Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Ark Addendum - Darkwings Combined

As usual, it's Tuesday and that means that it's time for some new character models. Since Ivan's Gallery yesterday featured Buster and Hydra Darkwing, I thought that today might be a good day to pull out the combination of those two into the Darkwings jet.

Masterforce is an interesting series. Like Headmasters, the toys are mostly the same as their American counterparts. Sure, some of them sport different color schemes, and some have different tooling. Still, the Japanese line of 1988 was substantially the same as the American line of 1988. Like Victory, the storyline for Masterforce varied greatly from the American storyline of 1988. Masterforce Pretenders walked among us, in suits and ties, working at jobs, driving in cars. The Headmasters were youthful participants in the war, with their own agendas and motivations. And the Godmasters were something special, tapping into ancient forces and powering Transtectors with their own will.

It functions as a kind of transition point, before the toys diverge but after the underlying mythology seriously diverged. The Darkwing brothers sort of function as both. As Godmasters, they represent one of the most important aspects of the Masterforce mythos, but they also feature the sort of extra combination-based transformation that permeated so much of Victory. Unlike the toys of Victory, the Darkwing combination is relatively simple, basically just smashing the two jets together. The animation model reflects this fairly accurately, though the motion lines and the sub-transformation of the human components jazzes it up a bit.

5 comments:

Prowl26 said...

These were two of my favorite guys as a kid. I always love to see more stuff on them. Good bot.

lonegamer7 said...

"Like Victory, the storyline for Masterforce varied greatly from the American storyline of 1988."

Don't you mean, "Headmasters"? ;)

Jimtron said...

No, I'd say that the Headmasters mythology wasn't so far off of the US mythology of 1987. The details varied, but the underlying struggle was between two teams of robots with detachable heads or guns. In fact, there are any number of similarities between the first three Headmasters episodes and The Rebirth.

I was trying to say that Masterforce has the different mythology, like Victory, but more or less the same toys, like Headmasters. It's right in the middle.

lonegamer7 said...

Ah, that makes more sense. :)

Carlos said...

Jimtron speaks wisely again ;)