I love it when a random repaint gives me the chance to check something out I’d have otherwise skipped. See, one of the many, many things going on with Legacy is a series of updates of characters specifically from Transformers Prime, the 2011 TV show and toyline that’s one of my favorite bits of the franchise. But in the process of updating them, Legacy’s Prime characters have all been heavily redesigned, in a way seemingly intended to make them blend in with a more Generation One aesthetic. This isn’t a choice I’m fond of, because it feels to me like it made them lose a lot of their personality in the process. Bulkhead’s no longer round, Knockout’s a good deal less angular, and Arcee just doesn’t much resemble the blue biker warrior of the show, outside of being blue and a bike. This means the Prime: Robots In Disguise Deluxe from 2012 or so that I have of her is still a better version. I think one reason these redesigns bug me is that Legacy doesn’t treat its other updates that way, and the characters from Beast Wars, Marvel, IDW, or the Unicron Trilogy that show up in the line are a lot more media-accurate.
All the sauce is gone!
Luckily, the Walmart-exclusive Velocitron Spedia 500 sub-line’s repainted and given a new headsculpt to this new Arcee, turning her into someone much more obscure, but someone who uniquely appeals to me: Road Rocket, an Autobot from Transformers: Generation 2, the early 90s chunk of the franchise that’s special to me, because it’s where I first got into Transformers.
In all their topheavy, ungainly glory.
The 1994 original Road Rocket was a Laser Cycle, a motorcycle-former with a clear LED-lit weapon as their gimmick. Road Rocket’s also a character who never really appeared in any fiction, aside from the usual D-lister routine of “tiny cameos in Takara-only Manga, and background roles in IDW,” though according to the Takara stuff, he’s a ninja warrior.
Also, we got an early look at the new figure via a small role in IDW’s new Wreckers miniseries.
As a kid, I actually had his Decepticon counterpart, Road Pig, but as an adult, briefly owned Road Rocket’s tooling via its Robot Masters repaint, so I can confirm that, while Road Pig’s a great figure (you can read a review of that tooling’s Robot Masters repaint, Sideways, over here) Road Rocket was….kind of not great, a weirdly proportioned, unstable, brick-y mess, meaning he’s the one who really needed the update, which he’s now gotten. Or rather, she, now, being an Arcee retool, and as confirmed by Hasbro designers during a livestream.
Vehicle Mode
Vroom, vroom!
As a member of the racing-themed Velocitron line, Road Rocket comes to us in her motorcycle mode.
They’re both sorta-earthly motorcycles, and that’s where the resemblance ends.
In terms of sculpt, it’s an original design, and, from what I can tell, isn’t homaging any specific details from Transformers: Prime Arcee, or the original G2 Road Rocket, or any kind of real motorcycle. It’s got a realistically-sculpted front, with headlights, a windscreen, handlebars, and even tiny speedometers sculpted into the dashboard.
They’re tiny, but they’re there!
The tires and wheels are similarly nicely detailed and realistic.
There’s more sculptwork in these wheels than the entirety of the original’s robot mode.
The body of the bike, meanwhile, is trying really hard to not look like a folded-up person, and sort of succeeds.
At high enough speeds, she can sharpen her nails on that rear wheel.
Her hands are really clearly hanging out of the back, there’s a bunch of visible limb joints in the body, and the whole thing feels a bit too bulbous to be a bike, but it’s passable, and better than some efforts. Curiously, there’s a sculpted tailpipe next to her rear wheel, and the details of it make me think more of Road Pig. Another possible repaint in the future?
Funny how these two wound up being about the same size.
In terms of construction, the bike mostly holds together really well, but the force needed to detach accessories from her weapons ports can cause the body to come apart, necessitating a quick peg-plug-in. Not the worst, but not as stable as she could be.
War for Cybertron: Generation 2 contains a surprisingly cohesive red-and-black motif.
The sculpt might not be much of a homage, but the colors certainly are, and she’s cast in red and black, with bits of blue and silver detailing, with light-blue clear parts. There’s more black on her than the original, owing to the needs of the transformation, but it matches up decently, and even includes blue paint on the seat of the bike, in imitation of the original. Plus, they found a budget to not only paint her wheel rims, but include a neat-looking red outline. One thing I wish they’d found space to include, though, is the “T950” tampo on the side of the original. There’s less real-estate on this sculpt, but surely they could have squeezed it in there. Still, red and black’s a classic look, and this figure pulls it off well.
*the motorcycle noise from the start of his opening theme plays*
An important, neat thing that the designers confirmed was intentional with this figure: This motorcycle is specifically scaled to go with 3 and ¾ inch action figures, like GI Joe, or Star Wars.
Transformers: No One Knows What Lies Behind the Masquerade.
And sure enough, if you have anything that size that can grip handlebars, they can ride her, though it’s a complicated enough setup that a 5-points-of-articulation figure can’t really pull it off, you need, like, elbows and knees.
Otherwise, this happens.
That, and the bulky shape of the bike makes it a bit of a challenging grip. Still, it’s an appreciated feature, and it leads to some fun crossover opportunities.
I never saw the AVP films, so for all I know, this happened.
For her accessories, Road Rocket comes with a transparent blue disc, which can also be split in half. In fitting with the ninja motif, there’s a gigantic black ninja star painted into it, which feels like the kind of silly thing they would have done in the 90’s.
Except the figure would have included, like, disc-launching action.
It’s got pegs on the top and bottom (that split when you divide it in half), and a hole on each side, in addition to a peg and hole at the split, so you’re clearly meant to combine this with other Legacy weapons and figures for uber-combinations. On Road Rocket, you can stash the halves in weapons ports on either side of her rear wheel…
Not as much of an obstacle as it feels like it should be.
…or on an additional pair just behind her seat, and it has to be halves, there’s no clearance when it’s a unified weapon, which is a bit of a shame.
Call this the butt-slicer.
For other features, she has an all-important, workable flip-down kickstand, and both of her wheels roll pretty nicely, which is about all you can ask of a motorcycle.
Transformation
So, Road Rocket’s theoretically not a partsformer, but in practice, basically is. Her front wheel can come off, as per the instructions, and in an undocumented feature, the whole front of the bike (windscreen, headlights, side panels), also comes off, apparently so the versions of this tooling packaged in robot form can fit in the box. And both fits are loose enough that they’ll probably come off anyway.
The full disassembly.
Honestly, though, it’s easier to pop them off and set them aside until you’re done, and it’s a feature I wish more Transformers were open to including.
As for the rest of the transformation, it’s easy to go from vehicle to robot, since you’re unclipping and unfolding a bunch of stuff, but it’s a challenge to go the other way. There’s a waist twist, followed by her legs exploding and wrapping around her in a complicated way that took me reversing the instructions to figure out. I eventually had it solved, and the whole thing’s pretty clever, but it’s hardly intuitive.
One last tip, when going to robot mode: Her waist can actually plug into the back of her abs to stabilize the robot mode figure, if you give her lower torso a push forwards until it snaps in.
Basically, push that lower strut forwards until it clicks.
The downside is that same joint’s liable to pop out when dislodging it to go the other way, though it’ll at least pop right back in.
Robot Mode
So, this is a feminine humanoid body, with a fairly compact backpack of bike parts, and one thing about her is that said bike parts can be configured in several different ways.
The boring way.
The first way, suggested in the instructions, compresses the backpack, and has her tire hang low off of her back.
The Prime way.
The second way is unofficial. You remove the wheel, rotate the backpack upside down, and flare out the motorcycle’s side panels, to give her the same shoulder-wings as the original Transformers: Prime Arcee, a resemblance she needs, as it’s otherwise not a very close match.
The Generation 2 way.
The third way involves putting the backpack back the other way, and lowering it. You then split the removable front wheel in half along an axis, and plug it into a port at the small of her back. The behind-the-shoulders wheels that result from this are meant to imitate the same wheels on the original Road Rocket, so it’s the configuration I typically go with.
Disney’s lawyers are squinting at that backpack.
Road Rocket’s sculpt is very much a genericised female form otherwise, without much to specifically tie it to the original. On the other hand, given how kind of indistinct, bulky, and awkward-looking the original was, this is to be expected, and welcomed. It helps that it’s good-looking sculpt on its own merits, with only the wheels hanging off the legs obscuring a clean silhouette.
A face made of polygons.
The new headsculpt is the other big homage. As I said in my review of Road Pig’s redeco, Sideways, these two had these really sharp, angular headsculpts that made me think of early 3D polygonal graphics, and those angles are preserved here in this masked, helmeted face, with its upside-down triangular eyes. I do kind of feel like it’s a bit too big for her frame, but that makes me read it as the character literally wearing a helmet and mask.
Imagine she’s bowing to Sixshot, just off-camera.
The colors are the same red, black and blue, and mostly imitates the layout of the original, including the blue on her legs. It’s slick-looking. I appreciate the addition of the red G2 autobot symbol on her collar, and the translucent blue eyes. And they feature light piping, a rarity on modern figures, thanks to the back of her head being made out of translucent plastic. And it’s really good light piping, too, that catches light really easily.
I wasn’t even holding her directly under the lamp.
You know what she reminds me of, though? Windblade, the fan-created Autobot that’s had far too few appearances lately.
“Well, one of us is going to have to change.”
Road Rocket’s color scheme of red, black and blue, and the placement of the wheels on her shoulders in place of VTOL fans make me see a version of her where she trans-scanned a motorbike instead of a jet.
They’ve got air and land covered.
And in Robots in Disguise (2014), she even had a deployable battle mask, furthering the connection.
Double Trouble.
Road Rocket’s articulation is interesting. She has ankle tilts, and feet that can clamp shut, which makes her nice and stable, even with the backpack.
“Hiiii-YAH!”
Meanwhile, her waist is extremely limited, with only a little back and forth movement, unless you “unlock” your abs, but she has another rare feature for these kinds of figures instead: A generous up-and-down ab crunch.
Here’s the “up.”
They gave her swiveling wrists, and a head that manages to not be blocked by her backpack. It all combines into a figure that can do Ninja Poses really well.
I consider this a Ninja Pose.
I do wish her legs held together better, though, her shins have a tendency to become unpegged from the struts they’re on when you pose her.
Fight like it’s 1994.
Her accessories, meanwhile, have more use in this mode. Split the giant ninja star in half, and you can stick it in weapons ports on her forearms, like Prime Arcee’s wrist blades. They make for nice weapons to pose with.
She’s taking him down for besmirching the Laser Cycle name.
Meanwhile, pop her split wheels out, put them in her hands, and they form an…”Energon blaster,” thanks to two barely-perceptible gunbarrels in the front.
I guess those are barrels in the middle?
Really, it’s kind of silly, and just looks like a pair of wheels. Maybe it’s a saw blade?
Ramjet’s about to find out.
It looks more like one of those flying drones to me.
Up, up, and away!
In this configuration, you can peg the circular ninja star into her arm like a shield, too. I also found that if you rotate her hands just right, she can hold the combined like a big throwing star, which is just excellent.
Sadly, there’s no spring-loaded throwing action.
Her other weapons ports are on her backpack, and aren’t super-useful for Weaponizing, but you can stash accessories there.
On her way to Do a Murder.
Overall
The lost second year of the Generation Two Marvel comic.
Road Rocket’s kind of a messy figure in many ways, but an interesting one. It didn’t work as Arcee, but it works well as a half-homage to an obscure G2 guy. They have my number, they know what I like. The motorcycle’s fun (even if it’s got a bit too much folded-up-person), the robot looks good, and is fun to pose, but there’s a fiddliness and instability to the whole thing (witness the amount of stuff that likes to come unpegged) that prevents her from being perfect, though it doesn’t kill my enjoyment of the figure. I wouldn’t call this an essential figure, unless you’re building a G2 shelf like me, but it’s a tooling worth checking out, if you want a fairly well-executed bikeformer gal, especially since both this figure and Arcee seem to be sticking around on the shelves. That being said, I look forward to the Flamewar repaint I’ve got on preorder, for sure.
Aw, yeah. That’s the stuff.
For over 100 Bot, Non-Bot, and Retro Bot Reviews, click here to view my archive.
Trackbacks/Pingbacks