But where those were clearly of the movie aesthetic, Tomahawk occupied a strange middle-ground - sold as part of the extended RotF toyline, but closer to the more fanciful, sci-fi look of Classics/Generations and, like Skyhammer, made to accommodate the c-clip weapon accessories that debuted in that line.
Vehicle Mode:
While Tomahawk is quite a small Deluxe class toy, I'd imagine, going by his appearance, that he's technically supposed to be about the same size as Skyhammer - both have the split-level, two-seater cockpit, if nothing else. He has a very sci-fi look - moreso than his larger-scale compatriot - and, were it not for the rotor blades, I'd think this looks more like the dropship from Aliens than a helicopter. There's actually a massive disparity between the way he looks from the side and the way he looks from the front or back because the main body of the helicopter is so wide. This is seemingly to incorporate a pair of huge intakes on either side of the nose... though what they're intakes for isn't made clear - there's another ridged section toward the back, leading into the tail, but there's no clear evidence of them being part of any form of propulsion. Another oddity is the way the wings work. They're attached to the body by ball joints, as part of his transformation, but it's not entirely clear how they're supposed to rest in this form. I tend to push them down as far as they'll go, so the panel lines on top line up with those on the front sections of the main body... but then the missiles on the underside butt up against the sides of the chopper and hang at a strange angle. Lifting the wings so they start out horizontal means there's a slight offset in the panel lining, but the missiles are mounted horizontally... and the ball joint means they are easily nudged out of position anyway.
Molded largely in black plastic, with a translucent yellow canopy over the cockpit area and a weird jumble of metallic grey and beige on the undercarriage, Tomahawk features only a small number of simple paint applications. The framework of the canopy is painted to match the surrounding plastic, a red block appears just in front of the canopy, while the 'wings' on the surveillance module, the guns on the wingtips and the tail rotor are all painted a dark gunmetal. Each wing features some linework in gold, and the same gold paint has been used to highlight sculpted panel lines on the tail. Among the jumble of parts on the undercarriage, there are panels which have been painted black but, by and large, what you see is bare plastic.
His rotor blades are molded in fixed pairs which are pinned into place on the top of the vehicle mode. They're supposed to spin freely, but they're not especially effective and I can't see why. They just come to an abrupt stop after a few quick rotations when flicked. Moving them slowly by hand, I can feel a couple of points where a little more force is required to keep them moving, so I can only assume it's simply that the alignment is off, and the grey piece between the top of the main body and the blades is tilting and scuffing as it turns.
As well as the pairs of missiles screwed to the underside of his wings and what appear to be miniature Gatling guns sculpted on the wingtips, Tomahawk can accommodate his two spring-loaded missile launchers in a number of ways. Most obvious is the 5mm port on the underside of each wing, but the addition of ball-jointed c-clips on each launcher means than can be attached to the guns on the wingtips or to the pair of bars protruding at an angle from the base of the tail. The clips can even attach to the crossbars on Tomahawk's feet, tucked away under the tail, though this does require them to flex rather more than intended. However they're attached, one has to ensure that the trigger buttons are accessible - in the case of the under-wing mountings, this means having them facing downward. Frankly, I'm sufficiently impressed that spring-loaded missile launchers were even included - they weren't exactly the norm on movie figures, let alone in the Deluxe class range.
Two quite surprising features of this toy are the inclusion of retractable landing wheels both in the nose and near the back of the main body, and the fact that the surveillance module on the underside of the nose can actually rotate left and right. Its range of movement may be disappointingly small, but it wasn't necessary to make it mobile at all. On the downside, Tomahawk's head is reasonably visible on the underside of the chopper, just behind the front landing gear. It can be rotated 180° for slightly better concealment, but that still leaves the translucent light-piping plastic on show.
Robot Mode:
Looking at Tomahawk in robot mode, one has to wonder if he was really intended for release in one of the movie toylines, or if he was simply too weird for the Generations line. Indeed, this mold was later repurposed for use in Takara Tomy's Dark of the Moon line (as Vortex), the Collectors' Club's Timelines continuity (as Spinister) and in Generations (as Springer, the year before the awesome Thrilling 30 triple-changer was released), each with a new head and/or paint job - the one part of this version that doesn't seem to have been reused is its head... which I'll get onto later.
Tomahawk is an odd-looking robot, to be sure. He has the super-long shins that plagued many a movie figure, along with weird, bare-bones, piston-like feet, a super-narrow waist, and super-bulky chest and arms, with bits of the helicopter tail folded up against his forearms. With his wings swung up behind his shoulders he looks kind of like a stylised robotic demon or bird-man. The way the legs are designed almost makes them look as if they're intended to look digitigrade. The lower section of the leg - the black piece running from mid-shin to ankle - does seem to ratchet into several positions between 'stowed for vehicle mode' and 'fully extended', I believe they're supposed to be straight in robot mode. While this emphasises the weird proportions of the legs - small thighs, huge knees and skinny shins leading to bird-like feet - and though he might have looked a bit more sensible without the black portions above the ankles, he certainly looks the part of the alien robot. The level of sculpted detail on his legs is excellent - there appears to be a mass of interlocking pistons and exposed cabling controlling his movement, with the heaviest armour appearing around the knees. The cockpit torso with intake pecs means he bears a certain resemblance to the G1 Seekers in a roundabout way, while his legs and feet bear a closer resemblance to movie Starscream.
There's not a great deal more paintwork visible in robot mode - just a couple of applications of copper paint on the beige plastic shoulder parts and on the forearms - but, since the upper half of Tomahawk's body is largely made up of large chunks of helicopter and armour panels, he more or less gets away with minimal paintwork. Something about his hands - particularly the way the knuckles are represented by circular indentations - looks rather unfinished, but they do serve as a decent 5mm weapon grip, despite being sculpted open.
One of the main sticking points with all helicopter TransFormers is what they do with the rotor blades. A 2-blade toy is easy enough - even as far back as Generation 1, they would generally fold together (occasionally even forming a weapon, as with Springer). One of the other movie Deluxe 4-blade helicopter molds split them in to pairs and made them removeable, while Blackout - both the original movie version and the Studio Series update - turned his 6 blades into a kind of cape. Tomahawk's solutions is... far from elegant. He has two pairs of fixed blades that fold together into a right-angled arrangement that just hangs off his back. They can be splayed a little to form a Blackout-style cape, but it still hangs quite loosely and is very much inclined to get in the way of the arms and/or legs.
The two spring-loaded launchers can either stay on his wings during transformation or become hand-held (or arm-mounted) guns for the robot. The missiles' tails are so long that he can't actually hold the launchers straight unless his elbow is pretty much fully extended so, these days, I tend to use the c-clips to attach them to the armour panels on his forearms - aircraft TransFormers with arm-mounted weapons being a fairly common thing. Aside from these, the fixed, wing-mounted weapons end up sticking up from his back, over his shoulders, and the tip of the helicopter's tail becomes a vicious-looking, blade-like pincer mounted on his right arm
The head sculpt is the source of my confusion over the intended continuity for this figure - there's no way that visored helmet and human-like 'robot' face fits in with the live action movie franchise... but, in my opinion, it would have looked equally daft on a Generations figure. You could easily paint the face pink and get away with claiming he's a human in some sort of mech suit. The helmet just looks like a pilot's helmet, visor and all, and is only minimally detailed. The one interesting thing about it is that his eyes are light piped separately, behind the visor - they're painted translucent blue, and come through the translucent yellow visor quite strongly.
Tomahawk's transformation is fairly unusual for a TransFormers helicopter, though nowhere near as usual as Evac. The obvious upside to that is that he's a lot more solid and stable in both modes, and looks a bit more convincing as a robot. Rather than have the entire tail and rotor assembly as waste hanging off his back, the tail folds back on itself to become his arms, and the legs unfurl in several stages from the bulky undercarriage. Most parts seem to peg together quite securely, or at least have a locking point in their movement (the intakes should have been rotated a little more than I've done in my photos above, but there's a point of resistance just before the locking point on mine!) aside from the chopper wings, which remain poseable on their ball joints in robot mode, and the rotor blades which just flop about on his back. I rather wish the tail tips collapsed a little closer to his forearms, but they work surprisingly well as shields, and I like the way the tail fins are turned into a mêlée weapon. Much of vehicle mode's bulkiness comes from the robot's legs, so it probably could have been slimmed down considerably were it not for his massive knees/calves... but I do like the way the feet and ankles compress in, with the heel slotting neatly into the shin/knee. It's just a shame that the feet are beige plastic, and that one toe on each side protrudes out from below the helicopter's tail.
With ball-jointed shoulders and hips, Tomahawk has the beginnings of excellent articulation. All the limbs are nicely jointed, with rotation joints just above the elbow, 90° elbows, upper thigh rotation, near enough 90° knee bend, the pinned mid-shin joint and independently mobile heel and toe pieces. That said, the feet would have been more stable had the two toes been independent of each other - while they're sculpted at a slight angle, it still leads to him standing on one toe or the other, while the way the heel piece was sculpted means that only a small portion of it is actually offering any support in some of the more dramatic poses. Given the extent of their reach, it's surprising how little stability his feet actually give the toy. The large flap sticking out of the shoulder looks like it could be cause for concern, but it only really limits the extent to which Tomahawk can raise his arms out to the sides. The real problem for the poseability of his arms is the length of the tails on his missiles - even when mounted on his arms rather than in his hands, they will end up clashing with his shoulder wings eventually. Naturally, due to the way he transforms, there's no waist swivel, and it can't even be faked especially well due to the shape of the grey thigh piece, which clashes with his groin very quickly when turned inward. The head is on a ball joint, with the neck hinged for transformation. This would have given him excellent range were it not for the way the back of his head is molded, effectively reducing the ball joint to a swivel. The hinge allows him to look down, but upward movement is virtually nonexistant.
MechWarrior/GERWALK Fanmode:
It occurred to me while playing around with Tomahawk to complete this writeup, that the arrangement of his arms and legs, coupled with the way the hips swing into place from the back of the chopper, should mean that he could adopt a reasonably convincing 'walking tank' mode... This is about the best (most stable) configuration I came up with, and it looks pretty decent. The only problem is those damned rotor blades, which get in the way of the wings... I ended up just sort of wedging the wings against the rotors on both sides, in an attempt to minimise the movement of all of them.
There were a lot of movie-branded toys that didn't quite fit the movie aesthetic, but they were largely repaints of older figures - particularly those from the Energon or Galaxy Force lines. Tomahawk seems to have been created for the movie line and, while the mechanical detail of his legs seems about right, nothing else fits: it's not a real-world vehicle, and the head sculpt is entirely off-brand. But then, in a lot of ways, Tomahawk looks like a transforming robot toy from another manufacturer - like those G1 toys Hasbro repurposed from Toybox (Omega Supreme), ToyCo (Shockwave) and Takatoku (Roadbuster). The reworkings of this mold, with the alternate heads, looked a little better, but still never seemed to be an ideal fit either within the movie or Generations continuities.
Tomahawk is a great toy, though - he's great fun to transform (apart from the rotor blades) and has a striking and unusual, if not entirely unique look. The fact that he's a very different take on the idea of turning a helicopter into a robot is also very much in his favour, particularly since it results in fewer wasted parts or weird, floppy panels. It occurs to me now that, with the right paint job and a new head sculpt, he could make a decent Cybertronian version of Beast Wars Silverbolt.
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