Phil's
Gobot Double Clutch & Mirage and
Spychanger Counter Arrow & Mirage
Review
Double Clutch is an Autobot racing car, and that immediately brings to mind the G1 Autobot Mirage. Double Clutch is molded in white, but the nose is painted red and the rear & spoiler are blue. Turning the car over the middle of the underside is molded in dark blue.
TF: Most of the Gobots/Spychangers - all the ones originally designed for G2 - have the G1 Sideswipe Transformation, so he's not too dissimilar to G1 Mirage here either. Pull the back of the car back, fold down the bonnet under the front of the car. Pull the arms out to the sides.
The nose has ended up on the chest like all the other Spychanger. The legs are dark blue like the panel that has ended up under the car nose/chest as is the additional gun.
Overall: Not a bad toy. Has the advantage of being distinctive in form from the car modes used for four of the other five Gobots.
You could have placed money on they're being a Mirage repaint. And there was. White becomes black - with the nose unpainted and yellow tiger stripes on the tail. Blue becomes silver. Not Mirage's colours but a nice repaint.
Counter Arrow has a go at looking more like Mirage again - the white becomes off white and is this time painted with blue detailing and a black stripe down the centre of the nose. The blue becomes white. The head gets a layer of blue paint.
Not too dissimilar to Double Clutch. Counter Arrow is Car Robots toy C-010 and also appears in the Spychanger multipack C-011
Clear Counter Arrow is quite a drastic recolouring - the car becomes clear blue while the underside of the car, the upper legs of the robot and the gun become clear green. Inventive and different for a racing car TF.
Mirage is Counter Arrow with a small Autobot symbol added to his nose. As such he's one of the few US Spychangers that look different in their robot modes when compared with their Japanese counterparts in Car Robots.
Mirage appears in a 2 pack with Ironhide. Mirage is in vehicle mode in both versions of the packaging.
Clear Mirage takes the Mirage colours and makes the toy out of clear plastic. Works better than the Clear Super Spychangers from Japan as he's the only one that's completely clear.
Tiny Tin Mirage is RID Mirage with the addition of a matchbox size sliding tin to put the car in.
Super Counter Arrow is another inventive repaint - the off white of Counter Arrow becomes red and the pure white becomes black. Distinctive repaint.
A completely plain clear version of the above. While Clear Mirage looks nice the plainer paint apps on this toy detract from it.
Effectively an inverse version of Clear Counter Arrow - with the car body in clear green and the robot body & gun as clear blue. Nice again.
This Mold has done well out of the repaints - the original and Gobot repaint are nice, as is the original RID and Spychanger and there's 4 good repaints of that too !
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