Nightbeat repainted as Minerva


In the Japanese market, female characters aren't quite as taboo in boys' toy lines as they are in the US, so when the second year of the Headmasters concept was being designed, the initial designs for the Autobot (Cybertron) Headmasters included a female character, named Minerva (well, actually, she was named Minelba on the box, but that's the result of a mis-guess on the r/l and v/b problems in transliterating Japanese into Roman characters). Unfortunately, female characters are "icky" to U.S. manufacturers (although it's no longer nearly so bad now, since they at least make femmes for the collector market), so Minerva was recolored and sold as Nightbeat in this country.

When a friend who had gotten me back into Transformers had to sell most of his collection to pay for bills, I decided to snag his Nightbeat and do something about this situation. This was my first major repainting effort, taking Nightbeat apart completely and repainting all the pieces in red and white, using my tapes of the Masterforce cartoon for reference. It was here that I found out it takes a bajillion coats of regular Pactra white paint to cover a dark color like blue. I deliberately left a few bits unpainted so that the toy could still transform, and I had to use a knife to carve out space at the top of the toy's feet so that the upper legs could still fit in the slots, with their several layers of paint. I used the top layer of a rubsign for her Autobot symbol.

Recently, I pulled Minerva out of storage because of Chris Meadows's Minerva Shrine and touched up the paint using the skills I'd built in the two and a half years since I originally painted Minerva. I know now that the color scheme of the real toy is markedly different from mine, but that's because the real toy is wrong. Seriously. If you consider the animated version to be the correct one, my toy is closer than the real toy (although neither version can do much about the arms...see the shrine for why). I also added more detail to the Headmaster figure, as you can see to the right (unless your browser doesn't recognize image alignment, in which case this page is awfully messy, sorry). It's not totally accurate either, but I had to work within the limits of the toy. I made a few deliberate changes as well, in keeping with my own aesthetic sense.


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