Unique Toys R-09 Red Destroyer

The moment I learned that Unique Toys were planning to develop Stinger for their line of Masterpiece-analogues, my curiosity was piqued. After all, this was a nonentity who dissolved into a flying cloud of metal cubes rather than transforming. When the first grey prototype images appeared, I was instantly hooked. My experience with Unique Toys products thusfar has been uniformly positive: their engineering has always been clever without being overly complex and their QC has yet to disappoint. However, in terms of screen-accuracy, particularly on their head sculpts, they've never been 100% on the mark, which resulted in some of their more recent figures later being 'fixed' by cheaper knockoffs.

Their strategy for this figure was to cut down on paint applications to reduce the retail price as far as they could, in the hope that people would buy the original rather than wait for a KO, and they teased the release of a Camaro Bumblebee with much the same robot mode as additional motivation - the suggestion being that the reception of Red Destroyer will determine whether the yellow Camaro goes into production. Their paintwork has almost always been considered lacking by fans and, coupled with the eyewatering prices of some figures and inaccuracies in their sculpts, they've given the KO merchants ample room to make improvements in the past. Dialling things back even further seems like the worst decision to me. As it turned out, they revealed images of the Camaro remix within a month of Red Destroyer shipping.

But let's see how Red Destroyer stands as his own product, before anyone has the opportunity to reverse engineer it and produce a cheaper option.

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.

Unique Toys R-03 Dragoon

I have a complicated relationship with The Last Knight, the final movie in Michael Bay's increasingly bizarre series of live action TransFormers movies. I refused to see it in the cinema, because it looked like a mess, and have continued to refrain from viewing it ever since. I didn't like the idea of shoehorning dragons and Arthurian legend into TransFormers (or vice versa), I have never enjoyed the excessive focus on human characters in movies ostensibly about giant alien robots, and the whole 'Knight' motif looked ridiculous...

...Nevertheless, I found the new design for Megatron strangely compelling. There was just enough G1 essence squeezed into his 'Black Knight' look (the stylised helmet, the arm-mounted cannon, Frank Welker's voice) and his vehicle mode (a coherent, albeit still very alien air/space craft) was vastly more impressive than any of those that preceded it, that it turned out to be one of the least aggravating designs for the Decepticon leader in the whole series.

Since I tend to prefer Leader class toys, when available, for Megatrons and Optimus Primes, I picked up the larger version from Hasbro's almost comically misnamed 'Premier Edition' line and, while it was a decent enough toy, it took some serious liberties with the design and its paint job was not just typically miserly but also amateurish and sloppy in its 'weathering' effects.

Since I'd already acquired Unique Toys' inaugural movie effort, Peru Kill, I wasn't particularly suprised when they unveiled their take on TLK Megatron, and it looked every bit as impressive... But does the end result meet the high expectations set by their first movieverse figure?

DX9 Kaleidoscope 03 La Hire

In all honesty, I hadn't been paying much attention to DX9 among the myriad Third Party producers of transforming robot figures. Their Kaleidoscope line has been quite random (the first figure not a direct TransFormers rip-off, the second a Beast Wars hybrid) and the War In Pocket line looked generally quite ugly.

Then came a huge surprise. Around the time that newcomers TFEVO revealed their take on a Masterpiece-style Hot Rod from The Last Knight, DX9 (in collaboration with Unique Toys, apparently) revealed their own version of the same thing. Initially, the TFEVO version looked superior due to its more intricate transformation and pretty stunning screen-accuracy in both modes, and I preordered it as soon as it became possible to do so... However, when review copies started to circulate, it became clear that the newcomers QC wasn't quite up to the task, and Hot Fire was a nightmare of floppy joints and tiny parts that had to be arranged just so. After I cancelled my preorder, I started to keep an eye on DX9's version in the hopes that it would be closer to Unique Toys' take on movie Lockdown in terms of build quality and mostly-intuitive transformation.

La Hire became available for purchase quite recently, and without much fanfare... Which would often be a bad sign. Throwing caution to the wind, I didn't even wait for more YouTube reviews to arrive before ordering, so lets take a look and see what DX9 have produced.

Unique Toys R-01 Peru Kill

Lockdown was an interesting addition to the fourth live action TransFormers movie, Age of Extinction, and potentially a clever addition to the franchise. Sadly, 'clever' is not a word that can be associated with the live action movies made thusfar under the auspices of Paramount and Michael Bay. In typical Hollywood fashion, he was killed off in the climactic battle of that movie, having very graphically killed off one of the Autobots from the first three movies right near the start (and several others off-screen, it's strongly implied).

There was a Deluxe class Lockdown released as part of Hasbro's mercifully brief Age of Extinction toyline, but it was one of the worst-received figures that year - short, blocky, weirdly-proportioned, and molded in entirely the wrong colours of plastic, about the only thing right about it was the way the face-cannon worked. Even so, and perhaps because I already had low expectations when I picked him up, I quite liked it. It wasn't perfect, but the transformation was reasonably clever, even if the results weren't quite right.

While Hasbro are due to release their Studio Series remake of AoE Lockdown pretty soon, Unique Toys have beaten them to the punch with a larger - essentially Masterpiece-scale - interpretation of this underutilised yet impressive character, under the baffling name of 'Peru Kill'.