Or is his name Moist? I can never remember.

Anyway, back when Hasbro Pulse was taking pre-orders for this guy, they were saying he wasn't scheduled to ship unitl April 2024. But, when I saw that people in Asia were starting to get their copies, I had a suspicion that they might just bump up the shipping timetable. Hey, I ain't complaining!

Can we all just appreciate for a moment that Takara has actually sold 58 of these things? Quite a bit more than that, actually, since some releases didn't get their own unique numerical designation (the most recent versions of Skywarp and Thundercracker, for example, were both called MP-52+ while Thrust, Ramjet, and Dirge all had the MP-11 designation attached to them). My point is that I don't think anybody predicted we'd have this huge collection of over sixty of these amazing toys. And there's no real reason to think the toy line won't keep going. (We still need Insecticons, Constructicons, the rest of the Dinobots...)

So, Hoist's box goes into quite a bit of exhaustive detail about the history of the Toyota Hi-Luxe 4XD in America (seriously), and it also describes Hoist's role in the cartoon as a maintenance expert, a bit of a goofball, and a sometimes movie star. I love that Takara always plays up the role of the characters in the animated series, since I really do think it's their cartoon depictions that made us all want to own toys of these characters in the first place.

The toy itself comes with eight accessories packed separately in the plastic clamshell—an extra grapple arm for his tow truck mode, an extra front bumper, an extra robot face, an alien mask, a replacement right fist, a hammer, a wrench, and a blast effect.

The grappling arm is a silly cartoon contrivance that absolutely had nothing to with with the original Diaclone-era G1 toy. It was just something the animators invented so that Hoist could help Grapple clear some fallen rock debris in "Auto Berserk." The arm is articulated at three points (two in the middle of the arm, plus the end where the claw armature is attached) and the four-pronged claw can also swivel and open all four claw teeth. It mounts to the center of his truck bed. It's an authentic recreation of a throwaway moment, but that's one of the things Takara does best. (And they already did the same thing for Masterpiece Grapple, so I guess they would have done Hoist dirty if he didn't get something similar.)

The extra front grill has slightly less surface detail, and is green with a flat grey bumper and silver-painted headlights, set behind clear plastic. It's an alternate look to replace the all-chrome bumper, which more closely matches the look of the vac-metal parts on the G1 toy from 1985. Either of them looks good, so it just comes down to how closely you want Masterpiece Hoist to match his cartoon appearance or the Diaclone-era toy. Other toys have come with extra parts like this (Masterpiece Inferno, Trailbreaker, etc.) and I think it's nice to have options.

Other features for the tow truck mode include an opening hood (revealing a sculpted engine instead of hidden robot parts, which is always nice), and opening doors (and his cockpit is specifically designed to accommodate the Spike figure that came with MP-44 Optimus Prime, or conversely, the hologram avatar that came with MP-54 Reboost). Of course, his main function in vehicle mode is to tow other Autobots, and to that end, he's got a fold-out carriage that you can use to prop other vehicle-mode toys up so he can drag them away from the battlefield for repairs. It doesn't really slide out on a track the way it did on the G1 toy—it's just connected to the rear bumper and folds down. (It's worth noting that his wings in truck mode are permanently attached. On the Diaclone toy, they were removable, and the connector posts doubled as emergency lights. Not this time!)

The truck mode has no side windows or roof panels, which is consistent with the animation model for Hoist. The triangular vent windows can fold down and tuck out of the way, as required for the transformation, but that's about it for cabin protection. Hopefully it doesn't rain on the days Hoist is out off-roading!

So, it kind of goes without saying that even though Hoist and Trailbreaker were both based on the same Diaclone design (only the head sculpt and camper shell/tow truck parts distinguished the two toys), the two characters had radically different appearances in the animated series. Trailbreaker was long and lean, and built like a superhero made of boxes, where Hoist was short and fat. One would assume that perhaps Takara would have recycled the Masterpiece Trailbreaker toy to make Hoist, but there are a bunch of differences between the two toys.

For Trailbreaker, the robot arms were tucked away inside the hollow camper shell. But, Hoist doesn't have a camper shell, so this time the robot arms are actually hidden inside the robot legs! The robot feet are entirely hollow cavities which the robot forearms are tucked inside of. The robot legs otherwise fold out like you might expect. Pieces of the rear bumper actually unfold and help build up his shoulders for robot mode, which is weird and unexpected. The doors turn inside out and serve as the sides of his robot body, and the backpack locks into the front of the body and helps hold everything together.

The gap that the robot head is required to slip through, directly in the center of the truck roof, means that the toy's upper half and lower half are held together by two very thin strips of plastic. I am honestly shocked at how little plastic there is. He's potentially an extremely fragile toy.

So in robot mode, he's around 7.75" in height, putting him measurably shorter than Trailbreaker, but roughly eye level with Grapple. You can tell in comparing Trailbreaker and Hoist that the same hood section was used, but everything else is different. Where Trailbreaker has squared-off arms and legs, Hoist's limbs are very rounded-off. Hoist has the arm-flaps hanging from the backs of his arms, which is correct. As a robot, Hoist's hood also sits differently with respect to the windshield, and has a visible faux orange hinge. Like Masterpiece Grapple, his front wheels are on a strut (which isn't mentioned in the instructions as far as I can tell) so that they can be positioned off-center with respect to the wheel well, to more closely emulate his cartoon look. Just about the only thing they couldn't do was magically make his rear wheels change from black to grey for robot mode.

The animation model for Hoist doesn't have a proper pelvis. The legs just sprout out of the body, which is actually exactly the way the G1 toy was designed. For hip articulation, he does have recessed, hidden working hips, but they're limited. They also incorporated a bending joint into the little orange skirt pieces, so that his legs will still swing forward. It's a little awkward, but it's better than giving him no articulation at all. He's also got working knee and ankle joints as well as ankle tilts. The arms have a wide range of movement at the shoulders, and he's got both elbows as well as what I can only describe as secondary elbows, about an inch apart from each other.

Also, the instructions don't show this specifically, but it's possible to arrange the arm struts to point slightly upwards, which more closely matches his cartoon design, rather than having them poking directly out to either side as the instructions indicate.

Robot mode is where the other accessories come into play. For starters, he's got an extra fist, in case you want to give Hoist a hand. I don't think there are any episodes in which he's got two hands, but I do believe there are a few scenes where his gun-arm is drawn on the wrong side, so this enables you to mimic that if you really want to. The gun attachment is capable of extending slightly, about a quarter of an inch. Also, both arms are designed to telescope and can extend an extra inch or so. He demonstrated this ability when rescuing motorists from a damaged bridge in "Triple Takeover."

Hoist also has a shiny silver vac-plated crescent wrench accessory he can carry, as well as a hammer attachment you can use to replace either of his hands. It is designed to plug into the laser barrel of his gun-arm. He used the hammer when he was trying to get the Dinobots back in shape after they were destroyed in "Desertion of the Dinobots" part 1. His blast effect is orange, and could be a laser blast or an impact strike, and as such it can connect to his gun-arm, his hammer, or the scanner behind his head.

He comes with an alternate robot face that reflects the different way in which his head was drawn sometimes. In some scenes, the cheek guards of his helmet flanked either side of his mask, while in others they connected at the bottom of his head to form a chin guard. One look doesn't seem sigificantly more right or wrong than the other, but it's nice that they included it. EIther of them can accept his alien mask from Moist's role in "Attack of the Evil Alien Robots," and it's so beautifully silly. Now all we need is a Masterpiece Powerglide and a Masterpiece Warpath, and we'll have the entire Alien Robots cast! (Masterpiece Tracks didn't come with an alien mask, though, so that needs to be remedied somehow.)

So... realistically, there's no way they could ever have designed a toy that captures the look of his animation model completely. In the show, he basically turns into a huge block with arms and legs, and his design problems are compounded by the fact that the person who designed his rear view was just making it up, based on what the front view design looked like. The Masterpiece toy really doesn't capture the immense Mister Belvedere proportions. This is Moist after he stopped getting donuts from the catering truck and joined Weight Watchers. It still looks like the character, certainly, but it doesn't truly capture his cartoon proportions as well as some of the other Masterpiece releases have done with their respective characters.

On Wednesday, February 14, 2024 at 6:12:38 PM UTC-7, Zobovor wrote:

> Pieces of the rear bumper actually unfold and help build up his shoulders for robot mode, which is weird and unexpected.

First off, it's not the rear bumper, it's a chunk of each side of the truck.. I have no idea why I typed "rear bumper."

Also... wow. Getting him back into truck mode is a huge chore. There are so many hinge pieces and folding pieces and swiveling pieces that his shoulders are connected to, and it just wasn't obvious to me how to get everything tucked back together for the tow truck configuration. It took a LONG time for me to puzzle my way through it all. That aspect of the toy's design is way more complex and frustrating than it needs to be!

Zob (carry on, citizens)