Dave's Transformers Legacy Rant: Commander Class

Motormaster (Truck/Battle Station/Skeletal Menasor)

Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Legacy/Motormaster

Okay, so a long-time thing for "3P" toys has been finding ways to be
slavishly show-accurate even when the animation design was kinda stupid or
outright impossible. Maybe adding thirty steps to get the waist tucked in a
little more tightly, or a pile of kibble only used in one mode. One
relatively recent trend for the "Scramble City" combiners (the ones where you
could put any limb on any torso in any position) is to follow the animation
model of basically "giant robot with vehicles stuck to the limbs." There's
no real transformation for the vehicles, other than what's needed to attach
to a limb that has a joint. We've seen that already with Dragstrip, whose
combiner mode is just "split in two, so part goes on the upper arm and part
on the forearm."
And that's how Menasor works now. You don't need any other Stunticons
to get a giant robot, the other four are just decoration.

CAPSULE

$85-90 price point, if you can get it through non-scalper channels.

Motormaster: A decent tractor-trailer that turns into a robot with a
battle station. The Menasor mode is basically complete in function, all the
Stunticons do is form decoration, which is kinda cheaty. On the low end of
recommended.

RANTS

Packaging: Well, at least for Commanders the whole windowless box thing
is not new. Like Kingdom Rodimus Prime, the box is 13" (33cm) by 11"
(27.5cm), but it's wider than it is tall, with vehicle mode featured on the
front. It's 4" (10cm) deep. Because the impressionistic color splatter art
makes it hard to judge depth or boundaries of scenery, it looks like the
other four Stunticons are R/C sized next to him, rather than being far below
or behind as he drives along an elevated (and rather narrow) roadway. The
left side has art of Menasor shooting something in the foreground, the top
has a render of the vehicle mode, the right side has the usual group shot
seen on other Decepticons in Legacy. The usual legalese is on the bottom.
On the back, the upper left is dominated by a render of skeletal
Menasor, with some callouts showing how Dragstrip and "Wild Rider" attach to
right and left boot respectively. Upper right is the vehicle mode, lower
right is Motormaster in robot mode manning the battle station made from his
trailer. The lower right shows how just the cab turns into Motormaster.
Yeah, to get the Sunbow Menasor, they basically had to abandon
Motormaster being the entire truck, now he's just the cab.
There's no QR code on the box or on the instructions. I also checked
all the box flaps, looked around for loose paper with a code, etc. And you
can't just browse the entries on Hasbro's site, it's code or nothing. (The
HasbroPulse store listing for Motormaster claims there's a code.)
The inside tray is cleverly folded up corrugated cardboard with a single
piece that can be just lifted away to reveal the truck. It rattled around
very little inside, despite the lack of any ties. However, there are reports
that the trailer wheel struts to suffer damage in shipping.
The instructions only show how to attach Dragstrip and Wild Rider, with
no mention of the as-of-August-2022-unrevealed other two. Presumably they
attach the same way as their opposite side counterparts, or their own
instruction sheets will clarify things.

DECEPTICON: MOTORMASTER
Assortment: F2987
Altmodes: Menasor Skeleton, Tractor-Trailer, Battle Station
Transformation Difficulty: 45 steps (vehicle to Menasor), 23 steps (trailer
to battle station), 23 steps (cab to robot)
Previous Name Use: Motormaster - G1, Gen:CW. Menasor - G1, Classics,
Titanium, Gen:CW
Previous Mold Use: None
Function:
Special Unit:
Origin Universe:
Signature Weapon:

STR XX INT XX SPD XX FRB XX

I'll leave the missing info blank for now, maybe we'll get a QR code as
part of a livestream or something later. However, since they usually go with
G1 as a guide, Function is probably Stunticon Leader (Motormaster) or Super
Warrior (Menasor), Special Unit is Stunticons, Origin Universe is G1,
Signature Weapon is either Cyclone Gun or Ionizer Sword (they usually just
pick one), STR 10, INT 3, SPD 2, FRB 9.
Note, Classics Menasor is really a Motormaster redeco of an Optimus
Prime toy, but they lost the Motormaster name for a while, as evidenced by
the "Motormouth" Optimus redeco from 2012.

Packaging: No ties, just truck mode held in by folded and taped
cardboard. Note, the back of box renders show an extra joint in the ankles
that was removed at some point, either for drop test reasons or cost-
cutting. The toes cannot point down, just up.

Vehicle Mode: A black-cab, gray-trailer "sleeper cabover" tractor-
trailer as in G1, if a little short compared to its other dimensions.
The cab is mostly black with purple windows and some white bits that
look a little out of place but are a result of the white arms of the robot
mode from the G1 cartoon. The back end is really spindly, with a big gap
down the center because it's really just the four-wheel chunk on thin struts
with the robot arms pegged to the chunk. It's hard to get the arms in
properly (and at least one will probably not be proper right out of the box),
but once they're in properly they're VERY hard to get back out.
5.5" (14cm) long, about half of that is the cab part. Most of the
plastic is black, the exceptions being some shoulder roots tucked under the
rear of the cab. There's also white paint on the robot forearms, which
sticks out pretty badly where the arms are pegged under the rear half.
There's very faintly metallic purple paint on the main windows, the upper
tier of windows, the tech greebles on the roof, the fuel tanks molded into
the robot forearms, and some not-outlined (and therefore hard to see)
Decepticon symbols on the sides of the cab near the back. The grille and
front bumper are dark silver, while the wheel hubs are regular silver. The
headache rack is actually the robot chest and pelvis, with some gray and
purple paint.
It rolls okay on the six wheels. The trailer hitch is a 5mm socket, and
there's a 3mm socket right behind it (envisioning having it pull a tiny
trailer). There's two 3mm studs in back, so you can use Fire Blasts for jet
thrusts or something, but they're really there for stabilizing parts of the
Menasor torso mode.
The trailer is mostly a gray box and is kinda short for the size of the
cab, but that sort of thing happens a lot in Transformers. On its own it's
7.5" (19cm) long with Menasor's chest and some kibble poking out the front
like a refrigration unit. It's mostly silvery light gray plastic, with a few
purple bits (including part of the rifle) visible, some white joints in back,
black wheels, and white plastic for the hitch connection peg and the rather
bad kickstand (it's very hard to get out, and collapses very easily).
There's an interrupted purple stripe along each side, and a purple Decepticon
symbol printed on each side neat the front upper corner. As with the cab,
the wheel hubs are painted silver. There's a big silver and purple
Decepticon symbol on the front, since that's Menasor's chestplate.
The rear wheels are on panels that fold outwards, sometimes when you
don't want them to. There's no 5mm sockets on the outside, and in addition
to the hitch peg there's four 5mm pegs on top at the outside edges of the
rear third. There's no useful panels to open up, but you can pull off the
front third to access the stored sword without dismantling anything else. To
get the rifle, though, you need to take apart the roof some.
All together, it's 10.75" (27cm) long, and while the peg can be a bit
stiff, it does articulate.

Transformation of Cab to Robot: The forwards direction to get to robot
is fairly intuitive, despite the large number of cab panels that end up
folding into parts of the boots. It can be a little hard to see where the
slots are for tabs when you're putting a black tab into a black slot, but
once in place they're quite firm. Before you fold out the fists, you may
notice that there's 3mm sockets on the wrist stumps. While these can be used
for giving the robot tool-hands, they're intended to go on those two 3mm
studs on the back of the tractor. The front wheels fold under the feet,
which is nice in some ways, but does cause some issues.
You should probably pay closer attention than I did when first
transforming it, though, because getting back to vehicle mode is a
significant hassle. One tricky point is that the robot head does not store,
it just sort of hangs between the robot arms and forms the lowest clearance
of cab mode, I spent a lot of time trying to hide it better. Also, getting
the front wheels to fold back out is difficult on mine, the joint is really
stiff.

On Monday, August 8, 2022 at 9:21:20 PM UTC-6, Dave Van Domelen wrote:

> Anyway, while an interesting novelty this time, I rather hope that Hasbro
> doesn't continue to make this style of combiner.

There's no reason to think they would do it again. It was done for Menasor because that's how he transforms in the cartoon. Motormaster transformed into Menasor all by himself, and the other four Stunticons clamped onto Menasor's existing arms and legs like magnets. No other team did it this way.

Zob (my Motormaster is arriving tomorrow, if all goes well)