Dave's Transformers Power of the Primes Rant: Leader Wave 1 Evolution Optimus Prime with Orion Pax (Tractor and Trailer) Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Gen/LOptimus Okay, not the first Leader class Optimus Prime in Generations, but I named the Titans Return file PMOP. While I was still reviewing Rodimus Prime, I found Rodimus Unicronus...and Deluxe Wave 2. So it was really tempting to put this one off, do the quick retool review and then dive back into Deluxes, but I'm gonna finish wave 1 before I move onto any wave 2, by gum. CAPSULE Evolution Optimus Prime: Pretty good robot modes, but the vehicle modes (especially the cab) suffer from the fidelity to G1 animated Orion Pax. Mildly recommended. RANT Packaging: Same as Rodimus Prime. AUTOBOT: EVOLUTION OPTIMUS PRIME Assortment: E1147 Altmodes: Semitractor, Tractor-Trailer Transformation Difficulty: (Orion Pax) 15 steps, (Optimus Prime) 33 steps Previous Name Use: None with "Evolution" IIRC. Previous Mold Use: None Prime Master I Got: Megatronus (ah, irony) Prime Master Ability: Harnesses the Fallen's strength for noble purposes Weapon: Rifle Function: Archivist/Autobot Leader Motto: "I'm a Prime playing a Prime using the power of another Prime." When the humble ORION PAX becomes the bearer of the MATRIX OF LEADERSHIP, he evolves to become the noble leader OPTIMUS PRIME. Aside: I guess he got the Fallen's power along with his face? Packaging: A rattan string around the combined robot's waist holds a plastic shield over the entire torso. Technically six ties supplement this, but the two on the smokestacks don't need to be cut. One tie on the Matrix, two on the combined rifle. Robot Mode (Optimus): Well, from the front, it looks very much like the various Masterpiece Primes out there. Once you pan to the side a bit, though, there's a lot of gray trailer panels folded onto various places, plus a backback made up of Orion Pax's legs. The figure stands 9" (23cm) tall, in pretty much the classic Optimus colors aside from the aforementioned extra gray. The main additions are two sides of each forearm (the back of hand side and the underside of fist side), most of each boot, the outer and rear facings of each shoulder, and the big plates at the shoulder roots (which are extended to help cover up some of the Orion bits folded up in back). A lot of the red parts are painted gray plastic, too. Red plastic is used on the lower halves of the upper arms and...um, that's it for the non-Orion parts. It's used on a lot of Orion, though. The feet, ankle joints, boot fronts, and head are made of darkish blue plastic. Some visible hinges as well as the Orion legs on the backpack are also blue plastic. The chest is clear light blue, the rifle is black plastic. Pretty much everything else in this mode is silvery medium gray plastic. The matrix holder is silvery gray plastic, the core is clear light blue plastic. Lots of red paint, a bit less saturated than the plastic. Most of the torso except for the unpainted window bits and the grille, the shoulder fronts, the forearm parts that aren't covered by panels. Silver on the grille, the shin vents, the face, the forehead tablet. The eyes are painted bright blue, and there's dark blue (good match to the plastic) paint on the lower pelvis. The usual "belt" details are bright yellow, but there's no yellow on the roof lights molded into the top of the torso. The Matrix core is mostly painted over in golden yellow paint, but on mine the paint is so thick it makes it hard to get the core in and out of the holder. There's some decent small stickers on the forearms, kneecaps, and toes, and slightly wrinkled Autobot symbol stickers on the shoulder fronts. The head is on a somewhat restricted ball joint, and can nod and lift a bit...and hey, I just noticed a bit of mold flash on the jawline. Optimus has a cyberzit. Easily removed with a knife. (PSA: do not remove organic zits with a knife.) No waist articulation. The shoulders are hinge and swivel universal, with the swivel being at the lower rear corner of the shoulder box. The top panel of each shoulder is hinged to get out of the way when lifting the arms, letting Optimus lift his arms straight up without rotating the shoulders. The smokestacks are hinged for transformation, but this also lets them get out of the way when lifting the arms way up. There's a swivel at mid-bicep (where the gray plastic meets the red), hinge elbows, stiff swivel wrists. Universal joint hips, with the swivel part soft- ratcheting and the hinges smooth. The swivels below the hip joints are a bit restricted because they're mostly hidden inside the thighs. The stiff knee hinges can bend a little past 90 degrees. The ankles have both forward- backwards hinges and limited side-to-side hinges, plus transformation struts for a little more range of motion if you really need it. The rifle is mostly the classic G1 Optimus rifle in design, but with the addition of a second handle near the front so that it can split into two shorter weapons, as Rodimus had. Combined, it's a bit over 4" (10.5cm) long, the rear piece is 2" (5cm) long and looks like a hairdryer, the front piece is a decent 2.5" (6cm) pistol. The rear half or the combined rifle is held by a peg that is a bit too thick, I had to sand mine down a bit. It also has a pair of 5mm peg holes on each side for choices of positioning in trailer mode (the rifle goes into a gap between the arms), and a 5mm muzzle hole. The front piece has a 5mm peg, as well as a 5mm post in back for connecting to the back half (unlike Rodimus's rifle, which uses non-5mm pegs for combining). The muzzle of the front part is also 5mm, so another copy of the front end could be plugged in, or a sword for a plug bayonet, etc. Optimus is not flexible enough to hold the rifle by both pegs at once To get at the Matrix storage, first open up the chest panels. Then open up Orion's chest panels. Then, for some of us, wait for the Get Smart theme song to stop playing. But now the Matrix can be accessed, although getting it firmly in place without tiny fingers is difficult. As with Rodimus, the holder will fit most Prime Masters and Titan Masters, so of course I used my Diac for this: http://www.dvandom.com/images/primeception.JPG Transformation (Optimus): Unlike Rodimus, there's no difference between the Orion vehicle mode on its own and when connected to the trailer. The trailer just goes onto the tractor part, using the peg hole in the back of Orion's helmet as a hitch. Orion pops out of the torso after you push down a latch, and then transforms to either of his other modes as described below. The remaining "someone shot Optimus with a really big cannon" framework does a lot of panel folding to turn into the trailer. I was briefly confused because I tried to keep the smokestacks out, but they're solely for combined robot mode and are hidden inside the trailer. The "lift the arms all the way up" motion is needed for this, as you have to get it so that the shoulder fronts end up IN front when you fold the shoulder baseplates around to the front. Note, the rifle is meant to go into a gap in the roof, but it's difficult to get it in and out with the trailer fully transformed, you need to pop it apart a bit. Reassembling everything into Optimus robot mode is pretty easy. It's much more obvious where all the panels go on the limbs. I've seen a few base modes for the trailer, but mostly they look like Optimus had a horrible accident. If you put the chest facing down, this reduces that effect a little: http://www.dvandom.com/images/PoPOPbase.JPG Turning the chest and head chunk into the cab isn't too hard. Fold the legs down and rotate them so that the shins face each other, tuck the Optimus head away (helps to turn it backwards first), fold the arms back behind it. Optimus chest unfolds and becomes the cab sides. Orion's head becomes the trailer hitch. Vehicle Mode (Optimus): Yeah, they definitely put a premium on reproducing the rounded lines of Orion Pax's animation model, which hurts this mode a lot. Everything rearward of the cab on the tractor is just a mess of really obvious limbs folded into a very vague trucklike shape. The trailer is a bit better, working fine from the sides or rear, so-so from above, and only really bad from the front. If it could snug up against the cab more, that wouldn't be as much of an issue, but Orion's arms prevent that even if they'd set the connection peg farther back inside. Also, using the rifle to fill the gap in the roof is a bit weird. The heel spurs that lock Orion's boots in place in Optimus robot mode stick out from the sides of the very back of the tractor's rear fenders, almost scraping the surface. Separately, the cab is 5" (12.5cm) long, the trailer is 7" (18cm) long ignoring the rifle barrel sticking out the front (it adds about an inch/3cm), and all together the vehicle is 11" (28cm) long. While it's got some wonky proportions, assuming that the trailer is standard width gives about 1:40 scale. The colors are the standard Optimus Prime set, mostly, although the front of the trailer roof is red. There's actually two shades of red plastic in the cab, with the rear section being slightly darker. The cab has silver paint on the bumper, grille, and most of the mid-height stripe running around the cab front and sides. The side windows are painted bright blue with silver edges and silver side mirrors. There's silver windshield wipers, and yellow headlights with silver borders. The window pieces are clear light blue plastic, so they have red paint around the borders, fairly decent match. No paint on the roof details or the smokestacks. No other meaningful paint on the cab. The trailer relies on okay foil stickers along the sides for the stripes and Autobot symbol. There's some robot mode red paint on the front and top of the trailer. No paint on any of the wheels. The trailer hitch peg has enough freedom to let the cab turn about 45 degrees away from the direction of the trailer. There's a pair of 5mm peg holes on the rear half of the roof, and four 2mm pegs on the rear half of the roof. If you don't want to mount the rifle between the robot arms in trailer mode, it can split up and mount in the roof peg holes. The trailer has no fold-out legs to let it sit on its own without the tractor. Robot Mode (Orion): Well, from the front it does a pretty good job of looking like the more rounded G1 animation design of Orion Pax, although as noted already it really hurts the truck mode. He doesn't quite have the full lips from the cartoon, just a pouting lower lip. He has some issues with hollow parts, mostly in his arms, and stable standing depends too much on fairly loose toe hinges. But hey, this is really the first major release Orion Pax to try to look like the G1 version rather than something more IDW-inspired or whatnot. So points for making a very obviously non-toyetic design into a toy. They did darken the colors to match Optimus (in the cartoon, Orion had very light blue and had white/silver instead of gray), but the Optimus mode would have looked a bit weird with those light blue bits. It's possible to stow the Orion head and fold out the Optimus head, but it sits too far back on the torso and leaves a gap in front of it. This also looks really creepy and knockoffy. A lanky 6.5" (16.5cm) tall, standing above the height of most Deluxes but below Voyagers. As noted, he's mostly in Optimus Prime colors. Most of the torso and arms are bright red plastic. The chest front is clear light blue plastic with red paint on most of it. The collar, elbow joints, and thighs are silvery gray plastic. The head, fists, hips, boots, and some hinges on the backpack are dark blue plastic. There's armor pieces over the hips that are red plastic. In addition to the red paint on the chestplate, there's also yellow details below the chest-window, and silver abs. The face and "bell bottom cuff" details are painted silver as well. The eyes are painted bright light blue. The shin details are crooked (on mine) stickers, and there's a foil Autobot symbol sticker on the center of the chest. There's no paint on the fake wheel details on the outer facings of the boots (the real wheels are on the backs of the boots). The head is on a restricted ball joint, the waist does not turn. Ball joint shoulders, upper arm swivel, double hinge elbows. The transformation hinges on the wrists don't really grant meaningful articulation. The hips are ball joints, but the armor pieces over them are swivels to follow along with the leg movement. Swivels just below the hips, soft-ratcheting hinge knees, somewhat loose pinned hinge toes. Transformation (Orion): Legs connect together shin-to-shin and swing forwards, and you don't need to store the Optimus head from robot mode, otherwise basically the same as going from torso core to cab. There's an extra step that seems to have been left out, in which the forearms fold down and tab onto the chestplate. Still doesn't look GOOD, per se, but it's a lot more stable. Going even farther from the instructions, when going back to robot mode you can leave the cab side panels folded down and just move them to the back, making it look like like he's wearing Optimus's chest on his back. This also makes his backpack a little better spread out. It doesn't *quite* mesh properly, though. Vehicle Mode (Orion): Nothing extra to talk about here, unlike Rodimus it's exactly the same whether or not it's hooked to the trailer. Note, the trailer hitch hole is wider than 5mm so that the trailer is free to swivel, so no mounting a gun in that. Overall: Well, as I said earlier, points for doing a G1 cartoon Orion Pax reasonably faithfully, and the Optimus robot mode is pretty good too. The vehicle modes suffer, though. Dave Van Domelen, got even more of wave 2 while working on this review.