MetaGate G-05 Red Fantasy

(Femme-Bot Friday #85)

The Bumblebee movie didn't just bring a new, unprecedented coherence to storytelling in live action TransFormers movies, but a whole new aesthetic. Gone were the overcomplicated, oddly-proportioned Autobots and the insectoid Decepticons seemingly made of needles, knives and random metal shavings; the overabundance of grey and bare metal. The framing of each shot gave characters breathing room, allowing for physical characteristics to shine through, and individual robots were easily distinguishable at a glance, even in the thick of the action. No longer were we, for example, stuck looking at Optimus Prime's armpit as he cut a swathe through legions of Decepticons in the middle of a city, or watching Starscream gob up some lubricant in hyper-sharp, ILM-crafted detail.

Sure, the movie only really featured two Decepticons for the bulk of the story, but what Decepticons they were! Shatter and Dropkick were the ideal - not to say archetypal - pairing of brains and brawn, with the former even convincing the proto-Sector 7 team to work with them, despite representing themselves as "Decepticon Peacekeepers", a flagrantly oxymoronic description if ever there was one. Silver-tongued Shatter was the standout villain, exhibiting intelligence, cunning and a keen mind for strategy, with the dulcet tones of Angela Bassett breathing life into her. To cap it all, both she and Dropkick became Triple Changers, which naturally made it difficult for Hasbro to make toys of them.

To make them viable, Hasbro essentially made two versions of each in as many size classes as possible... The Deluxe class Studio Series car mode Shatter was a clumsy, flimsy mess, but the jet mode toy was excellent, if a little overburdened with vehicle mode parts on its backpack. However, it wasn't long till Third Parties started teasing their plans to make (loosely) Masterpiece scale figures that would actually feature both car and jet modes all in one. Toyworld announced theirs first, back in 2019, but relative newcomers MetaGate - creators of the stunning, triple-changing movieverse Drift, Haiku - were the first to actually ship theirs and, even at first glance, it looked substantially better.

But let's have a closer look and see exactly what kind of dark magic had been brought to bear on this character...

First New Purchases In Quite A While - AKA Not An Unboxing Post IV

When I started this post, I wasn't quite sure how long it had been since I last ordered anything TransFormers related. Having subsequently looked it up, it's technically only about five months... but that was a non-transforming model kit (Flame Toys' Furai Model Kit Arcee, specifically).

It's been a touch over a year since I bought an actual Hasbro TransFormers toy... Which probably tells you everything you need to know about my opinion of Legacy as a toyline. I (technically) still only own a single Legacy toy, and that was Tarantulas, from the second wave of Legacy's first year.

However, after successfully completing a couple of freelance jobs earlier this year, I decided to order a couple of Third Party figures I was keen not to miss out on... Both of them are Femme-Bots, so look out for some Femme-Bot Fridays coming 'soon' (though that's absolutely in the Fun Publications/TFCC sense of the word 'soon').

The box they arrived in was significantly battered, though thankfully there's only minor damage to Red Fantasy's box. Before even opening either, the first thing that struck me was how heavy Metagate's latest offering is - I knew there were die-cast parts in it, but she's much heavier than I'd expected. Conversely, Spider Lady is surprisingly light, especially in comparison.

Can't wait to get these out properly and have a fiddle with them before eventually taking some photos. Their arrival gives me a bit of motivation to tidy up the coffee table in the lounge, so I can set up the light tent... But I have to admit, I'm still struggling to find the motivation to photograph Furai Model Kit Arcee - which I put together before Christmas - or even finish the post about Furai Model Kit Windblade, which I photographed almost six months ago.

MetaGate G-01 Haiku

I have quite a few excellent Third Party figures in my collection now, with an increasing number based on movie characters, and in a loosely Masterpiece-adjacent scale. Considering the couple of Hasbro-produced, Deluxe class figures of Age of Extinction Drift that I own are less than stellar, the announcement of a Third Party MP-analogue version certainly piqued my interest... And the fact that it was to be a triple-changer, taking both his Bugatti Veyron and futuristic helicopter modes into account, seemed like a tall order.

Add to that, the creators, MetaGate, were previously unheard of, and suddenly launching themselves toward an eager - and frequently highly critical - fandom with such an ambitious debut project. There have been rumours - as there were with DX9's La Hire - that Unique Toys have had a hand in this figure's creation but, so far, there appears to be little or no concrete evidence of that.

However, it quickly became a figure I was intent on acquiring, and the recent sale of my Game Boy Color game collection gave me just enough breathing room in my finances to risk taking a punt on a stunning-looking figure from an untested company. I preordered from Iacon.Store at the start of September, and it arrived a little over three weeks later... so, let's take a look at MetaGate's inaugural offering, and see how it compares to the output of some of the more established Third Party figures.