Power of the Primes - A Plethora of Prime Masters

Although, technically, thirteen wouldn't really be 'a plethora', let alone the mere eight I managed to obtain. The Prime Masters - much like the 'loose' Titan Masters of the Titans Return line - were released in single packs with 'Decoy Armour' (AKA Pretender shells - a homage to part of the 1988/89 section of the Generation 1 toyline) which, for no obvious reason, also transform into TargetMaster-style weapons which the Prime Masters could then attach to externally.

As 'play patterns' go, it was just as daft as that of the loose Titan Masters, but further aggravated certain elements within the fandom who had been hoping for a bigger, more impressive revival of the Pretender concept. For me, though, Hasbro's most heinous crime was releasing only eight of the thirteen Primes at mass retail, and holding back the remaining five for special boxed sets - Onyx Prime being made available only with the Predaking boxed set (which I had zero interest in) while Amalgamous, Nexus, Prima and the Thirteenth Primes coming only with the San Diego Comic Con 'Throne of the Primes' set (also made available at mass retain in Hasbro's Asian markets). Exacerbating this, Prima Prime also ended up packaged with the Amazon exclusive Punch-Counterpunch, so the completist would end up with two copies and a total of fourteen Primes.

Aside from all of this, the Prime Masters served no real purpose other than the decorative. Sure, each one was supposed to grant special powers to whoever wielded it - via slots on the larger figures and on the updated (and now separate) hand and foot parts of the gestalts - but there were no new features activated - Unicron Trilogy-style - on the toys. Furthermore, they were rendered mostly redundant by prexisting chunks of plastic - molded as either weird, flat handguns, Enigmas of Combination or Matrices of Leadership - which already occupied the Prime Master slot on every single Power of the Primes toy of Deluxe class and above.

So, to close off the Power of the Primes and, indeed, the Prime Wars Trilogy posts on this blog, here's a roundup of all the mass retail Prime Masters...

Power of the Primes Evolution Rodimus Unicronus

As previously mentioned, my original intention with the scant Leader class selection from Power of the Primes was to skip Rodimus Prime entirely, instead picking up his blatant Shattered Glass homage repaint, Rodimus Unicronus. Hasbro had come up with a cover story, to the effect that this version of Hot Rod/Rodimus Prime was under the sway of Unicron, via the Matrix of Chaos, but there are too many Shattered Glass references to ignore.

The 'good guy' version of this mold turned out to be far better than I'd expected, so let's take a look at his 'bad guy' repaint, and see if he follows the pattern whereby black repaints of any toy are better than the originals.

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?

Power of the Primes Evolution Nemesis Prime

The moment I laid eyes on Evolution Optimus Prime, I knew that it was a foregone conclusion that I'd also buy a Nemesis Prime repaint of the mold, should it appear. It wasn't long before it was announced, and the real surprise was that it had not one, but two unique head sculpts - one for the Leader class figure, and one for the Deluxe class cab robot, named 'Nemesis Pax'.

Then came the bad news... In the wake of the collapse of Toys'R'Us, he would be an Amazon exclusive, to be released on Prime Day 2018. This wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, but previous Prime Day exclusives had become difficult - if not impossible - to find in the UK except at hugely inflated prices on the secondary market. But then he turned up as a preorder, at the surprisingly low price of about £35. I put in my preorder, and waited.

And waited.

Prime Day came and went, and I received a series of emails from Amazon, apologising for being unable to locate stocks... Despite the figure being widely available in the States (just not for shipping to the UK). Several months later, I gave up. Feeling like he'd never come to Amazon UK (but with the nagging sense that it'd be in stock the very day after I cancelled my preorder), I bought one via eBay for about £60 (cashing in a whole bunch of Nectar points to soften the blow) and cancelled the Amazon preorder... Only for the figure to magically and suddenly be announced as available via Amazon UK less than a month later.

The path of a dedicated Collector is seldom a smooth one... and almost never cost-effective. But let's not get hung up on the negative... Let's have a look at the Nemeses instead...

Power of the Primes Blackwing Darkwing

Also (as in originally) known as 'Darkwing', Blackwing is the second Combiner Wars Aerialbot retooling to be turned into a G1 Powermaster homage following Power of the Primes Dreadwind. While both have lost their Powermaster gimmick in favour of the somewhat shoehorned Prime Armour gimmick, their other unique and defining feature - the ability to combine their vehicle modes into the giant 'Dreadwing' superjet - was announced as having been retained. Having missed out on the cumbersome, clunky G1 figures, I was keen to see what contemporary toymaking techniques could do with such an interesting concept.

I was reasonably impressed with Dreadwind on his own, but acquiring this figure made both seem more disappointing than either in isolation... so let's find out why...

Power of the Primes Evolution Rodimus Prime

If you've read my write-up of Evolution Optimus Prime, you will have gathered that I was pretty lukewarm on this figure. My plan was to skip this one entirely, and instead buy the Shattered Glass-alike repaint, Rodimus Unicronus, because that had the advantage of being a black repaint, and we all know that black repaints are awesome.

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...

Prime Wars Trilogy Punch-Counterpunch & Prima Prime

As far as I can recall, Punch/Counterpunch appeared, very briefly, in a grand total of two episodes of the old G1 TV show - 'The Rebirth' parts 1 & 2 - though I can't remember if I actually saw them on TV, or as one of the edited-together stories I owned on VHS. Even so, he was fascinating: appearing first as the Decepticon Counterpunch, he warned a couple of other Decepticons that his "Autobot counterpart" (surely something of a giveaway) was "nearby... real nearby", at which point he transformed back to Punch and attacked them.

I only really looked into the G1 toy once I got back into TransFormers in the early/mid-2000s, and discovered that it was actually a bit shit. Nevertheless, while it never quite made it onto my list of 'Holy Grail' TransFormers toys, even after the less than stellar attempt at an update by the Collectors' Club, based on the Classics Sunstreaker/Sideswipe mold, I was quite keen to get hold of one...

...Until, that is, the Power of the Primes version was announced. Sporting a sleeker vehicle mode and a Combiner Wars-style transformation (minus the combiner peg, thankfully), and coming as an Amazon exclusive boxed set with the Prime Master 'Prima Prime', this seemed like a better use of my money than acquiring the G1 Doublespy which, complete and in good condition, can command silly money on the secondary market. Since I'm still awaiting any news from Amazon on their supposed Prime Day exclusive PotP Nemesis Prime, I ordered this from In Demand Toys for £35 - cheaper than a Deluxe class toy from the Club, certainly... but still somewhat inflated for a Deluxe. Is it worth that?

Power of the Primes Moonracer

(Femme-Bot Friday #56)

There's an awful lot of the G1 TV series that I missed out on due to its irregular scheduling on British early morning telly back in the 80s. One episode I only became aware of after I got back into collecting as an adult was 'The Search for Alpha Trion', which revealed that a group of six Femme-Bots acted as a resistance group on Cybertron, and featured Shockwave uttering the immortal line "Female Autobots? I thought they were extinct.", which was basically all the explanation ever given both for the existence of Cybertronian Femme-Bots and their absence in the preceding (and subsequent) episodes.

Terrible writing of a kids TV show designed to sell toys aside, it's taken Hasbro more than 30 years to create toys of any of that group... which is hardly surprising, given that they never appeared in the show again after that episode. That said, one of them was part the BotCon 2005 boxed set, Descent into Evil, as a repaint of Energon Arcee with a new head, while another was an additional souvenir figure for BotCon 2009, and several have apparently appeared in other fiction intermittently over the years.

One such Femme-Bot was Moonracer, who now appears as one of the Combiner Wars-style figures on the final chapter of the Prime Wars trilogy...

Power of the Primes Dreadwind

Powermasters came along at the point in G1 where my interest was beginning to wane... Aside from the new Optimus Prime, the only one I picked up was Doubledealer. While, at the time, I though the gimmick - where the Powermaster figure had to be plugged in for the toy to transform into robot mode - was pretty cool and interesting (not to mention given a good explanation in the Marvel comics), virtually all the others looked overly simplistic compared to the Diaclone-derived toys that first got me into TransFormers.

There were a couple of Decepticons with an additional feature, though - Dreadwind and Darkwing transformed into individual robots, but could combine their jet modes into the super-jet, Dreadwing. Given that gestalts were nothing new to TransFormers, the idea of combining vehicle modes was only slightly novel, and the results were as clumsy as one might expect from late-G1 toys. Nevertheless, I do somewhat regret not picking the both of them up.

Thankfully, then, Hasbro decided to resurrect this concept in Power of the Primes, recreating both Dreadwind and Darkwing as Deluxe class figures (released in separate waves, just to make things interesting). The gestalt jet feature has been included... but is it an improvement on the original?

Power of the Primes Elita-1

(Femme-Bot Friday #48)

Generations Arcee - if not TF Prime Arcee before her - seems to have caused something of a snowball effect. Hasbro have realised, not before time, that one of their biggest boys' toylines is (a) actually appreciated by girls as well and (b) gifted with a fandom that isn't as firmly against 'girl characters' as they had estimated. It really shouldn't have surprised them, given the enduring popularity of the likes of the Baroness in GI Joe, but it goes to show how out-of-touch they were, and for how long.

Elita-1, for example, turned up in the G1 TV series back in the 80s... and, while the name has been applied to several other characters over the years, it's actually taken more than thirty years to get an official, mainstream toy based on Optimus Prime's old flame, with the Collectors' Club getting their version in almost ten years ago.

Was she worth the wait..?

Power of the Primes Battleslash & Roadtrap (aka Duocon Battletrap)

One thing post-Diaclone Generation 1 got right was its constant innovation within the concept of 'TransFormers'. Even when the toys these innovations delivered were objectively crap, and ridiculously simplistic compared to the sort of thing Takara had originally produced, it was the toymaking technology, not the new ideas, that let them down.

Combiners, HeadMasters and PowerMasters were all prime examples of this, as Hasbro's more recent reboots of the concepts have clearly proven: components of each gestalt have had reasonable vehicle modes and fully articulated robot modes, while the gestalts themselves are also fully articulated. HeadMasters and PowerMasters may have been boiled down to a single core concept for Titans Return, but each has delivered fully articulated 'bots in five different size classes, with varying degrees of compatibility with the mini-figures.

Power of the Primes has not only developed the Titan Masters concept further, but reintroduced another old G1 concept... Starting with the Duocon Battletrap.

I'd considered splitting this into three separate posts - Battleslash, Roadtrap and finally Battletrap... but I figured that'd just take me too long to complete... So here's the full set, all in one!

Power of the Primes Evolution Optimus Prime

...And so it begins...

There's no point trying to say that I didn't expect to buy any Power of the Primes figures - as soon as they announced just the Prime Masters, simple variations on the Titan Masters, which would represent the 12 (or 13) Primes, I started debating whether or not to pick them up because I have a shelf in my collection that already has interpretations of several Primes. But when the 'Evolution' figures of Optimus and Rodimus Prime were revealed, I was instantly hooked.

Rodimus was going to be the less likely prospect as I already have a perfectly good Hot Rod from the Titans Return line, and the partsforming required by the new one - not to mention the floppiness of his joints, as experienced by several YouTubers - did not appeal, but a Leader class Optimus Prime figure that's also a Deluxe/Voyager-ish class, G1 cartoon-accurate Orion Pax? That has to be worth having... right?

Well... Once you answer the question "Do I really need another Optimus Prime in a trilogy that's only recently given us Titans Return Powermaster Optimus Prime/Legends Super Ginrai?" Come on, need I refer you to the Unicron Trilogy and its three unique versions of the Autobots' leader..? I'm not averse to skipping an Optimus Prime figure if it seems superfluous, and honestly feel that the character has been done to death (literally, in the case of Takara Tomy's Masterpiece 'Sleep Mode' repaint), but some versions are obvious must-haves.

Let's take a look, and see if Evolution Optimus Prime is one of those...