Crasher

Crasher was one of the harder to find releases from the Velocitron Speedia 500 Collection Legacy sub-line. Released in 2022, Crasher was shipped only one per case, and was a WalMart exclusive.

Crasher is interesting because it is a homage to the classic Gobot of the same name. In the Gobot line, the first release of Crasher was white, but the more common release had a black and red deco. This mold was originally used for the Kingdom version of Mirage, but incorporates the head of the Siege Holo Mirage toy, which is inspired by the G1 toy. In addition, Crasher’s face is pink, as a nod to the cartoon version of the Gobots toy. Yes, Crasher is a woman.

The packaging, while attractive, is flimsy and not collector friendly. I like to save my boxes, often to store the figures back in after display. The lack of a plastic window makes this useless for me.

In vehicle mode, Crasher is a generic earth-mode Formula-1 race car. Car mode holds together ok, but I always have difficulty getting the area of the cockpit to come together well. There are 2 5 mm ports on the side of the vehicle for weapons.

Transformation is a bit difficult, with some origami-inspired movements for the legs. The transformation echoes that of the Siege Mirage, but the chest and arms are more refined. In my opinion, the legs just don’t come together well. I feel like there should be some kind of peg or clip to attach the front coverings of the legs to the inner workings. I am also not a fan of the long trailing tail of the feet, although it does help with stability.

The weapons are straight up repaints from the Siege version, and look fine, but the missile launcher no longer has a place to peg into on the shoulder. Despite that, Crasher has 11 5 mm ports in robot mode (including the hands).

I never owned the Kingdom Mirage, only the Siege version, so I was surprised as to how different of a toy this is. There are a few common parts, but it’s mostly a new toy. This one features much more refined engineering, but loses the iconic shoulder 5mm port that Mirage had.

Overall it’s a great figure, and I now regret missing out on the Kingdom version of Mirage. Sadly it was an exclusive packed with a beast wars figure, and it goes for a fair amount on the secondary market.