From pretty in pink to brutal in burgandy.
No toys today, but, here, have an image I put together for the Transformers Wiki. Considering how frequently the animation studios mixed up their Hot Rods and Rodimuses, a visual guide to their differences seems like it’d be a good idea. Monzo provided me some scans of some colored character models from old Japanese magazines, but I wanted something a little less grainy and a little more, uh, accurate. So I took their character model lineart and colored it myself by eyedropping colors from select episodes. Some episodes were by crappy animation companies, so I avoided those, as they had different color palettes and sometimes colored things wrong.
So, hey, Hot Rod is pretty pink. It’s kinda funny that, as he gets older, he gets more desaturated. I say it’s funny because when you die in Transformers, you turn gray. So this is like a subtle commentary on aging. You’re halfway dead! Kup also desaturated with age, so it’s not just Hot Rod who has his mortality written all over him in Prismacolor.
(The ancient, bearded sage Alpha Trion, even in modern times, is bright purple and red. When he was a kid, I bet you couldn’t look at him without burning your retinas. He was a walking lense flare.)
I scaled the models to each other according to how they’re depicted in the animation materials. (I’ve got a lot of this crazy stuff on my hard drive.) So their relative heights are accurate, at least to that one height chart.
My favorite detail is the crotch. Why? Because it’s their windshield and roof. That’s where the passenger cabin is intended to go during the transformation to robot mode. If any toy ever attempted it, it’d basically look like Hot Rod or Rodimus is wearing a huge diaper, so I can understand why their toys shy away from that.
Hope you enjoyed character-design geeking with me.
Wonder if the windshield crotch explains why Masterpiece Rodimus Prime has clear plastic there.
That is awesome! No website can have enough pictures of Hot Rod & Rodimus in my eyes. He’s been my favorite Transformer since I was a wee tot.
What surprisingly Protoman-esque behavior on your behalf, Walky.
Why is the windshield/roof the crotch? I don’t remember seeing it end up there…. I always thought the windshield was just folded up between his back and his wings. There was an Ark Addendum once showing Rodimus’ transformation, but it used Optimus’ crotch at the crucial stage; and I checked TFTM and the crotch just folds away underneath there. Either way, I don’t think that in practice Rodimus ever transformed consistently.
It was intended to be the crotch by the original character modeler, Floro Dery. The toys were created from there, and then another pass of character models were based on the toys. Rodimus’s animation transformation is from that latter pass.
Dery’s character models didn’t think through its transformations. He would just slap vehicle parts wherever. Figuring out the transformation would be the engineers’ job.
http://www.ntfa.net/universe/english/index.php?act=view&char=Hot_Rod
The lineart here is based on Dery’s original character models. Contrast it with the one for Hot Rod that I colored. Ignoring the coloring, compare the lines on his crotch to the shapes on the car’s windshield. Note the side-windows on his hips.
Interesting… So the comics model (eg the TFU link you gave) was based more closely on Dery’s designs, but the animation studies then tweaked them for the cartoon? It’s funny that Rodimus’ anim model has hardly been tweaked at all, and the Hot Rod model is much more similar to Rodimus — shoulders, wings and crotch are especially noticable. Maybe the anim studios put more work into the Hot Rod model, as the star of the movie, and Rodimus was put on the back burner (in TFTM, he uses the Hot Rod model & colours).
Well, Rodimus Prime is a weird case. The ORIGINAL original Dery Rodimus looks different from the one published in Transformers Universe, and looks super old and geriatric. But the one published above is clearly a Dery-drawn revision, since it basically copy-pastes Dery’s Hot Rod arms and legs, while all of the other revisions are completely redrawn.
It’s all very dizzying.
There it is. Look at the face of your G1 Rodimus Prime toy and note the resemblance.
Thank you for uploading this to the wiki, even as a hardcore fan, I sometimes can’t tell one apart from the other, except when it comes to toys, the crappier one is a Prime.
A post I fully approval. Good show Willis.
If AKOM’s color palettes weren’t so awful, I think that people wouldn’t need such an explanation to straighten them out on the issue of Hot Rod’s colors. Although, it should be noted that the pink is pretty toned down in “The Burden Hardest to Bear” in part because much of the episode takes place at night, and also because it’s one of the few episodes on the DVDs where we got the broadcast masters instead of the incomplete 35mm prints.
[i]If AKOM … weren’t so awful[/i]
Then they wouldn’t be AKOM, now would they? :p
This is very true. However, it’s not like Toei was perfect-their first season episodes are universally horrible, even “Fire on the Mountain” and “The Ultimate Doom” Part II, which were done by the same guys that did most of the second season. (And that’s before taking into account the crappy DVDs.) It’s just that Season 3 AKOM is so much worse that we forget the messes of the first 16 episodes.
I find the original Rodimus character model by Dery to be highly amusing.
He looks lke Hot Rod in his mid Forties after a harsh life of booze and drugs… Which is pretty weird and funny for a transformer.