Ack! Once again, the December Matty figures are shipping soon and I haven’t opened my November figures yet! Oh, yeah, not to mention the Battle Ram and the huge-ass Castle Greyskull boxes that are taking up precious real estate in my toy closet. I’ve vowed not to open any of the big stuff until I’m completely done with this year’s figures, so let’s take a step closer to that goal by tearing into The Evil Horde’s road warrior, Dragstor!

Dragstor fills out his package nicely and his tag line is “Transforming Evil Warrior Vehicle.” Apart from that I don’t have anything new to say about the packaging. We’ve been seeing it for years now and not much has changed. Of course, Dragstor was a figure that was big on gimmickry in the vintage line, so I’m very curious to see how this Classics version turned out!

Dragstor’s design is a delicious mix of monster and machine and one that adheres very strongly to the vintage design. In fact, once you get past the more realistic proportions and the neutered gimmick, there’s not a lot of changes at all. And that’s a good thing for me, because I’ve always dug this crazy design. The exposed tire that resides in Dragstor’s tummy is particularly well sculpted with well-defined treads and it even has the little notch off to the side where the rip-stick would go if that gimmick were still in tact. The whole tire ensemble is part of a bulky sculpted vest that’s laid over the torso of the buck and also includes some silver hoses and The Evil Horde symbol sculpted right into the chest.

The back of the vest features Dragstor’s jet-powered backpack, which helps propel him at break-neck speeds on his tire. I love the way the side pipes look on this piece as the design is straight out of a suped-up hot rod. The outfit is rounded off with a pair of red angular boots and orange gauntlets, just like on the vintage figure.

The head sculpt offers what little look we get of Dragstor’s actual organic side and it isn’t much. You just get a pair of reptillian eyes and some scaly skin peering out from the helmet and breather mask. There are a few paint flubs on my figure. particularly noticeable is the one pupil that runs up into his eyebrow. There’s also some slop on the silver paint where the pipes meet the vest. All in all, though, it’s nothing too bad.

Articulation follows the usual MOTUC male buck. The arms have rotating hinges in the shoulders, hinges in the elbows, and swivels in the biceps and wrists. The legs are ball jointed at the hips, hinged at the knees and ankles, and there are swivels at the hips and boots. The neck is ball jointed and Dragstor can swivel at the waist. I’m sure there’s still an ab crunch buried in the torso, but all that gear on him renders it inert. Alas, I was unable to get him to balance on his tire without having his limbs touching the ground to support him.

Dragstor comes with two accessories. First you get the ubiquitous Horde crossbow. In this case, it’s a very unique design and made to look like it’s fashioned out of an engine and exhaust pipes, which is a nice touch because I don’t remember the vintage toy’s crossbow matching Dragstor’s theme so nicely. There’s a hole on the top of his backpack, where you can plug this thing in for storage. It probably makes more sense to angle it down, keeping the spoiler and the pipes in the opposite direction he’s traveling, but I kind of dig the way it looks angled up.

The other weapon is a whip with a double bladed axe on the end. It’s presumably intended as a nod to the vintage figure’s rip-stick. If you want you can plug this into the backpack too, but it just looks silly to me.

As the last addition to my Horde ranks, I really dig Dragstor a lot. He’s a perfect example of the crazy imagination that went into this line. At the same time, Matty was able to keep him very faithful to the original design and still make him fit in with the modern Classics aesthetic. It’s a great figure like this that makes it harder to face the fact that it all ends this month with the final shipment of figures. But before we can get to that, I’ve still got one more November figure to look at next week.