Posted September 19, 2012 at 12:16 am
It can't be great that both of the popular old guys in Transformers are just a color swap away from each other.  What I'm saying is, making Ironhide into Kup shouldn't result in that great of a Kup, yet it does.  I mean, it's good that it's a great Kup, y'know, for purposes of having a great Kup, but not so good in a world-building sense.  You don't want the two guys who share an archetype to be even more interchangeable.  It makes one of them redundant.

For some reason, the toy that was originally designed and solicited as Transformers Prime Deluxe Class Ironhide, based on Ken Christensen's design for Prime Ironhide, ended up being redecoed and released as Kup instead.  And like I said, it works pretty well.  They're both pickup trucks who are old guys who have windows on their chest, and neither of them is particularly shy with weaponry.  But Kup is green and Ironhide is red.   This is how you tell the two old guys apart.

The design itself is a great hybrid of elements of various Ironhide incarnations, particularly his G1 and live-action movie versions.  He's red and has his mohawked dome head with the cylinder ears and a windshield chest, but he's a pickup truck with giant cannons on his arms, his head embedded within his massive shoulders.  Since this version of the toy is Kup, I've not been attaching his giant cannons to his arms, opting to combine them into a larger  hand-held cannon.  It makes him look less Ironhidey.

Ironhide's character is pretty huge, especially in these post-Michael Bay days, and this toy's design reflects that.  What I mean to say is his head is tiny compared to his body.  In a more perfect world, he would have been a Voyager Class toy.  Instead, he's the size of Deluxe Arcee and with a head half the size.  It makes him look kinda Classicsy, really, since a frequent feature of G1 toys is their pinheadedness.  He's got a small head and he's blocky and rectangley.  Plus he has a nose.  Deluxe is a better size for Kup, I think, but his tiny head makes him  look really out of place next to other Prime toys.

I like how the doors fold in half to make his forearms.  I don't like how hard it is to get the center of his hood to split off from the rest of his hood and headlights.  I was afraid I was gonna break it when I tried to separate them the first time.  They click together pretty solidly.  After a few tries, the hood comes apart more easily, and also comes off the hinge entirely, which it's not supposed to do.  But if I put it back on upside-down in robot mode, that actually solves the problem of it sticking out pretty annoyingly from his back.  So, hey, making lemonade.

I'm sad this guy isn't who he was originally supposed to be, with no known stateside release at the moment, but I do like Kup way better than Ironhide, so that works for me.

UPDATE: I have added an image of Deluxe Kup next to Cyberverse Commander Ironhide because many folks are apparently confused about Kup's size and there was no way to slip any more iterations of the word "Deluxe" into this blog post without sounding like a jerk.
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