D-50 MOTORMASTER

D-50 Motormaster was the hardest of all the original four Scramble City leaders for me to find. It didn't matter if I was looking for a loose one or a sealed one, launcher equipped Motormasters were tremendously scarce. Unlike Onslaught or Silverbolt, you can't just look at a D-50 Motormaster in vehicle mode and say, "Hey that one has a launcher". This makes hunting one down really hard when you're shopping the internet auction sites since most people selling a Motormaster only show it in robot and/or truck mode. On top of that, a sealed or boxed D-50 is even rarer, and I've talked to dealers at Botcon and other collectors who have stated that Menasor giftsets are more common than sealed/boxed D-50s. And that's saying a lot! So what I did was blindly bid on all the loose Motormasters I saw on Yahoo Japan, in the hopes that if a Japanese guy is selling it, it must be the Japanese version. I was right every time. Eventually I found boxed ones, and those were like holy grails to me!

There's an interesting difference between the US and Japanese Motormaster box art. On the far left is the Japanese version, and to the right of it is the US version. The two are almost identical until you get to the waist down. Then the Japanese version has correctly transformed legs, but the US version has thighs bent at a 90 degree angle! It's as if the toy being used for reference was transformed wrong. It's not uncommon for character boxart to differ between US and Japanese TFs, but this boxart variation is more than just a different pose-it's an entirely different transformation! What's really funny is that on the US Menasor giftsets, Motormaster has US thighs and Japanese lower legs! I guess they tried to fix the incorrect boxart for the giftset but didn't explain what exactly needed to be done, so the artist combined both versions.

I've found that D-50s were produced in two places as indicated by their boxes and stampings-Macau and Japan. Furthermore, the boxes were printed in one of two locations, either Japan or Hong Kong. Macau made versions have the boxes printed in Hong Kong. Both kinds have the launchers, and the only differences I've found so far are the fine print on the boxes and the copyright stampings on the toys. The Macau box shown above has some extra kanji regarding Stuntron Drag Strip above the 'D-50' area that the Japanese version does not. I'm not sure if this is unique to the Hong Kong boxes, or if it's just an addition to the boxes made later during the print run. My Japanese printed D-64 Onslaught box has kanji in the area above the 'D-64' designation as well, so this leads me to believe that my Japanese printed D-50 box is an early release. I guess it's also possible that there exists a third D-50 box, one made in Japan with kanji above the 'D-50' designation.

Just like my C-50 Silverbolt, my D-50 Motormaster came in a plastic bubble. This was a radical departure for Japanese Transformers at the time these two were released. Before Silverbolt and Motormaster came out, Takara packaged all Japanese release Transformers with styrofoam inserts, and used plastic bubbles for Transformers destined for sale outside of Japan. Takara even reverted to packaging Transformers in styrofoam inserts for domestic release after D-50 and C-50. So why they ever did this for these two Japanese releases I will probably never know. I have heard claims that D-50 and C-50 each came with styrofoam packaging at some point, but I have never seen examples of them like that.

Here's what it's all about-base mode. Like C-50 Silverbolt and D-64 Onslaught, D-50's spring loaded launcher makes his ramp mode a fully functional vehicle launcher. Although the front of the box has a photo of Motormaster in base mode with Stuntron Dragstrip ready to be launched, I've found that D-50's ramp is too narrow to support the wheelbase of any of the other Stuntrons. In fact, Motormaster's ramp is only able to comfortably support the little minicar that he comes with. The narrowness of his ramp got me thinking. If Motormaster was designed to launch only his minicar and not the other Stuntrons, could the same be possible for the other launcher equipped Scramble City leaders? Could it be that D-64 Onslaught and C-50 Silverbolt weren't meant to launch their smaller team members? If so, what were they supposed to launch? I think it's possible that the gestalt chest shields were supposed to have small wheel attachments and the team leaders were designed to launch these chest shield spaceships.

In the pictures above you can see how the launcher was omitted and replaced by a black piece of plastic for the western release version. The Japanese D-50 is on the left and the non-Japanese Motormaster is on the right.

Depending on how you look at it, D-50 is either the most brilliantly engineereed of the Scramble City team leaders or the most horribly designed. Either way, it's a pain transforming this guy if you forget to leave the launcher in the correct position. When transforming D-50 back to tractor trailer mode, it is important to remember that the launcher must be in the "launched" position. Otherwise, the black pedal-looking piece gets in the way of Motormaster's legs, which are supposed to retract into the upper body portion when returning to trailer mode.

Since I had an extra "junker" D-50 I decided to take it apart for an exploded parts view. The picture on the upper left shows all of the pieces in place with the bottom portion of the trailer removed. This view reminds me a lot of when I took apart my Optimus Prime to restore his launcher function. A lot of the launcher design is shared between the two, and I think sometimes that Motormaster may have been meant to be a smaller sized Convoy had Diaclone continued. The picture above right shows all the removable parts. D-50 is a bit more complicated than D-64 Onslaught because (as seen in the last picture) there are actually four pieces to the launcher mechanism instead of D-64's three. The fourth piece (D-50's trigger button) is actually molded into his main body and is not visible in the last shot.

Here's a quirky little variant I've found. There's a ridge that acts as a catch when the launching bolt is locked back before firing. The Motormaster on the far right is a non-Japanese version that's missing the ridge!

Lots of collectors have told me that their US release Motormasters have the ridge, even though US versions don't have the launchers. It makes sense that at some point the ridge was eliminated from the mold because the launchers were no longer being integrated into the toy. I have yet to find another Motormaster that doesn't have the ridge. Since I bought this Motormaster loose, I don't know where it came from. My guess is that it's either a very late run US release, or a European Classic version. This one had a rubsign at one point, so I don't think it's a Euro Classic. In the picture to the right, I've tried to show how the ridge catches the launcher on the Japanese D-50. When that big conical grey button is pressed down, the ridge is forced down, and the launching bolt moves forward.

There are at least three trademark stampings on Japanese D-50s. I have pictured two of them here. The first one is totally blank with no stamping at all-I have two D-50s like this. Absent stampings aren't all that rare for Takara Transformers, as others like Ravage have surfaced with no trademark stampings. So I know these aren't bootlegs. The second stamping is a traditional 3 line 'Hasbro/kanji/Takara' version, just like the stamping that came with the US version Motormaster. The third stamping (which I don't have pictured here) is the Macau version. It has the 'Japan' portion blocked out and replaced with 'Macau', otherwise it's exactly the same as the three line stamp.