The original Transformers animated series may have ended in 1987, but over in Japan, they kept it going (ignoring the brief fourth season), releasing three full-length anime TV show sequels over the rest of the decade, The Headmasters, Super-God Masterforce, and Victory. I watched them all when Shout Factory subtitled and released them locally around 2012 (a decade ago! Sheesh!), and out of all three of them, Masterforce wound up being my favorite, largely because of how unique it was.
Minerva’s lower-left, in the red armor.
See, Masterforce was a human-focused show, with only a few Autobots around (most of which disguised themselves as humans through Pretender shells). The show focused on a team of people who could use the Master-Braces to pilot, control, and merge with sparkless Transformers bodies called Transtectors (as either Headmasters or Powermasters), to fight off a combined Decepticon/Evil Human Collaborator attempt at conquest. Toy-wise, Masterforce was mostly made up of re-releases and repaints of the Western 1988 range of stuff, including this character, Minerva, whose figure was a repaint of Nightbeat (and, in fact, the first female Transformer figure to make it to market).
The G1 Original famously had the name “Minelba” on the box, due to bad translation.
The human Minerva was a half-french, half-japanese teenager (because every Anime War needs teenagers to fight it), whose status as high-class, poised, fancy ambassador’s daughter was played for contrast against the more lunkheaded boys on her team. In her Transformer form, she mostly served in a medic and rescue role, and had a whole character arc about overcoming the fear of battle to fight for justice.
One season later, her now-sentient robot form would appear in Transformers: Victory.
More recently, an alternate, Cybertronian version of the character (so, no human inside) was a part of the newest iteration of the Wreckers in IDW’s Wreckers: Treads and Circuits miniseries. It turned out that she was there to promote this new figure of the character, who’s a retool of Legacy Elita-1, and exclusive to Gamestop here in Canada, and Walgreens down south. It’s also, more notably, the first time any version of Minerva’s gotten a wide Western release, and the first time her G1 self’s gotten a full transforming robot figure since the original. As a fan of the show, this was too good to pass up.
Robot Mode
Minnie Elba.
This is more of a new spin on Minerva’s design, than a cartoon-accurate or toy-accurate one. To get technical, everything but the head was really sculpted as Elita-1, more specifically the version from the War for Cybertron show, so a lot of her detail (arms, pelvis) are specifically from that. But really, it’s all soft-focus detail that’s different, it basically looks correct, unless you’re doing a side-by-side comparison (and there’s something to be said for how she calls back to the recent Prime Wars Trilogy era when slavish cartoon-accuracy wasn’t mandatory.) It helps that the bulky lower legs, and the extended backpack pylons are Minerva-specific details, so the silhouette is hers.
The Lady Carformer’s Burden.
While not quite as Overtly Woman Shaped as Arcee, Minerva’s still a female car-former with most of her altmode folded into a backpack, though at least they did a good job of compressing it, and those shoulder pylons make it seem more like a design choice, and less of an engineering burden. It feels right for the character, too, she’s probably got first aid supplies stashed there.
The figure isn’t a Headmaster anymore, but you can pop the head off if you really try.
It’s funny how much the head is Nightbeat Minus The Visor, or just Toy-Accurate Nightbeat, with the exact same helmet. I really like the softer, cartoonish face, and the toy-accurate Neutral Expression doubles as feeling very Super Robo-esque.
Divergent Evolution.
One other tiny bit of sculptwork I like: The sculpted pistons behind her legs to “beautify” the hollow bits, I like it when that level of effort is put in.
More figures should do this.
Minerva’s colors are actually really nice, and feel a bit extra. She’s got a lot of alternating white and red, some gray, some blue, a bit of orange on the face, and black wheels. Pains seem to have been taken to follow her Masterforce cartoon color breakdown, and it does a good job of following it, minus some leg paint, but that’s fine. She feels “complete,” and a little premium.
As an Autobot medic, she has to help with this once a week.
The biggest loss is an Autobrand on her chest, though. There’s even a space for one at her collar! Maybe I have a spare Toyhax one lying around.
She’s devastated by it.
So, the big drawback on her is simply that her build quality doesn’t feel great. A big part of it is the backpack, because nothing on it pegs in. There’s supposed to be a big flat peg that goes into a hole on her back, but it doesn’t actually secure or lock in any way at all, so the pile of car parts flops around pretty freely.
That tab is more of a suggestion.
As for the parts themselves, everything else is just kind of held on friction, including her shoulder pads, which stay in place fine, but lack a definitive-feeling “final” positon. Her waist, and most troublingly, her ankles similarly feel really loose when they’re not snapped into place, and her feet are likely to dangle when you pick her up.
That being said, she poses just fine.
Here’s the thing, though: Despire this, nothing on her is actually broken, or non-functional, and it doesn’t stop her from being an Action Figure. She can stand fine (no small feat with that backpack), pose well, and everything stays in place. It’s almost like they knew the tolerances would be wonky, and engineered around it.
She definitely did this at least once on the anime.
Articulation, meanwhile, is really good. She’s got those loose, but present ankles and waist, on top of swivelling wrists, a ball-jointed head, and lots of limb swivels. Those shoulder pylons, and indeed, her whole backpack, manage to stay out of the way of poses, too, and thanks to how they transform, you can even get her lower legs to do that kind of knock-kneed Anime Girl pose that Minerva and characters of her archetype assume from time to time.
Maybe they shoot, like, pills or something.
Minerva’s oddly well-armed for a medic, coming with two rather large guns, one clear, and one painted over in black (sculpted to resemble the original Minerva’s black weapon.)
“Thanks for the assist, but my name’s not Ginrai.”
She looks good posed with them, and her flexibility can get put to good use being extremely non-pacifistic.
“BE HEALED!!!”
I really appreciate that she doesn’t feel under-armed like so many Siege and post-Siege figures do.
Stopping Overlord before he can do harm qualifies as healing, in her books.
“Take two shots of this, and call me in the morning.”
Speaking of that, she’s lousy with accessory ports, in a good way. She’s got two holes on one gun, and two pegs on the other.
Double Healing Blast!
On her body, she’s got two ports on each foot, one on each lower leg, one beneath each arm, one on each shoulderpad, and one on her back.
You know you messed up when the doctor comes in like this.
The port on her back, meanwhile, typically has a clear red ambulance siren (with a painted white center) mounted on it, which you can pop off, or just leave on, since it’s also got a port on top of it.
Having a siren on your forearm must be really annoying.
Partially because of the ports, but also partially just because of her design, she’s got an air of customizable flexibility to her.
Walking gun turret mode?
I find myself seeing if I can do something with the parts of her backpack, and I’ve already seen some interesting fan modes making use of both the backpack, and those ports.
I just imagine this waddling slowly.
Transformation
Like other Carformer Ladies, Minerva’s a complete shellformer. You flop her face-first, compress her legs, unfold the entire car from her backpack, and then start fiddling with pegs and holes to snap it all into place. It’s about mid-tier in terms of Shellformer difficulty, not as elegant as it could be, but not the kind of Panel Hell that Shellformers can have. I thought I was really in trouble, and that things didn’t hold together, until it was pointed out to me that her wrist-swivels are needed for transformation, because her hands need to point a specific way to properly fit into her shell, and that turned out to be the keystone to make the whole thing work.
How it all needs to look. Pay close attention to the hands.
Well, kinda work, a lot of stuff still doesn’t fit together very well. Her arms don’t like to plug into the bit of cockpit flap above them. Or the shoulderpads in front of them. And those shoulder don’t like to plug into the hood very well. The whole thing, at least, is designed so that it holds together pretty solidly if the tabs aren’t all 100 percent in.
Vehicle Mode
The image of this zipping around corners makes me happy.
When the Elita version of this scrunched, bubble-domed Cybertronian car made its debut, pretty much everyone laughed at it, and myself and others compared it to The Homer, Mr. Simpson’s poorly-designed, company-bankruptingly-expensive concept-car from the second season of The Simpsons.
Okay, but, for real, make this retool happen as a Collaborative, please.
But the deco, the lightbar, and the presentation this time around actually make it work with Minerva.
She fits right in with the Medical Patrol.
She’s an almost chibified buggy of a car, a small, fast-looking first-aid vehicle, who in some continuities is driven by a literal high-schooler, so it fits.
Complete with four sets of Batmobile Jets!
It’s definitely nothing like her Earth-styled vehicle in Masterforce, but it feels natural for who she is.
Another case of extremely divergent evolution.
Again, the engineering seems to have taken the jankiness of the tolerances into account, so, while the whole car mode holds together well, there’s a lot of gappy seams where things don’t quite stay in place, including around the hood, with some very big gaps on either side of it.
The most dicey section.
The feet still like to do this.
It’s a shame, because looking past that, there’s a lot of nice little sculpted detail and panel-lines.
“Still not Ginrai.”
The car’s mostly white with red trim, and we finally get an Autobrand on the hood. It seems that the price for the really nice robot deco was that this mode feel a tad bit under-painted, though, with its solid white headlights and front bumper. At the top of the mode, there’s a clear blue cockpit with tech details sculpted in, though all we can see through it is her waist. Her wheels are solid black, but the contrast with the white body means I prefer them that way.
A teamup issue that never was.
For features, there’s no dedicated gun storage, but a lot of ports you can use, again. There’s now an impressive three ports on each side of the car, and four on the back, as well as the one on the roof that holds the also-has-a-port ambulance siren, meaning you can turn this tiny medical car into the most armed-up thing ever.
Call an ambulance, but not for me, etc. etc.
Oh, and it also rolls really well.
Nyoooooom!
You’d think there’d be an issue with ground clearance, what with her whole body just kind of hanging underneath, but there’s actually room!
Overall
A scene from the lost Wreckers: Treads and Circuits 2.
This is a weird one. There’s a lot of flaws, but also she’s also a lot of fun? Like, the wonky handfeel and tolerances are definitely present, and definitely an issue. She’s not as solid-feeling as her Deluxe Legacy peers. But at the same time, that feels almost like it was understood and worked around in the engineering stage, and it doesn’t actually affect her ability to function as a figure. She poses well, has a lot of personality, and even has a spark of flexibility that makes you want to fanmode her a bit. Even her adorable, characterful buggy-car mode doesn’t like to peg together, but works well enough to not come to pieces anyway.
Exhaust: “Why’s he small? Maybe because I’m not Wheeljack, and have no idea what I’m doing, like I keep telling you!”
This is such a weird case, I don’t know whether to even recommend this or not. I like her, in spite of the issues. And on the scale of “good female car-formers” it’s definitely higher up on the curve, I’ll say that. It’s also the best Minerva, and good addition to your medical ranks. That’s not faint praise, either, she’s still legitimately fun on her own merits. So, yeah, I guess that’s a cautious recommendation.
This is a good character dynamic. More about the other half next week.
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