Henkei! Henkei! C-11 Ironhide

Height: 13.3cm to top of head;

Articulation: 24 points total - Swivel neck; 6 points each arm: universal shoulder, hinge elbow, forearm swivel, double joint wrist; swivel waist; 5 points each leg: universal hip, mid-thigh swivel, hinge knee, ball joint ankle.

Colors: Molded red, dark red, off-white, clear blue, dark grey, black; Painted red, yellow, metallic blue, off-white, dark grey, silver.

Accessories: Blade/Cannon weapon

Release Data: Released in Japan on November 20th, 2008 at a price of ¥2200.

Gallery: 25 images.

Author: ExVee


Though it's a rare occasion that RAC or myself will actively seek out the Japanese alternative to our domestic product to completely replace the US counterpart for our collections, Ironhide ended up being just such an instance. What it really came down to for our decisions was differences in color layout and some extra paint operations that made it at least superficially preferable. The honest truth is that Ironhide has not made a good impression on us from the very beginning with baffling design and engineering choices. It may seem odd that either of us would then choose to spend a considerably greater amount of money for some vague differences in color, but by the time we made the decision we were grasping at straws for any positive detail we could find!

Ironhide did come with a mini-comic, showcasing himself and his Henkei wave-mate Galvatron. While a translation has not surfaced as yet, what I take away from the art is that in whatever side-universe the comic stories take place, Galvatron's existence is the direct result of Megatron eating some bad Energon. Yes kids, food poisoning will transform you into a nigh-invulnerable, murderous berserker. Japanese Transformers always has the most valuable lessons!



Vehicle Mode


Ironhide seems to be a modified Cadillac Escalade but generally fits the typical expectations of any sort of high end luxury type. ...a high end luxury type that's been in some horrible accident. See, the big issue with Ironhide is that a complicated transformation means he ends up with so many separate panels that both sides of the vehicle body are a mass of panel lines. These are so heavy that you could almost believe there was a terrible wreck and someone picked up all the shattered pieces and tried to duct tape them back together like a jigsaw puzzle of twisted metal shrapnel (shrapnel). The fragmentation even includes the side windows, where it stands out very strongly as the metallic blue paint does not wrap around the edges of the parts, leaving very obvious red borders between each painted surface.

Despite the terrible appearance this all gives, the vehicle mode holds together surprisingly well. While it is possible to implode the vehicle with too much pressure on the thin panels of the sides, there's actually a very small number of failure points and you can pop things back in place pretty easily. Plus, contrary to some other offenders from this year's Universe offerings, it's pretty much guaranteed that you'll have all four of Ironhide's wheels in contact with your tabletop with no fiddling required. Sunstreaker should do so well...

One notable bit of added paint in the Henkei release of Ironhide versus Hasbro's Universe version is a yellow stripe running along both sides, between the wheels. It helps with recognition as Ironhide, since the yellow stripe on the original G1 representations was a defining characteristic. Sadly since it crosses several separate pieces, getting an Ironhide with a totally straight stripe is a bit like winning the lottery, if the lottery cost $30 or so per ticket. The blue window paint is also a little bit different shade in an attempt to better match the color of the actual transparencies. I've never approved of using blue paint to try to disguise an opaque window. ...or clear blue plastic, for that matter. Meanwhile, the sunroof strip is painted black. What the heck, guys?  Other visible differences in vehicle mode include a blank license plate, and chromed head and tail lights. Certainly wouldn't have been my first choice. In an odd twist, when it comes down to it the worst problem in color match does not occur between painted red bits and bare plastic red bits. No, in fact it's color matching between two areas of red plastic that seems to have eluded us here, resulting in a slightly darker red expanse between windshield and back window.

In front, Ironhide has a bumper bar obscuring part of the grille, though it could easily be removed with no trace of it remaining visible, since it's secured with a single screw. The hubcaps are unpainted, as are the few details present on the rear bumper, such as twin dual exhaust. One other thing that is really sadly lacking a paint operation is the barely perceptible rear window wiper molded into the clear plastic. It's a great little detail (and further accurate to the Cadillac the toy seems based on) and it gets almost totally lost.



Transformation


While the Lamborghini and 350Z-inspired bodies from the first wave certainly features almost Alternator-like transformation engineering, Ironhide really tops it all. The nearly origami quality of the folded portions that contribute to the sides of the vehicle body are actually pretty straightforward compared to some of the craziness at work elsewhere.

For one thing, what kind of engineering school do you have to fail in order to think it's a good idea to make the windshield section be a single piece with the middle of the hood? Why would anybody have a length of clear plastic stick straight out and not have any kind of safe failure point?

Pretty much whichever direction you're going, there's places where everything has to be in a particular place for the rest to go properly. And worst of all, while transforming the torso, you're required to force the pelvis past a point that in any other case would feel like a safety stopping point. I honestly believed Ironhide was misassembled before I applied a terrifying bit of excessive force. I could probably write a whole separate article about why Ironhide is a bad transformation, but suffice to say that while the instructions are a terrible failure you need to try and follow along with them until you get the sequence memorized.



Robot Mode


Let's just say up front that there is no means of transformation, mistransformation, posing or surgical modification that will result in Ironhide's head not appearing cast down to some degree. The one and only way I've seen to accomplish that so far has been to fully replace the neck joint. I'll agree that everything makes it look like somehow things should come together just that half centimeter farther, but it just doesn't work that way.

The instructions direct you to fold Ironhide's wheels around so they fill up space in the backpack. I find that the head comes up a little bit farther if you leave the wheels either at the hips, or even spread out to the sides. Some justify it by calling it a jetpack of some sort, but I'm happier with the hip wheels.

To say there's weirdness with the jointing in the arms is putting it mildly. First, there's no upper arm swivel. Mind you that if there was, the connecting hinge would be a very effective elbow joint. Instead it swings out to the side and must be supplemented by an additional elbow hinge with much less range. The sideways elbow can be utilized in certain kinds of poses with the large weapon, but it mostly just exists to frustrate you. There is possibly unintentional added shoulder articulation, provided by transformation swivels, letting the arms swing backward and forward in a range very similar to natural human movement. The main shoulder swivels are pretty simple pegs - it's not hard at all to just pop off one or both arms, especially if your example's parts fit isn't ideal. The wrist is a funky double joint, a ball joint base with a hinge that the hand attaches to. Makes for an unusual range of motion, but at the same time largely useless.

The only cool bit with the torso is that in the act of flipping up the bumper for transformation, you slide a mechanically-detailed panel behind the rear window. It's made in such a way as to suggest the mechanisms that might serve as Ironhide's muscles. Plus it's a nice nod to G1 where suddenly techno-bits would be found where a passenger compartment existed moments earlier in vehicle mode. Ironhide ends up with something of a backpack, where the large, single piece that is the windshield and part of the roof just hangs around. Sadly it extends quite a distance out from the toy's back, and is probably the weakest looking element of the robot mode. As mentioned, the wheels are meant to fold into the backpack structure, but I think it comes out badly enough already without contributing more junk to it.

The legs are kind of bizarre looking, with large empty spaces clearly visible even from the front. Ironhide is remarkably stable, though, between stiff joints throughout the legs, and large, flat feet. Though not intended as such, there's even extra bits that can fold down to increase surface area, much like the feet cranes and other heavy equipment deploy to help anchor to the ground. Sadly while there is a good number of joints in the legs, tightness or physical limitation generally hampers their use. The hips are very stiff (he is an old dude, afterall) and the knees have a limited range. And sadly whatever pictures you've seen with Ironhide's pelvis jutting forward, I'm afraid it's not mistransformation. It's all so sadly true. Some attempted modifications will make the problem worse, too. Think about that before you get the idea to start carving away at stuff to fix the head.

More substantial differences in appearance here. For one, the plastic color layout has been changed around, eliminating the black forearms and "shorts". The arms are now the same red as most of the rest of the body, while the upper thighs have been painted over in an off-white color to match the plastic of the pelvis as closely as possible. The facing side of the shoulders is now painted dark grey, and the face also uses the off-white color of the upper legs as opposed to the mistakenly blue face of the Universe Ironhide. (though that's allegedly in the process of being corrected!)


Accessory


This has always looked pretty neat to me. Maybe less so when done entirely in chrome, but the idea is still good. Okay, so it's a large techy thing. At one end is a Gatling or Vulcan gun. The other end is a short, clear blue blade. The idea is that mounting one end to the arm serves to push out the weapon on the other end. Instructions and package photos direct you to fold away the toy's hand first, and certainly the jointing supports that. However, that method results in neither end of the weapon deploying to its full extent. Meanwhile, if you fit the weapon over the hand and then mount it to the forearm, everything works perfectly. Vulcan and knife both get pushed all the way out, the fit is more secure, and it's more in the spirit of the G1 cartoon function it's trying to replicate, wherein a hand is replaced with a piece of specialized equipment.

Indeed, the jointing that seems to support the official direction to fold the hand out of the way really just exists for transformation, leading me to believe that sliding over the hand was how the designer intended this to work and everything since that point has been in error. Not to mention that both ends are fitted to what feels like a spring, allowing them to be pushed in further to accommodate the hand. Take it as you will.

The weapon fits over either hand, and is not restricted to one side or the other being "up". One side does have a sort of scope, indicating it should probably be on top, but it'll mount either way. The weapon also has a peg to mount in vehicle mode. That can be a matter of having to carefully massage everything out of the way just enough to allow the weapon to pass. It does help immensely to position the hands a certain way for vehicle mode, though. Still, being that the entire body of the thing is chrome, I'm more than a little wary of having it rubbing between Ironhide's legs as it does.



Closing Remarks

While very few of the new mold Universe toys have managed to capture the feel of the Classics toys which inspired them, Ironhide is the only one so far to feel like it's sticking a giant middle-finger in the face of that style as it goes in entirely the opposite design path. That by itself wouldn't necessarily be enough to get a bad score from me, since I'm a fan of variety in my Transformers. No, what gets to me is that it seems to want to take the very worst aspects of not only Alternators, but even the movie toys and mash them all together into a great big pile of bad wrongness. It's easy to read me wrong here, but I actually don't have too much problem with the robot mode, and I'll acknowledge the vehicle mode is at least fairly stable even if it looks like a broken mirror. But I have such a quarrel with the engineering and design concepts that allow the vehicle mode to look like that and transform as it does in the first place that it's really hard for an "okay" robot mode to salvage anything from this.

As to a choice of which version of this toy to buy, I'll just say that our rationale for buying the much more expensive Henkei version was "Well, he looks less ugly than the US version!" There is no kind of material improvement to the toy in this chrome-laden manifestation, it's all about which colors you prefer, and if they're worth about triple the price of the one you can get at Target.

Henkei in my opinion has a better appearance than Universe in this case (definitely not my typical opinion on the matter), but bringing it down to the merits of just the toy nobody is ahead. In contemplating this review, I really wanted to stick Ironhide with our lowest score of "Shoot Yourself", but I can't bring myself to that point in any fairness. I'm going to give Ironhide a rating of Could Have Been Better, in part because I think the phrase alone is about the best description I could give.

You guys wanna know the saddest part here? In addition to the already known Ratchet, I can come up with at least two more hypothetical recolors that would make me buy this mold again. I'm a sucker for punishment.

-ExVee, 12/08/2008