This bot first made an appearance in the 1986's Transformers The Movie, and stayed all throughout the franchise till this day, keep on being updated and reimagined. Although not always great (and there were worst time), the bot have a special place in every TF fans all around.
The bot....she, is Arcee
Not the first female Robot (Fembot) being introduced but she became a regular and can be seen in most of Transformers continuity (maybe not all). Not to be fooled by her appearance, Arcee was an excellent gunner and marksman. During Season 3 and Season 4 of Transformers G1, she can be seen joining missions with Rodimus Prime, Ultra Magnus, Springer and others.
With a female character, there's bound to be love story. Although not much (nor apparent), Arcee was said to have feelings for Hot Rod which withered with his transformation to Rodimus Prime in which she grew closer with Springer.
In Season 1 and Season 2 of Transformers G1, we have our human friend, Spike, being taken cared of by Bumblebee, Arcee somewhat held the same responsibility with Spike's son, Daniel, especially in the last 3 episode of US G1 where Daniel became Arcee's Headmaster partner (although the 3 episodes were ignored during the Transformers Headmasters continuity)
It's interesting to note that there's several version of 'explanation' on where fembots came from. In the animation, it was made clear that there were fembot even before Arcee. In Marvel UK, Arcee came to being as a respond by the Autobots to the human accusation of them being Sexist (WTF?).
But the worst of all.....the origin introduced in the IDW comic....
Yes....I understand... Pic Credit : Web |
Transformers Energon Pic Credit : Web |
Arcee made recurrent appearance in other series such as Headmasters, Energon, Animated, Prime as well as the second movie, Revenge of The Fallen, also in vast amount of publications.
Let's get back to G1 Arcee. Despite being popular, Arcee was damned to never have her G1 toy. There's a lot of rumors as to why this happened, some said the popularity of a female character to not be appealing to boys and another was the abomination of the prototype design.
There was an effort to release a G1 Arcee toy under the Titanium Line but it stop with the death of the line.
There's a few versions of Arcee toys post-G1 in which mostly depicting Arcee as either a motorcycle or car. But one of the most popular of all would be iGear MGT-01 Delicate Warrior
Pic Credit : Web |
Despite all that, to each their own i guess. I could understand fans wanted a G1-accurate version of her in which, Delicate Warrior is the way to go.
PE-11 Scouting Force |
Now, let me go ahead to the main event. Perfect Effect, a company that is known for releasing an updated version of Frenzy, Rumble and also other G1 cassettes.
However, their breakthrough release would be PE-11 Scouting Force, their take on G1's Reflector.
On August 2011, Perfect Effect release a concept images of what seems to be a homage of G1 Arcee (in robot mode) and prototype of it next to some Classics-verse figures. Many fans (myself included) hold judgement for her due to the fact that her alt mode is a futuristic motorcycle rather than car. But due to my dissapointment with Delicate Warrior, I opted for her on a whim and found myself really happy.