Bot Reviews Special: Building the Perfect Generations Optimus Prime

It’s the most basic thing I could say as a Transformers fan, but really, Optimus Prime himself, specifically his G1 iteration, is one of my favorite characters in the franchise. There’s a lot of reasons why, but one of them is just him being an all-timer when it comes to good character design. Naturally, this means I’m an easy mark for figures and merchandise that capture his classic cartoon look really well, which is what Earthrise Optimus Prime set out to do, with some mixed results.

We all have our odd collecting fixations. In my case, as soon as I realized there were options available, I decided to start building the perfect mainline Generations Optimus Prime, which involved purchasing multiple figures and upgrade sets, and combining them into one uber-figure. Because I feel the need to have some reason to have undertaken this journey, I’ll chronicle this Convoy Quest here, as a record of my madness.

Step One: Earthrise Optimus Prime’s Trailer.

Honestly, this journey began because I was a little dissatisfied with Earthrise Optimus Prime’s vanilla release. It wasn’t really a bad toy, at all. In fact, it was quite good, like most War for Cybertron Trilogy figures. It was just missing a few things about it that made it shy of perfect. The cab robot was nice enough, with one distracting issue: His blue eyes combined with the rest of his head to get oddly lost in the sculpt, making him appear dead-eyed. 

It was the trailer that was the real problem, though. Sure, it was fun to play around with, full of weapons ports, and neat little twists, like how the crablike drone uptop was removable, and could clip onto other figures thanks to making use of War for Cybertron weapons ports. However, in other ways, it was kind of anemic.

Firstly, Roller was nowhere to be seen, and I consider that little buggy to be an important part of the whole G1 Optimus Prime Experience. Secondly, the trailer had almost no color to it, especially on the crab drone uptop, which was cast in solid, unpaintable grey plastic, instead of the proper blue-with-orange-cockpit, and it really didn’t look great. 

Some of this likely had to do with all the last-minute color and deco changes Earthrise Optimus went through, evident from all of the different looks he sported in promo pictures. At one point, his eyes were going to be toy-colors yellow, and at other points, some of his plastics were going to be blue, in order to make the trailer-drone the right color. But he also had other issues they managed to fix, like grey robot-mode fists.

It sounds like there was a lot of trouble behind-the-scenes with making this guy look as good as he could within a Leader-class budget, so I’ve got a lot of sympathy for the designers. But, for my manic fixation on having a perfect representation of Optimus, it wasn’t quite there. 

The funny thing is, in the long run, the trailer is the only part of this release I wound up keeping.

Step Two: The Centurion Accessory Pack’s Optimus Upgrades.

After Earthrise Optimus Prime came out, there was at least one third-party upgrade kit planned out for him that included a Roller, and several other extra bits. And it still looks pretty good, but I lost sight of it after Hasbro released its own set of upgrades, a part of the Generations Selects Centurion Accessory Pack, which I reviewed last year. 

Earthrise Optimus Prime got the lion’s share of specific accessories, including that all-important Roller. He also got his clear yellow Energy Axe, a second, extra-large rifle, and the rocket pack he borrowed from Sideswipe during the show’s pilot miniseries.

While I don’t consider those latter things essential to a “perfect” Optimus (especially considering the rocket pack’s solid grey instead of show-accurate red), I appreciate their availability. 

Honestly, since this pack restored the most critical missing parts of him, I could have stopped here. But the reveal of other products made me want to take it one step further.

Step Three: War for Cybertron Trilogy Optimus Prime, for the main robot (and weapon).

The Trilogy release of Optimus Prime (which basically everyone calls Netflix Prime, since it even has the streaming service’s logo on the box) came without the trailer, and basically fixed the lone issue I’d had with Earthrise Optimus’s deco, as well as making a few other critical improvements I didn’t even realize he lacked until I saw this version.

Firstly, swapping out the lighter blues for darker ones immediately eliminates the problem of his eyes getting lost in his head sculpt, and they’re now brilliantly visible. Plus, it tweaked a couple other things in ways that I thought improved on him, namely removing some of the grey from his legs and swapping it to blue, and making his gun solid black, instead of black with grey parts. 

On the subject of those big, obvious changes of a darker blue and grey windows, a lot of people instinctively think these colors are less screen-accurate, but really, if you look at G1 cartoon screen captures, you’ll see that he’s actually a darker blue most of the time on the show, and has greyish windows.

It’s more so modern merchandise (and modern portrayals in comics and other media) that have shifted our perception of G1 Optimus into a lighter color palette.

So, because of all these little improvements, this guy’s become the main robot of this set I’m building up. His two Battlemaster companions, Eneraxe and Sheeldron, are surplus to requirements here, but the good thing about Battlemasters is that they’re made to be shared, so other robots can wield them.

And that was it when it came to official stuff. But it turns out there was one more upgrade I was after, and it was less-than-official, though it’s the mildest form of it.

Step Four: Toyhax’s sticker set for Earthrise Optimus Prime, for the trailer.

So, let’s talk a bit about Toyhax, or as they were known until recently, Reprolabels. They’re technically an unofficial third-party company, but they’ve existed for so long (since at least 2001, maybe earlier) that they predate the whole idea. When they first got into the game, their main product was high-quality reproductions of the stickers that came with old Transformers toys, so you could refurbish your vintage figures. They still do that, but over the years, their main business became upgrade sets for Transformers (and other toys), in the form of stickers (and the occasional plastic part).

I’ve bought a few things from them over the years, and can attest that the best part of their products is how durable their stickers are. In particular, you can apply and remove them multiple times without ruining them if you make a mistake, something I appreciate. The perceived downside to their upgrade kits is that they’re often seen as a bit excessive, slathering every surface of a figure with more details than they need. Their Earthrise kit is no exception, and includes odd details like cell-shaded stickers to paste over his windows, and silver stickers to go over painted silver bits on his body, to make them….more silver? 

However, I’ve always been of the mindset that you don’t have to apply every sticker in a set, just the ones you like. And in this case, I felt that the paintwork and deco on Netflix Optimus was already great, so I entirely used the stickers on that plain-looking Earthrise trailer, to give it the toy-accurate details it was missing.

The funny thing is that, when it comes to the trailer base, most of the interior detailing of the original G1 toy wasn’t present on the TV show model. On the other hand, that show model rarely appeared, and wasn’t drawn consistently, so in my mind, I picture the trailer base as looking more like the original toy, which is why this sticker set works for me. It can’t totally make the crane blue, but it can add a bit of blue to it, and more importantly, make the cockpit yellow.

Really, this was the most extra thing I bought, because Toyhax sets aren’t cheap (this one ran me about 25 bucks Canadian), and I’m only using about a third of it. So, was it worth it? Well…

The end result.

So, this is the end of my Convoy Quest. Certainly, I’m enamored with the results. This is basically it, when it comes to a G1 Optimus. He’s got the right colors and the right trailer, with the right accessories and details. 

This is also basically it, when it comes to a G1 Optimus in mainline scale.

Like, I don’t see myself buying another one, if they decide to revisit the design in a few years, because there isn’t much they can do in the way of improvement.

And even then, the amount of effort I put into getting this whole set together would probably keep me attached to it. 

So, thanks for joining me on this obsessive journey to create the perfect version of the big red guy. May you never get as fixated on one figure as I’ve been.