Friday 15 May 2009

Rock the Casbah

Well, I apologise for my tardiness! A bit of a delay getting 'round to this, a review of yet another excellent figure - Mirage. Yes, I know, these reviews are getting to be a bit like a stuck record (don't worry it won't be long till I get to 2.0/Universe)

Mirage, as with most of the original Classics line, is a character that first appeared in the first year of G1. I never owned the original toy, so I have no memories (fond or otherwise) of the original. Mirage is, however, a character that I have always felt was criminally underused in both comic and cartoon.
A aristocratic spy with no particular affinity to the Autobot cause, Mirage strikes me as a character with bags of internal conflict for a writer to exploit. Perhaps his time will come.

In time honoured fashion, I shall begin with a review of the vehicle mode. Mirage used to be a 1970s F1 race car, now he's a generic race car that looks quite a lot (but not the same) as a F1 race car (or Indy car for you Yanks). There's not a lot to say about the toy as such - it's a toy car, it has 4 independent wheels (no suspension). You give it a push, it rolls across a flat surface a fair way.
As far as the deco is concerned, Mirage is blue and white as has always been the case, and he still sports the number 26. The adverts tampographed to the toy offer a few nice homages - to the Autobots' human friends and the robotic race wiped out by Unicron early in the animated Transformers movie.

After a very satisfying transformation, Mirage stands as a willowy, yet powerful looking robot. This toy must also be one of, if not the, most poseable Transformer yet. 14 points of articulation. It doesn't sound much, but you can get some fantastic poses out of this toy. A nice touch is that the nose of the car becomes Mirage's pistol, which seems a fitting weapon for a sneaky spy.

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