The Energon Pub

Thu Apr 24, 2014 11:14 am

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I've wanted to create an movie version of Prowl for a while now and Roadbuster's alt mode made perfect sense to me: Chevrolet Impalas are used by the Police and NASCAR vehicles are essentially modified Impalas. (Plus, Roadbuster has those shoulder-mounted rocket pods, which seemed like a natural fit for Prowl.)

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The custom head was fairly straightforward to make, cutting off unwanted mulletness and moulding Prowl's distinctive helm from Milliput. I took care to ensure everything still fit when he transformed and only had to trim a little plastic from his legs to enable his new noggin to slot into place.
After that, it was down to considering various Police liveries: I decided it was best to base him on the original toy, which allowed me to use Prowl's Reprolabels (for both G1 and Classics) rather than try to located appropriately-sized, generic Police decals.
The tricky bit was finding a light bar to match, but fortunately, I found a 1/38 scale diecast toy, from which I was able to liberate the required item.

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The final touch was giving him more suitable guns rather than Roadbuster's chainsaw. These were taken from his fellow DOTM Wrecker, Topspin (who seemed to have guns to spare). These can either be hand-held or mounted on his forearms using the Mechtech ports.

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(In fact, as the lightbar has been mounted using the rooftop port, this can also be swapped out for one of his guns for more explodey fun! This also means you can put his lightbar on either one of his arms but... I don't know why you'd do that?)

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BOOM!

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News Credits: 6188 · Sat Apr 26, 2014 4:27 am

That actually works really well! Nice job.

Sat Apr 26, 2014 6:19 am

Va'al wrote:That actually works really well! Nice job.

Thanks a lot! I've been reading the current IDW comics and he's a bit more 'tooled up' in that, so it was either this or a SWAT van, though I couldn't find a good base figure for the latter!

News Credits: 6188 · Sat Apr 26, 2014 6:28 am

brokenchopstick wrote:
Va'al wrote:That actually works really well! Nice job.

Thanks a lot! I've been reading the current IDW comics and he's a bit more 'tooled up' in that, so it was either this or a SWAT van, though I couldn't find a good base figure for the latter!

I like how the missile launchers can pass for a movieverse version of the rocket ones in the original designs, too.

But I see what you mean about finding an IDW base figure for the custom.. :-?

Sun Apr 27, 2014 10:09 am

That's cool. Most of the Movie-verse Prowls I've seen are made from Bumblebee molds; it's nice to see something different!

I'll be honest, the only thing I don't care for is the legs. All the silver makes it look like he's wearing shorts. It's just my opinion, though, not trying to deride the rest of it. I really do like it!

News Credits: 11 · Sun Apr 27, 2014 2:34 pm

That looks perfect! Great work!

News Credits: 8 · Sun Apr 27, 2014 9:49 pm

WANT! Even iin a Generations line, this makes a nice Prowl.

Mon Apr 28, 2014 3:48 am

Nemesis Maximo wrote:That's cool. Most of the Movie-verse Prowls I've seen are made from Bumblebee molds; it's nice to see something different!

I'll be honest, the only thing I don't care for is the legs. All the silver makes it look like he's wearing shorts. It's just my opinion, though, not trying to deride the rest of it. I really do like it!

I agree, the legs are definitely the weak point of this figure. I considered ways of adding Reprolabels to make them better reflect the original design e.g. making the feet look like fake bumpers, etc., but I think that would end up looking worse.

I might revisit them at some point, but I don't think there's too much room in his alt mode to bulk them up much at all!