Stunticons, Stunticons, how shall I count the ways I love you?
One Mississippi, two Mississippi. Man, Mississippi is a strange word when you type it out.
Going along with my love for evil Decepticon cars, I have here the beautiful Wildrider. Having been stunned at the Delightful faithfulness of Dragstrip and being super impressed at how close Wildrider's vehicle mode looked to the original Ferrari 308 GTB, I had to get this guy. Plus I was determined to finish Menasor. So here I will be talking about the Legacy version of Wildrider as I count down to Menasor.
How is he?
Pretty much exactly as one would expect.
Robot mode has him looking very square, also pretty darn close to the look of him in the G1 cartoon and just like Dragstrip there is a lack of colour on his pants. However his torso manages to make up for that by hogging all the attention. One controversial aspect to this iteration of WR is that the designers decided to make the bonnet on his back split up. It was described in a Hasbro Pulse thing as a type of cape. The idea was to emulate his look on the cartoon, where there were no car parts, and I can appreciate what they've tried to do, but it doesn't really work too well. In fact, I would say that having it hang down makes it look more obvious, and it also hinders movement in the arms quite significantly.
However, if you ignore that part of the bonnet and just leave it whole, you don't hinder the arms as much and the top of the car sticks up maybe a millimetre more than with the bonnet split. I don't really see any pay off to having the bonnet breakup like that.
Moving on, the torso has some really nice detail and crisp pant applications that make him look very G1. The legs, well, they're relegated to just enjoying the sculpt. There is a decent amount of nice car sculpting.
Oddly, there is the option for lightpiping his head. Normally I'm a big fan of this, but here, I am not. Mainly because it doesn't work. The plastic is red, so if you cram some light in there, you'll get a red glow. However, the astute among you will have noticed that his face is also red. So, it if worked, it actually wouldn't work. If that makes sense. To make his eyes stand out normally though, they've slapped some blue paint over them. The blue eyes are much better than his possibly glow ones.
Unlike Dragstrip, Wildrider here doesn't quite have the same success with his weapons storage. You can stash a gun on the back of leg, which is the same port that's used for weaponising his vehicle mode, but it doesn't look too cool.
The guns do look pretty cool though, I really like the metallic purple colour on them. Again, they can be joined together, but again, it doesn't really look all that fantastic.
On his butt, he also has a plug for a flight stand, but for some reason, I couldn't get anything all that exciting out of it. Annoyingly this plug is stashed behind his feet in vehicle mode making it rather inaccessible. But anyway, it's there, so I guess having it is nice.
I think Legacy has received a nice upgrade from the others and while I though that the UW one was a lovely toy, having the extra feet articulation and I guess, more classic body has won me over. However, I will freely admit, that Legacy WR has a lot less to do for Menasor than any other Wildrider-like I have. Also, I'd like to add, that all their face sculpts are just fantastic!!
Articulation on this guy is actually pretty good and he has a really nice ankle tilt and a standard amount of articulated joints with relatively little hindrance. Once the bonnet has been sorted for robot mode that is.
With his snazzy, decent articulation and dual wielding options, he is a solid little fun toy. The guns are cool and wouldn't it be awesome if you could use the effect parts they popped out so frequently just a quick series ago?
Yes, yes it would.
but can you?
No, no you can't.
Unless you hold them yourself.
Okay, now let's get on to the vehicle mooooooode!
Hnnnng, that is a goood looking car. I just love the way it looks super 80s. The colours are well done and the main sections of paint are the red strip, roof and the Decepticon logo. They managed to match the colour of the paint over the translucent red roof extremely well! I also really like the little port in the back of the car. Is it a homage to the foot connector? It could well be. To me it looks like a JET BOOSTER, along the lines of the Batmobile.
You can also stick the guns on the roof, it looks good (Roadblasters baby!). Underneath looks pretty clean as well and the sculpting there manages to make it look like car bits in there. He looks great when paired with Dragstrip too.
And now here he is sitting next to his other-universe counterparts.
As you can see, the Legacy one is quite a bit darker than the others. I think the vehicle mode also has a bit more character than the UW one. CW was a completely different guy, so aside from colours, its hard to compare them.
So, in that case, let's get someone similar, who I see as an honorary(less) member of the Stunticons:
Runabout also has the ability to ROADBLASTER himself as well. What a nice looking pair. They are also pretty similar in personality as well. What a sexy pair.
So to finish this up, while I absolutely adore the vehicle mode, I actually found myself a bit cool on the robot mode. It does nothing wrong and is by no means a terrible toy in any way, it just doesn't manage to do much that is very exciting, except for looking like a nice approximation of the cartoon character, while having a sexy vehicle mode.
Final Superfluous rating:
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