Samurai Prowl

Height: 15cm/16cm (Robot Mode/Samurai Mode head heights), 13cm (vehicle length)

Articulation: 17 total points- double-jointed neck; 2 points each arm: ball-joint shoulder, ball-joint elbow; ball-joint waist; 5 points each leg: ball-joint hip, thigh swivel, double-jointed knee, mid-foot ball-joint.

Colors: Molded black, tan, gray, and transparent blue. Painted gold and gray.

Accessories: Sidecar/Samurai Armor.

Release Data: Released January 2009 in the United States at a MSRP of US $10.99.

Gallery: 20 images.

Author: RAC

With Lockdown returning again and again to plague the Autobots, Prowl is determined to take him down, once and for all. To combat the Decepticon bounty hunter, he upgrades his body to its ultimate limit, adding weapons and armor until nothing Lockdown can do will stop him.

Optional Armor- I love the stuff. While it can introduce new problems to a toy, when done right you get a versatile toy with two different configurations. Or, in the case of a Transformer, three or more! So when I heard that Prowl was going to be rereleased later in the Animated line with such an upgrade, I knew immediately I had to hold out for that version. Finding out later, when the episode in question finally aired, that the armor itself became a sidecar for Prowl was the icing on the cake; for whatever reason, I really like sidecars, too. So this is pretty much the optimal toy for me, and it's largely, but not completely, living up to my high expectations.

Vehicle Mode

Prowl is a highway patrol motorcycle with, of course, a sidecar. (It's about the right size for 3-3/4- or 4-inch figures, too! Though not actually designed for them, so you may have to work at getting them on there.) Slick and streamlined, it comes as no surprise to me that Prowl bears some resemblence to the Kawasaki Ninja 250R. The lightbar and gold sergeant's stripes help tie in this Prowl to the original Prowl's police car alt-mode. Makes a heck of a lot more sense than a police racecar. Unlike the original release of Animated Prowl, his lightbar is entirely blue, presumably for reasons of cost- there's a lot more transparent blue to account for this time.

The sidecar matches Prowl's stylings perfectly- odd for a piece of equipment owned by Lockdown (twice), but it looks great, which is really the greater consideration for both toy and character designers. It's also completely removable, so you can have standard Prowl in both modes if you like. One of the tabs is on a hinged piece, though, so the sidecar sometimes wants to unfold when you try to pull it off. While Prowl rolls alright when combined with the sidecar, the bike rolls a fair bit more smoothly without it- only half of the sidecar wheel turns, so that's probably a big part of it right there.

Transformation

I'll cover the sidecar's transformation, and the description of the Samurai Armor, under the Accessories section. For now, let's focus on Prowl himself.

Changing Prowl to a robot is pretty simple but creative. The way the torso wraps around a central column is a perfection of the Classics Mirage transformation, using a ball-joint at the waist instead of Mirage's temperamental swivel. The only real trouble spot is Prowl's shoulders- the transformation joints are very stiff, and sometimes the arms pop off rather than swinging into the correct position. Now, changing Prowl back to a motorcycle is a bit more fiddly, as you have to fold up his legs and align things just so. The front kneecap plugs into the nose of the bike, and the sidepanels of the bike- Prowl's "wings" -tab into the rear heel. Getting that all to line up properly has been a bit of a fight for me, and the pictures in the instructions are designed to take Prowl from bike to robot, so they're not too helpful here. (The aforementioned wings were modified from the original toy. They now swing up to accomodate the armor, and that new joint makes things a bit trickier to line up than they previously were, I suspect.)

Lastly, note the small kickstand on the back of Prowl's one ankle: the legs are very cleverly designed to be symmetrical in Robot Mode, but if you want that kickstand to be where it belongs on the bike, you have to transform him with that leg facing back.

Robot Mode

Tall, slender, and halfway between a motorcycle cop and a ninja. Prowl's a pretty good representation of the Animated character, though there have been some changes made since the original release which (I assume) help the fit of the samurai armor. Even so, there's no mistaking him for anybody else- unless you bring up pictures of the original figure like I did, you may not even notice the differences, outside of this figure having a bit more black than the original.

The head is on a fairly shallow ball-joint that doesn't really do much. You can get a full-360 turn out of it, but only forward tilt. You can get much better front-to-back tilt out of the hinge the head joint's mounted on, even if that wasn't the intent. The shoulders do as well as a single-joint shoulder ever can, with unrestricted swivel and the ability to swing 90 degrees out to the side. Inward range is decent too, but Prowl's kind of barrel-chested, and he's never gonna cross his arms. (Not that many toys really can, of course.) The elbows do pretty much everything the shoulders can- the elbow could fold a little tighter for my taste, but it's decent. The lightbars swing around, I guess to approximate some type of bladed weapon.

Prowl's waist joint is tiny. How tiny? There's a tab on the bottom that you can use to get some leverage on the thing, that's how tiny. The bike seat coincides with Prowl's seat, so to speak, so you have to tilt the hips forward a bit to be able to turn the waist much. If it weren't for the extended nose on this version of Prowl's motorcycle mode, he could come pretty close to doubling over. The hips have the same great range as all the upper-body balljoints, and with a pair of hip swivels and next to nothing in the way, you can manage quite a lot. Neither the balljoints nor the swivels are quite as firm as I'd really like, though- Prowl sometimes has balance problems, and the armor makes them a bit worse. His basic knee-joint is a hinge with a rather pitiful 45-degree range. They look like they should go further, but the shape of the lower leg prevents it from getting its full range for some reason. You can use the transformation joint in the lower leg to make up for it, but it looks kind of weird since it's so much lower than the actual knee. In between the two joints we have Prowl's wheels, with their removable outer hubcaps. On the previous Prowl these were his shuriken weapons, but here they're a solid piece, and can't be unfolded. Eh, I'll just borrow Cheetor's. I don't know if I'd define the foot joint as being an ankle joint or a toe joint, but it's got good enough range to balance Prowl in any number of poses. All in all, he's appropriately bendy for a cyber-ninja.

Paint and Deco

Prowl has a good bit of paint and- with the exception of his gray face and sidecar tire -it is all gold. Every gold part on Prowl is a paint app, a sensible choice since matching gold paint to gold plastic is next-door to impossible. It's a pretty pleasing gold, a deep, metallic paint, and it covers pretty cleanly. Unfortunately, the gold never wraps around the edges of a piece, which means at some angles the deco looks shallow, and makes Prowl look more toyish than he needs to. This is especially evident on his face, where the transparent blue is very visible behind the gold and gray of his head-crest. When you make use of the light-piping, it looks pretty obvious, and pretty bad. On the upside though, there's no evidence of the stickiness that has plagued Transformers' painted transparent plastic for the past year!

Accessories

Now we get to the sidecar! As I said above, optional armor is nothing new, and I've seen lots of toys that have it. If the armor becomes a separate accessory for the toy, as it does here, it's quite likely that the accessory will have to be pulled apart and reassembled on the figure as the armor. Good examples of this would be the Cybertron and Robots in Disguise Optimus Primes. But this is not the case here- the wheel weapon is a separate piece, but the rest of the armor- helmet, backpack, shoulder and skirt plates- all unfold from the sidecar as a single piece. Nice!

To transform the sidecar, you remove the wheel/sword assembly and unfold the rest. Swing the shoulder armor down so it can fit under Prowl's arms and swing Prowl's wings to point straight up. Line up the tabs on the back of the sidecar with the notches in the wings, and get the various armor plates into position. Then press the wheelsword onto a forearm- firmly, as it's harder to lock down than it looks- and you're done.

Samurai Prowl

Aesthetically speaking, it's particularly neat that the armor fits in very well with Prowl's existing deco- most optional armor sets are designed to dramatically change the look of a figure. And while this makes Prowl look a lot bulkier and more imposing, he's definitely still Prowl. I like that a lot. The Samurai Armor isn't really show-accurate, if it matters to you. (But then, neither is Prowl.) It's got more clear blue to it, and none of the specific details quite match up to the show version. Most notably, the tire-shield/sword is only on one arm here, though you can pick which arm since the tabs are still there. (Sadly, they're totally incompatible with Ratchet/Lockdown's EMP, so you can't have that on the opposite arm.) TFWiki says the change to a solid sidecar wheel is a last-minute thing presumably made for safety reasons. (That probably has something to do with why only half the wheel rolls, as well.) The helmet has some molded-in glasses that help offset the natural narrowness of Prowl's head. But it's definitely closer to the original version than it is to the helmet of Yoketron, Prowl's cyber-ninja master. Fan-produced upgrade parts in 3... 2...

As with all real armor, Prowl sacrifices some mobility to gain the extra protection. He can't really swing his shoulders forward at all due to the shoulder armor, so it's elbows and lateral movements only. And his head is just about totally immobile now, since turning a helmet mounted on an armature isn't very effective. The skirt plates stay out of the way of the legs, happily, but the top-heavy upgrades argue with Prowl's loose hip joints from time to time. There are just some poses that he can't balance in when armored. He's not gonna tip over constantly, but it can be a problem, and you will certainly need to re-find his center of gravity.

Besides the fact that you only get one, the other problem with the wheelsword is that the blade doesn't want to stay straight- there is a stop designed to hold the blade in position, but it's designed to hold the blade flat when it's collapsed for sidecar mode, and so it doesn't stay lined up with Prowls arm or the tire. Other than that, though, it works well, and once you've got it pushed in all the way it is not coming off the arm unless you want it to.

Closing Remarks

Done poorly, optional armor can be more trouble than it's worth, much as I love it. But here, it's not. Perhaps because it was first designed by animators rather than toy designers, it bucks some of the bad habits and usual applications of this type of accessory. If you're looking for a Prowl, not only is this one more accessible at this late date, but the base figure can stand alone without any trouble. And really, isn't this accessory just more fun than some ninja stars and a traffic light?

Samurai Prowl gets an Excellent rating from me. If you're not a big fan of removable armor, you might go as low as Very Good. Either way, it's most definitely a great toy and worth owning.

-RAC, 04/21/2009