card that was omitted from DX9's La Hire, five years ago!

I ordered this from Omegalock, at a point when it was listed as 'Imminent', and only had to wait a couple of weeks for it to be despatched. I was a little dubious as the delivery options are focussed on DPD as the courier, and they've let me down recently, but this one went OK, arriving yesterday.

Had a quick fiddle with it in the afternoon and, aside from one point of the transformation that I had to look up on a video, he's just as intuitive and straightforward as La Hire and Peru Kill.

Alien Attack STF-01 Firage

When Hasbro cancelled the Dark of the Moon toyline with at least one wave of toys still to come, Takara Tomy picked up the slack to an extent. Molds like Que/Wheeljack and Soundwave were released in the Asian markets - both under the Movie Advanced banner, with Que also getting released in Hasbro's packaging in certain markets, as well as a repaint as 'true' Wheeljack with a G1 toy-style head. Dino, meanwhile, only got released as a repaint of Revenge of the Fallen Sideways, with a new head and weapons added to the weird-looking robot with a hopelessly wrong Audi-style vehicle mode.

Understandably, lots of fans were upset by this omission - it's hard to describe any of the robots from any of the live action movies as 'key characters' or 'important characters', but Dino at least had several lines of dialogue and a couple of cool action scenes, even if he did end up getting done in offscreen, between Dark of the Moon and Age of Extinction - and the Movie Advanced version, while not too difficult to obtain, was rather expensive for what was little more than a repaint, and became positively extortionate on the secondary market.

Enter Spring Thunder (ST) Studio - a customiser based in China - who, back in 2015, took a 1:32 scale Ferrari 458 shell, a Battle Blades Bumblebee figure and some ABS plates, and created a very accurate-looking, super-poseable and fully transformable custom figure, and offered to take orders for a limited run of duplicates. One of the Third Party companies then contacted him, and this offer was cast into doubt. Less than a year after images of the custom were posted online, it was announced that Alien Attack had picked it up for manufacture... but it was over than a year after that before it became available for preorder, and several months more before it was release. Was it worth the wait?

AD16 Movie Advanced Autobot Dino

The more I think of the more recent TransFormers movies, the more I think they were basically designed to make it next to impossible for Hasbro/Takara Tomy to successfully make toys out of the robot characters. Hasbro - these days styling itself as "an intellectual properties company" - didn't even seem to mind that one of its biggest toy brands was being misused so grievously, even seeming to quickly lose interest in trying to make plastic versions of anyone who wasn't Bumblebee. Then again, it's not as if other characters got much screen time or character development anyway... Hell, a good number of them didn't even get proper names, or got lumbered with a different name in the movie versus the toyline (Brawl/Devastator in the first movie, just for example).

So while my happiness at Hasbro's announcement that they were making a toy of Dino/Mirage, quickly turned to disappointment when they backtracked and cancelled the entire tail end of the line, I didn't exactly feel that I was missing much. While he seemed pretty cool in the (approximately) one minute of screen time he got in Dark of the Moon - particularly in the motorway battle with the Dreads - the cancellation of the figure might even have been a good thing given how poor some of the DotM toys turned out to be.

Then came Takara Tomy with their Movie Advanced line, loosely associated with the fourth movie, Age of Extinction, and releasing several figures that never made it to shelves in the US/Europe (or did so in very limited quantities) along with some fairly cool repaints of older figures... But even these were not quite what we might have expected.