The King of the Road

Motormaster, anyway you look at him, the guy is a prick.  I think that’s kind of why I like him.  Adding a horrible, brutal bully who is a tough bugger just adds to the personality woes of the Stunticons.

When I first saw the Combiner wars images of MM, I was sceptical.  After all, where is his trailer?  Then the robot mode showed up and I still wasn’t convinced.  Then an (obvious) Optimus Prime remould came along and I thought, “Wow, they actually designed this toy as Motormaster first and Optimus is the cheap re-hash.”

As you can see, I obviously have a Motormaster, despite my reservations, so does he disappoint, or what?

The truck has a lot of black.

As I said in the Animated Motormaster review, I see MM here as the original Nemesis Prime.  Better than that though, he is actually a different character, as opposed to a clone or something.  This truck is black, very black.

Luckily it’s highlighted here and there with silver and purple.  The silver on the grill, bumper and touches of the side are reminiscent of the G1 toy’s  chrome on the front and the trailer on the sides.  The purple windows are still purple and look nice.  On the bed of the truck, he has a brown metallic colour which looks nice and finally he has silver hubcaps on the wheels.  

On the grill he has a teeny tiny Decepticon insignia, there is also one on either side of the rear “sleeper” part of the cab.  



The truck has a good amount of sculpting.

The sculpting is about what you would expect.  The grill is very nice, I do appreciate the little tow hook things attached to the bumper at the front.  He has some nice lines on the side, that lead your eye towards the smokestacks and Decepticon logos on the back.  He also has a convincing looking connector thing for where a trailer would go.

 

From the back though he looks a little awkward, as you have the Menasor groin plate stacked up against the rear of the cab.  It doesn’t really look like anything trucky.

Overall though, he’s a pretty nice, tough looking truck with lots of Decepticon colours.

Clear out!

Stunticons, TRANSFORM!

What I rather liked about MM’s transformation is that it is tough!  It starts with the side panels flipping down in a strong, determined manner, the way the arms unfold from underneath, the cab splits in half and folds to the side revealing his broad tough chest, a little bit of twisting the forearms for orientation, then fold down the legs, finally the rather cool flipping the head over from his hidden spot in the shoulders.  

It’s a very macho, powerful and fun transformation.  Not too flashy, not too simple.  I was pretty impressed when I first transformed him, just in the way he transformed alone.  That was without taking into account the robot mode.

Motormaster is here!

What a robot mode he presents!  His colours are strongly influenced by the cartoon show which means that dark colours are important, so his torso, waist and legs are a dark metallic grey (almost black) and the arms are a very nice matte silver.  It’s a stark contrast and leaves no debate as to whether MM is a good or bad guy.

To break up the black on the body, there is various shades of darkness and some purple.  On his legs, he has a few purple paint apps, which nicely replicate the look of the G1 truck windows in a modern way.  His chest has a little application of purple in the middle, which coincides nicely with his light purple face.  Naturally encased in a box.

His back is mostly black with a few purple highlights die to it being the chest of Menasor.
His arms have the silver as previously mentioned before, but is broken up by using the joints in a rather cleaver way, segmenting each batch of silver so it isn’t overwhelming.  

He isn’t THAT colourful a robot so you might think he’s boring, however he isn’t due to



Motormaster’s Robo MUSCLES




Ambient sculpting on this guy is very nice.  The main area of concern is his broad chest, but he has some very nicely sculpted details in there to break up the various levels of dark and to attract the eye.
It manages to hit the right balance between enough and not too much.


I was initially concerned that he would look like he has a huge backpack, because of the need to have Menasor’s head and chest on his back, but in toy form, it certainly doesn’t look too big.  In fact without it, he would look rather slim.
 
 



 
His head is a head in a box.   It’s nice and unfriendly looking, the forehead hangs right over the small eyes, sliver nose and frowning small mouth manage to give him a mean look, which is aided by his sharp, angular cheeks.  There is a lot of personality on this toy.

It ain’t a nice personality, but it IS personality.

Mine is aided in that he has a case of Heterochromia.  One of his eyes is black, while the other is red.  Darn.  One day I’ll get around to fixing it, but it looks ok.

 



 
 
That’s a well articulated truck                                                    bot.

MM comes with a lot of nice articulation.  

• Ball head
• Hinged shoulders, with forward back as well as up/down.
• Bicep swivel.
• Hinged elbow (comes from transformation.
• Hinged wrists (not really THAT useful)
• Swivel waist
• Ratcheted hips, slightly hindered by sculpt, but can go in most directions .
• Thigh swivel
• Hinged knee
• Hinged middle of foot (Tfing joint)

His balance is pretty good and so far I’ve found it to be a lot of fun posing him and can usually get him to do what I want. 

I particularly like his head joint as his box head is above the shoulders by just a mm or two, and allows you an all important ability for Motomaster,


The ability to look down on people.


 

OMG, it’s soooo good.  Just that slight angle down of his head and he goes from looking like a horrible prick, to being an arrogant, horrible prick.

Sorry Stunticons, your boss is an arsehole, there’s just no nice way about it.


That’s a BIG Motormaster you’ve got there (not a metaphor).

Luckily, old MM here is sporting the size category of voyager, making him a size up on the other Stunticons, a fact that must irritate Dragstrip a lot.  That means that when you have these guys all together, they just look awesome with MM towering over them and looking super buff. 
 

 

Being a truck, you’d expect his robot mode to be chunky as well and luckily they’ve managed to get quick a bit of perceived mass to him.  Very very cool!

Chop chop blam blam

MM also comes with a sword and gun.  They are both silver, which is nice for the sword.  The gun, well, I think it’s a little too silver.  The reason for that though is that they combine together to become Menasor’s sword.  

I’m fine with that, but I do wish the gun handle was a bit more centred.  Then the gun could have looked a bit more rifle like.  As it is, it’s a very long, heavily front balanced pistol.  The sword is just about the right size, but no wrist guard seems to bother me a lot for some reason.

 
Of course they can be mounted on the vehicle mode too, but it looks awful.  They just plug together and then plug into the back of the truck. It’s boring and slightly crap looking.
 

Motormaster says “Shaddup”

In summary, Motormaster is actually a rather nice toy.  Even without his trailer, which made up the good parts of MM and Menasor in the olden days, it’s a cool toy.  The colours manage to invoke the feeling of the cartoon well, the robot mode is bulky enough and the truck mode, well, it’s a black truck.  

His size, articulation, sculpting and transformation schematic all manage to combine to make an interesting and fun Transformer that’s personality is pretty much immediately identifiable.