I was supposed to be opening my fourth and final figure in Super7’s most recent Collector’s Choice wave today, but I got side-tracked last week and forgot to include these in the rotation. Yeah, sorry about that. But today I’m putting things to right by getting back on track and opening up Granita, the “Heroic Comet Combatant!” And I have to be honest, this is going to be a rough ride…

At some point in the 80’s, toy company execs crumbled under the enormous pressure (and probably copious amounts of cocaine) to come up with new ideas… and the rock transformers were born! For the Go-Bots it was the Rock Lords and for Masters of the Universe, it was the Comet Warriors, Rokkon and Stonedar. That pair got updates in Matty’s MOTUC line, but their among the few figures I never hunted down (and yet, I bought the Star Sisters, so… go figure!). I probably wouldn’t have bothered with this third Comet Warrior, Granita, either, but she was in an assortment with three other figures I wanted real bad, so let’s check her out.

As a Comet Warrior, Granita comes with her rock armor, but we’ll start with the base figure. She looks good and I get a strong Filmation vibe off of her, despite the fact that I don’t remember ever seeing her in the cartoon. She’s got light blue skin and a somewhat futuristic looking red and pink one-piece as well as some matching knee and elbow pads that make her look like she should be wearing roller-skates. But nope, just some low boots. She also has a gold belt with sockets in the front and back, and we’ll come back to those. Granita’s design is simple enough, but I like it, and the coloring and quality of paint are all up to snuff to make for a nice looking figure.

I also dig her head sculpt a lot. She’s pretty and has a somewhat distant and serene expression that makes her look alien, and a dome of green “hair” which is supposed to be rock, but honestly looks more like hair… unless you attach the rock piece to her back and here it looks a bit more like longer, stone hair. It does mess with the ball joint under her chest, but I could still see myself displaying her with this piece on. And believe me, this is the only one of her rock pieces that works reasonably well. I say, reasonably because the color doesn’t quite match and no matter how hard I adjust it, there’s always a big gap between her hair and the lower back piece. Also, I’m not really sure how stone hair works. Does she get gravel instead of dandruff?

Granita’s other rock pieces consist of a shell piece and four pieces of rock armor that clip onto her arms and legs… well, in theory they do. To be fair, I can get these to stay on well enough if she’s just standing in place, but as soon as I pick her up or try to pose her they fall off because the clips are just way too loose. I can’t even begin to articulate how frustrating this is. Get one three pieces on and another falls off. It’s a shame because they did a nice job sculpting the stone and I love the circuitry printed on the interior of the pieces. It’s even painted over with a metallic silver to bring out the detail. But what befuddles me is: How could they not get these clips to work right? It seems like a simple enough concept. And hell, if they couldn’t get the clips to work, they should have just had them peg into the figure. Of course, all of this gets pretty problematic when I try to transform her into her rock mode.

Here you can see that her rock mode is just her bending over into the extra rock piece with her armor forming a shell. I left two of the pieces off in the above shot to show what’s going on in there. But forget about actually getting her to transform into her rock form without the armor falling off. I found the only way to go is to bend her over and then put all the pieces on afterwards, and even that is an exercise in frustration, not to mention when you’re done you just have a lump of green plastic rock, so I’m not sure the ends justify the profanity-enduing means.

“This is fine!”

In addition to her dubious rock parts, Granita also comes with a little blaster pistol and I do dig the design of this thing. It’s got a cool retro vibe to it, with a big gold disk on the end. And as a nod to the vintage toy, you can even plug it into the hole on her belt. On the downside, her hands with the outward pointing thumbs, aren’t the best choice to go with this weapon.

When I set out to open this figure and write this review, I had no idea how dire things were going to turn out. No, I’m actually not disappointed to have Granita in my collection. The figure itself looks good and she displays fine with the rock pieces on, but this is a case where the gimmick fails so miserably that they would have been better off working around it. I would have been much happier to get the figure with stylized and permanently attached rock armor while not being able to transform her into a lump of space rock. Honestly, it’s not a great gimmick to begin with. Maybe I would probably be a lot happier if I had Stonedar and her brother Rokkon to display with her, but I’m not likely to hunt those down and so Granita will have to remain the sole (and highly mediocre) Comet Warrior in my collection.