It's funny how long Transformers has been circling the drain of Doing Just The Cartoon Style Ironhide Goddammit.   Sure, it was a major milestone when we first got an Ironhide with an actual head, and there was that obligatory Masterpiece, but there was an entire War for Cybertron toyline trilogy of Faithfully Approximating Cartoon Appearances which gave him two toys and neither went Full Cartoon.  Stege Ironhide, the first one, was one of the few "Cybertronian" versions that actually went for a distinct space-y vehicle, rather than Recognizeable Earth Car With A Different Roof Or Something.  And then Earthrise Ironhide tried to retool that into an Earth vehicle with mixed success.  But even that effort fell short of attempting to match the animation model.  

And so we start from scratch!  It's Studio Series '86 Ironhide, who's gonna cartoon at you super hard!  He's a robot made out of boxes wearing a minivan windshield on his chest!  AS GOD INTENDED.

The previous two Ironhides were both Deluxe Class-ish.  Well, the first one was solidly Deluxe Class, but as tall as Deluxe Class could manage to keep him in scale, and the next one was... half of an exclusive set but given a very gigantic Roof Piece that was 20% of his new altmode, so who knows whether that budgets into a retail pricepoint.  But clearly the upper limit of Large-ish Deluxe had been hit, and if you want a better toy at that size, you gotta pump him up to Voyager Class.

SS86 Ironhide is no bigger than the previous two Ironhides, but by handling and transforming him you can see the difference.  He's... a lot of parts.  His roof doesn't get yanked off and set aside, the whole mini-van becomes the robot.  (RIP battle sled)  And so there's a lot of folding.  It's not bad folding?  It's actually fairly interesting folding.  Like, the rear section of the minivan collapses into his feet.  Just his feet!  The rest, up to the front cab, origamis into his legs.  There's a lot of engineering here.  There kind of has to be, if the toy must meet its mandate.  

When you finally get him narrowed into mini-van mode, he clips together pretty solidly.  So solidly you kind of wonder how you get him out of that mode again.  There's no obvious staring point, since what's holding the van together is buried inside.  But you can kind of wriggle him out of vehicle mode again, and yanking the arm clips out of the front roof section is really the only leap-of-faith do-or-die will-I-break-this moment.  And you won't.  Ironhide's pretty robust, true to his name.  Yeah, he's got clear plastic.  He's still robust.  

Ironhide comes with two pistols.  They're based on the pistol (singular) that Ironhide wields in his death scene in The Transformers: The Movie.  He comes with two because Ratchet had two, and Ratchet's getting retooled out of this guy later, obviously.  The pistols can store in multiple places -- in vehicle mode there's two nubs on the roof (which for Ratchet will undoubtedly house the siren/flashers) which you can fit the pistols on.  There's also two more nubs on the underside of the rear, where the pistol barrels can kind of double as dual exhaust pipes.  In robot mode, there's two more nubs on the back behind his head, in case you need robot mode storage.

It's a very good Ironhide!  I can't imagine them doing better at the pricepoint.  

I've probably mentioned it in this blog before, but when I was a kid, I designed a Transformers combiner.  Powermaster Optimus Prime and Pretender Classics had just happened, and I noticed that we were starting to get old guys (Bumblebee, Jazz, Grimlock, Starscream) redone as new toys with current gimmicks, and I hatched a plan to get me other new toys of guys I wanted years earlier but never got toys of.  And so, using allll the creativity that a ten-year-old can muster, I designed a Transformers gestalt guy made of Ratchet, Ironhide, Prowl, and Wheejack with Optimus Prime as a torso.  It was very creative.  So wow.

Anyway, twenty-five years later, the dream is nearly being realized.  I've got my Ironhide and Prowl, Wheeljack's coming, and there's some art of a possible Ratchet that leaked, and of course there's Optimus Prime.  I am so into this.  I want everyone to be a combiner.  I want to rebuy my entire Transformers collection as combiner limbs and torsos.  Combiner Wars is the shit.

Anyway, all these new limbs here (Ironhide, Sunstreaker, Prowl, and Mirage) are retools of the Stunticons.  Ironhide was Offroad, Sunstreaker was Breakdown, Prowl was Dead End (well, okay, he's a retool of Streetwise who's a retool of Dead End), and Mirage was Drag Strip.  They all get new heads.  They're officially supposed to combine with "Battle Core Optimus," a white redeco of the first wave Optimus Prime torso with a new also-Optimus-Prime head retool, but I'm cool with the first wave Optimus Prime I already have.  My childhood combiner guy didn't have a white redeco of Prime in it.  Also Legends Class Rodimus forms the chest armor.  Sort of.  He likes to not stay on so well.

My favorite of the four is Sunstreaker, since his toy incorporates the big fist/foot/cannon accessory into the robot mode itself.  Plus Sunstreaker's yellow, and you know me and my yellow.  

One thing I don't like is how the fist/foot/cannon accessory on each of these guys is split up between silver-painted plastic and silver plastic.  Some of the plastic in these toys are nylon for structural integrity reasons, and nylon won't take factory paint, but it still makes the weapon modes of each toy look even less cohesive than before, like a piece of gun with some fingers in it.  It's just more conspicuous.  Which, again, is why I'm happiest with Sunstreaker, who can peg his fist/foot/cannon accessory onto his back.  

I've seem some folks complain that we're getting new toys of these four guys when we already have toys of them.  Well, maybe you do!  Those toys came out in 2008!  That was a while ago!  And, like my childhood self, sometimes you don't get to get everything you want during the first pass, so second chances are nice.  And it's even better if these second chances combine into a larger robot.  

Now where's my Wheeljack and my Ratchet?

Generally I take a few photos of my toys before slaughtering them with paint.  But not Ironhide, apparently.  He's had good photos of him up on TFWiki from another user for a while now, so half my impetus to photograph him was gone.  And, really, I got Ironhide for the express purpose of painting him.  It was why he was in my hands.  So he went on the kitchen table pretty damn quickly.

I wanted to paint him 'cuz we've seen Ken Christiansen's concept art of Ironhide and he's a mostly black guy with a splash of red, while the toy is mostly red with a splash of black.  And I know black paint goes on reeeeally easy, especially for a shaky-handed and impatient painting novice such as myself, so I became obsessed with getting this guy so I could "fix" him.

And I did!  His arms and legs are black now, as God and/or Christiansen intended.  Those guns he's sporting are Kup's, of course.  The Mini-Con that comes with Ironhide (and transforms into one of his cannons) is giving me trouble with assembly, so he's sitting around somewhere.  The purple crystal thing won't snap in.  It pops out.  It's annoying.  I have the plastic flash sanded and everything.  It's gone.  The piece just won't stay.  I hate it.

I have but one photo of Ironhide without paint or his stickers applied.  There it is on the right, with his buddy Unicron The Face Volcano.

Oh, and if Kup's review taught me anything, it's that I should mention that this is not the Cyberverse toy you can find in America.  It's a Deluxe and it's from Japan.  It's unknown whether he's ever coming over here at the moment.

As this is still opening weekend, this is intended to be a spoiler-free toy review.  If you wanna go talk the plot points of the movie, go find the movie review blog post.

(Also, we're upgrading TFWiki's software today, so that solitary link below will be up and down throughout the day.)

I woulda had this review a little sooner, but I've been waiting on my newer, larger photo studio tent to arrive via the mail so I could get a shot of both Leader Class Prime and Ironhide together.  Woulda been pretty impossible inside my old one, but my new 2 foot squared space is luxurious enough to fit both.  Sweetness!  Once we get moved this month, it'll be even better, 'cuz I hopefully won't have my studio lights trying to shine through the legs of the table the studio currently hasta fit underneath.

I've been hoping for a larger Ironhide since the first film.  The Voyager was... okayish, but though he was the same size class as my Ratchet, he was shorter than Ratchet, which just does not do.  Ironhide is bigger than Ratchet!  He's also smaller than Prime, so the best possible solution would be an Ironhide at Ultra Class scale.  However, that's kind of a dead size class, so it's not likely to happen.  So here Ironhide is at Leader Class scale, same as Prime and Megatron and Starscream.  It's technically a little too big, but I prefer it to him being too small.

Make no mistake, Ironhide's Topkick 4x4 mode in real life is HUGE.  It is basically the size of a semi truck.  It's one of THOSE kind of vehicles, the kind no one in their right mind should need to own.  And so it's no big deal that he's almost as big as Optimus while in their truck modes.  In fact, it makes me feel a little happy inside.  Yay!  Approximate scale!  In robot mode, Ironhide's about a head shorter than Optimus.  Which is too tall, but you can fake Ironhide a little shorter by squatting him.

Though this gets into one of Ironhide's most glaring faults, depending on how you feel about toys.  Ironhide definitely skews to the more toy-y side of the spectrum, rather than the movie-accurate-model side of the spectrum.  He's full of gimmicks all over.  Unfortunately, these gimmicks hinder his poseability pretty substantially.  His knees, for example... one leg bends pretty well, but the other has no practical knee at all, despite having the jointing there, because of one of the pop-out weapons in his shin.  His head also doesn't turn, since that would make his flip-down-mouthplate gimmick impossible.

On the other hand, if you like toys that do an insane number of things, you're in luck.  Like I said, his legs are full of things.  One opens to reveal a knife that he can remove and carry around in his hand.  The other opens up into a missile launcher, which automatically turns and faces forward as you open the leg hatch.  This missile launcher can also be removed.  On each of  his arms is a pop-out weapon.  Just pull back the truck mode's smokestacks and these guns reveal themselves out of his arms.  Again, the gimmickry of it all was given precedence over visual accuracy, and Ironhide has some very undersized forearm cannons as a result.  In the film they're a third of his mass.

But wait, there's more!  When you push down a lever on the back of Ironhide's shoulders, panels move out of the way of his stomach and a chaingun pops out of his tummy, spinning, flashing, and making machine gun noises.  Oh hell yeah!  And finally, the neck-inhibiting gimmick of popping down his faceplate.  When this happens, he says "IRONHIDE IS HERE" and his eyes flash.

My, Ironhide certainly is full of things.

The transformation is complicated, but not Sentinel Prime complicated.  The only real snag is forcing panels together.  And that's not a lining-up issue, but an excessive force snap-together issue.  Oh, and his truck hood kibble halves pop off their balljoints like crazy.  They fasten securely in both modes, but it's during the journey between those modes that they're bound to detach.

In summary, Ironhide is a huge awesome truck that has pop-out guns.  He transforms into a huge awesome robot that has pop-out guns, missile launchers, knives, chainguns, and has flashing lights and sounds.  He's not as poseable as most modern toys, and his screen accuracy is inhibited by much of his awesomeness.  Weigh your priorities before purchasing.

Here's quick note about my BotCon 2010 bagged set auction: It ends in a day!  That's quicker than Rome was built!

Here's Animated Ironhide, Rodimus Prime's Toys "R" Us exclusive casemate.  There's not a lot to say about him that wasn't said about Ratchet.  He has a new head!  His red is very Cel-Animation-Red, if you know what I mean.  Muted, what with the televisions.  He has a lot of paint operations on stuff that is usually superfluous, probably because he didn't need much paint, what with being entirely red, and so they had to use up their paint budget somewhere.  Like painting his accessories entirely silver, even though they could have been fine left black, especially since they're made-up weapons for the toy and they could be any color.  He has the black areas under his eyes painted, and the three yellow hashmarks on the sides of his chest.

Oh, and his knees now snap into place in robot mode, which is new.  And very nice.