CLASSIFICATION: KITBASH
BASE FIGURES: TARANTULAS (BEAST WARS KNOCKOFF); BLURR (TRANSFORMERS); DIERDRE (MYSTIC KNIGHTS OF TY RA NOG)
PARTS USED: DIE-CAST 1/44 SCALE CORVETTE STINGRAY (WHEELS, WINDSHIELD, DASHBOARD, SEATS)
MATERIALS USED: HOBBY KNIFE; SCULPEY MODELING COMPOUND, PAPER CLIPS, SUPER GLUE, ENAMEL PAINTS
FIRST APPEARANCE: THE TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE

"Have to... try and transform!"

Preamble:  Arcee has always been one of the most-wanted toys on my list.  Now, I'm not talking about an Arcee that transforms into a spider or a motorcycle, or a tiny little PVC figurine.  I'm talking about an actual Arcee toy that turns into a car, is the same size as the other movie character toys, and who actually looks like the  animated character from The Transformers: the Movie.  Back in the day, Hasbro just got a little too caught up in the notion that boys just don't like to play with toys of female characters, and none of the half-hearted attempts to rectify this in the modern era have ever completely satisfied me.

Ever since the original Beast Wars Tarantulas toy came out, I realized that his transformation was very similar to the way Arcee transformed in the cartoon.  I mulled over the idea of using Tarantulas as the basis for this project for a very long time, but I didn't really have the experience or skills to properly execute it.  After years of playing around with the idea, I finally set out to design and build the toy.  (What's ironic is that Tarantulas makes up less than 50% of the finished project.)

It was important to me that I used as many parts from existing toys as possible.  I could have sculpted the whole thing out of Sculpey, if I wanted to, and it probably would have been a lot more accurate.  A transforming Sculpey model would have been incredibly fragile, though, so I tried to stick with as many existing plastic parts as possible.

Preparation:  Once I figured out what toys I wanted to use, I had to hunt them down.  A kind soul from the alt.toys.transformers newsgroup donated the knockoff Tarantulas I used for this project (I didn't want to destroy a genuine one since they're fairly hard to come by).  The knockoff was made of substandard plastic, but it sufficed, and the cheaper materials ended up being useful.  As for Blurr, originally I was just going to use the sensor on the top of his head and the arm shields to serve as wheel hubs, but after I went that far, I saw no reason not to make use of other parts of the toy as well.  Blurr's vehicle mode shares many similarities with Arcee's, after all.  I got a Mystic Knights of Ty Ra Nog action figure on clearance, which I used for the female-shaped arms, lower legs, and head.

I also drew up full blueprints of what the finished toy would look like.  This was going to be such a complex piece of engineering that I needed to plan everything in advance.  Arcee's transformation actually isn't that complicated, but I was working with so many different parts (and different toys) that I needed to determine where everything would go during the transformation, how the parts would fit together and what modifications I would need to make.  (I found it helpful to temporarily attach pieces together with poster putty while I worked, which allowed me to see how each piece would be attached.)  I also drew up a character model of Arcee, researching the movie as well as episodes like "Five Faces of Darkness" and "The Dweller in the Depths."

Construction:  I chopped Blurr into pieces, cutting his pelvis off for use as Arcee's, and cutting down his chest to form Arcee's chest plate.  I also had to cut grooves out of the sides of the body to make room for Tarantulas' arm pegs, which would later be attached to the sides of the body.  I cut out a large hole in Blurr's backpack for the vehicle seats, and another small hole to insert the sensor from the top of Blurr's head.

I screwed Blurr's pelvis to Tarantulas' inner body, deciding to keep the skinny Tarantulas waist in an attempt to retain some of Arcee's feminine physique.  Unfortunately, the Tarantulas knockoff toy has hips that are much wider than the genuine toy for some reason; I wanted Arcee to have wide hips, but this was a little excessive.  Oh, well.

The floorboard from the Corvette toy served to connect Tarantulas' pelvis to Blurr's backpack.  The dashboard was glued in place, as were the two seats.  (A Diaclone driver can fit in the seats, incidentally.)  The windshield would be glued in place later, after I had painted most of the toy.  The space between Blurr's body halves (where his head goes in vehicle mode) really bothered me, so I attached a new piece of plastic to close the gap.

The legs posed a couple of minor problems for me.  Tarantulas' legs transformed just like Arcee's were supposed to, as near as I could figure it.  I wanted Arcee to have much more feminine feet, though, so I replaced the lower legs with those from the Dierdre figure.  I also cut out the feet and reattached them with a section of paper clip.  This was necessary for the transformation so the ankles could bend, but it also gave the figure a little more articulation.  I also cut out grooves in her shins for the wheels and attached them with screws.  (I know she doesn't have wheels there in the cartoon, but neither does Hot Rod, and that didn't stop Hasbro from sticking wheels on his legs.  Besides, they had to go somewhere.  It hadn't occurred to me until much later that her wheels were actually in her knees, like the Blurr toy.)

The original plan was to cut out holes in Dierdre's lower legs that were the same size as the ones for Tarantulas, so I could easily attach the new lower legs to the thighs.  Unfortunately, when I was test-fitting the right leg, the plastic broke.  I settled on cutting the knee connector off Tarantulas' leg and attaching it to Dierdre's leg with a combination of screws and super glue.  The fit was loose enough that it didn't put too much strain on the screw.  I could have done the same to the other leg, but I figured if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

The legs were all set to go, except for the fact that the new pelvis plate wouldn't fit when the toy was transformed to vehicle mode.  I cut out grooves from the inside of the thighs to accommodate the new part, also cutting away at the screw base that held the upper legs together.  The upper legs no longer had anything to hold the two leg halves in place, though, so I drilled small holes in each half, took another piece of paper clip, and basically stapled them together.  Another problem was that the bumps on the fronts of Tarantulas' thighs were interfering with the transformation.  I didn't want to cut away at the plastic because that would leave huge holes in the legs, but I realized that if I put a cookie sheet in the oven at, say, 500º for a few minutes, once I took it out it would be hot enough that I could press the leg to the sheet and melt the plastic down to the right shape.  The fact that the legs were made of cheap knockoff plastic made this very easy to do.

The arms ended up being the hardest part to build.  I had to find a way to attach Tarantulas' arm pegs to the body without them interfering with the rods that the backpack was attached to.  In the end, I cut grooves into the inside of the body shell, just large enough for a paper clip, which I inserted through the arm connectors after drilling holes in them.  The paper clip sections ended up going though the length of the body and hooked into the sides, and I glued the pieces in as well.  I also had to whittle down the connector knobs so that Dierdre's arms would attach to them.

Blurr's arm shields became the large shoulder pads for Arcee.  I added some Sculpey to them to make them the right shape, but unfortunately I warped the plastic when I baked these pieces without a piece of tin foil on the baking sheet.  I had overestimated the heat resistance of the styrene plastic, which warped slightly in the oven.  I managed to more or less bend the pieces back into shape.  For the front wheels, I decided to sandwich them between the shoulder armor and Dierdre's arms, with each arm assembly held together with a piece of a paper clip.

After I cut off Dierdre's head, I drilled a hole into the base of her neck and whittled down Tarantulas' neck connector to accommodate it.  I cut a notch into the inside of Blurr's chest to accommodate the heck connector, which would swing back during transformation.  I drilled a hole through the side of the inner body panel, used the screw mount from Tarantulas' leg to make the hole in the neck connector smaller, and attached the neck connector with a piece of paper clip.  I also cut away at Dierdre's face to get rid of the mask and cut at her nose, cheeks, and chin to make her a little more robotic looking.  Then I sculpted the helmet armor and baked her head.

In painting the toy, I stayed as close as possible to her color model from the movie and cartoon.  The stripe on the bottom of her chest is actually a strip of plastic that I painted and glued to her body.  In car mode, her tail lights are sheets of plastic that I glued to her backpack.  She carries two weapons, a pink rifle (like the one she's got in "Five Faces of Darkness" and a smaller grey one (which she used in the movie and "The Dweller in the Depths").  I also cannibalized a genuine Autobot symbol from my Kup toy and a rub symbol from my headless Inferno to give her a touch of authenticity (this was long before anybody was offering reproduction labels).

Transformation:  To transform the toy, the chest pivots and flips up, to give her head room to swing back.  The chest then connects with the back to form the car's hood, and the arms rotate 180º to form the front wheel hubs.  The lower legs fold into the upper legs, and the upper legs wrap around the pelvis to form the rear wheel hubs.

Comments:  I'm not completely pleased with the finished product.  The robot mode is pretty good, I guess, but her vehicle mode just isn't as compact as I'd hoped it would be when I designed it.  (There have been several other very good Arcee fan projects that totally blow mine out of the water.)  On the other hand, even as poorly as parts of this project turned out, this toy is still more accurate than any of the official transforming "Arcee" toys Hasbro has cranked out over the years.