![]() There are a lot of flat panels that unfold-the rear fenders, the car doors, the rear bumper and tail lights. The robot legs tuck under the rear fenders, with the robot feet clipping together and using the heel struts to plug into the car body. The robot hips are no longer required to shift apart from each other. The arms lay underneath the front fenders this time, with the robot hands slipping into the fronts of the fenders. The robot head and chest do the same thing they did with the Generations release. Her transformation is similar to previous toys, and at first I was confident I could do it without the instructions, but I ended up having to check on a couple of key points. She comes with one small, grey blaster, which is screen accurate-it's the gun she used when shooting at the internal defense systems inside Unicron, and the one she carried in "The Dweller in the Depths" as well. Takara obviously didn't require it, since the Legends equivalent released in Japan wasn't colored this way! But, not even the right colors could eliminate those thunder thighs. I get that black plastic has greater tensile strength, but the copious black connector parts all over 2014 Arcee (her neck, knees, hips, etc.) ruined her look. The hands have been redone with an open palm that can still grip weapons, like the Scourge/Sweep toy.Īlso, the color mapping is finally correct. In place of the gigantic heel struts on the Earthrise toy, she's taken a minimalist approach and has small balancing tabs on either side of her heel, like a backwards Trypticon. Her Deanna Troi labor hips have been reduced in size, and the feet have been redone. The rounded abdomenal curvature, complete with belly button, that suggested an organic form is gone, replaced with the more stylized, trapezoidal-shaped hips that are consistent with her animation model. But, the rest of the toy got an overhaul. The shoulder pads with the skinny wheels connected to them, the robot chest, the head sculpt, all these things should seem familiar. The toy is similar to the 2014 Generations release, at least from the waist up. So, this time they went back to the 2014 toy, took what worked well, and rejiggered it a bit to make it even better. Hasbro must certainly have heard the fan feedback about Earthrise Arcee, who was one of the worst transforming toys from that assortment. It seems strange for them to address Arcee again so soon, after only a couple of years, but the Studio Series places emphasis on screen accuracy, so maybe it was the right time to try again. The emphasis on that toy was clearly the robot mode, but it was done so at the expense of everything else. She could either ride the car mode as a surfboard, or she could wear it on her body as the world's largest backpack. Really, she's an action figure that wraps a car shell around her body. It had basically a perfect robot mode in terms of screen accuracy, but to call the toy a Transformer would be a bit of a misnomer. Then a few years later, when John Warden was hellbent on giving us the definitive versions of Transformers: the Movie characters, we got Earthrise Arcee. It's likely he worked on perfecting it for years. ![]() That toy was designed by a Takara employee (Hironori Kobayashi) who had created it back before he even worked there, and it was a good enough fan design that it won awards at BotCon Japan, so that should tell you something right there. She was arguably the must-have toy of that year, despite some minor aesthetic issues (like the black connectors for her neck and limbs, and the weird random blue patches painted on her vehicle mode). So, after years of getting assorted Arcee toys that turned into spiders and motorcycles and things, we finally got the first really good Arcee toy in 2014, which turned into a pink car. I had previously pre-ordered this toy through Hasbro Pulse, but when I heard Amazon was already shipping her, I ordered through them instead, and she showed up today! Yay!
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