Shattered Glass was FunPub's take on a 'mirror universe' in which the Autobots were the bad guys and the Decepticons were heroic. It's not an original idea (ripped off from Star Trek, if nothing else) and wasn't even especially well-explored in the BotCon comic or the related story in the Collectors' Club comic, just enough to spark the fan community's interest.
Rodimus, if I remember correctly, was presented as a sort of low-level gangster type - very stereotypical Italian-American mob-like - with a black, purple and silver paint job that was one of the oddities of the Shattered Glass concept, in that it wasn't taken from an equivalent traditional Decepticon, it was simply an adaptation of the long-standard 'Nemesis' palette. But let's get into the analysis properly...
Vehicle Mode:
So, here we have a black repaint of Classics Rodimus with a more vigorous flame pattern on his bonnet and further, similar decals on his sides and the roof. The engine is painted pretty much identically to the original toy, but the roof features an additional silver paint application in the trapezoid detail at the back, while the windows are translucent red rather than blue. The rear of the car features silver paint applications in the five sunken rectangular details but, other than an additional Autobot insignia on one side at the back like a sort of vehicular tramp stamp, the paint job is pretty much indentical to the Classics toy - the exhaust pipes running down the sides and all the hubcaps are painted silver... and that's about it.
His headlights and tail lights are unpainted, but the base plastic is a very sparkly charcoal colour rather than outright black. Even so, I'd have liked a bit of paint on the headlights since, even with the flame patterns, the vehicle looks pretty dull without them - there's not a massive amount of sculpted detail and the overall shape of the vehicle isn't that interesting (with a couple of exceptions, early Classics figures really haven't aged well), and having the spoiler in grey plastic is a real let-down. It does feature a sparkly component, just like the black plastic, but it's very much lost unless the light catches it just right. Chrome, like Takara Tomy's Henkei Hot Rod, would be a bit too much to ask from Fun Publications, but a bit more silver paint might have livened the spoiler up a little.
Naturally, since there are no changes to the mold, SG Rodimus features the same afterburner weapon, stashed on the underside of the central rear section of the vehicle, and his flame missile is translucent red, just like the vehicle's windows.
Robot Mode:
I'm now seriously disappointed in myself that I haven't already got round to the original Classics Rodimus yet, because this robot mode has really become one of the low points of Hasbro's first major G1 reboot. Even at the time, I can remember thinking that, sure, it looked better than G1 Hot Rod and was vastly more poseable... but something about his overall aesthetic just didn't seem to fit with the rest of the Classics line, to the point where it looked like it had been designed by an entirely different team to those who had created anything else from the first few waves.
The overall build of him looks OK, with the shoulders sticking up way beyond their joint as is pretty typical with a Hot Rod... but due to the way the upper body is put together - and in particular the way the car's bonnet and engine protrude above the level of the shoulders - the arms end up looking like they're mounted too low, and the forearms look especially stubby because they're about twice as deep as they are wide.
The legs legs are very odd-looking, with reasonably-sized thighs leading down to enormous, clodhopping boots that look as if they've been borrowed from a figure in a larger size class. The legs are also burdened by a pair of vehicle mode panels hanging off the hips. They're clearly there for effect, and it's certainly well-integrated into the hip joints... but it's not a great look, and wasn't any better when the original Rodimus figure appeared.
Paint-wise, this being a BotCon exclusive, it's surprising how few differences there are between this and the stock figure. Aside from the style and size of the flame pattern applications, the robot-specific applications of silver and purple paint follow exactly the same template as the mainline Deluxe. Purple substitutes for black on the tops of his shoulders and for silver on the chevrons on his shins, as well as for the yellow on his black plastic hip sections. The silver paint applications are much the same - shoulder tops, small pipe sections on the sides of the torso, 'belt buckle' panel on the groin section - but there are new applications, unique to this version of the figure, on the raised, curved details on the cuffs and on the tops of the raised shin details. With no significant differences and only a handful of new paint applications, he doesn't look especially 'premium' for an exclusive.
The weapon is similarly underachieving, the only difference between this and a stock Rodimus weapon being that the trigger for the spring-loaded launcher is grey rather than orange. The tip of the barrel has exactly the same coverage with silver paint as the original. Much as I don't like the flame stylings of the 'missile', I have to say it looks good in translucent red plastic. There's also, of course, the flip-out circular saw in the left forearm. This weapon wasn't even referenced in the BotCon comic, though I have a feeling it may have been brought up in the Club comic
On the upside, the head - while exactly the same sculpt as every other version of the mold - is slightly more elaborately painted. Both the two side crests and the central detail are painted purple with the recessed parts and the crossbar of the central detail further picked out in silver. The face on mine is rather haphazardly painted silver, possibly a little scuffed below the left eye, but it almost looks intentional, giving him the 'heavy eyeliner' look used by many an evil doppelgänger over the years. Completing the look, along with the red light-piped eyes, is the stereotypical 'evil character' goatee which, according to the comic, he added himself as he felt it made him look "distinguished". It follows the sculpted robotic jaw details and works quite well, effectively disguising the impression that his lower jaw sticks out from his face below his weirdly angular mouth.
A lot of the time, when I write about toys from the Collectors' Club and BotCon, I'm pretty disparaging of the character bios provided, both in the sense that they have been poorly written and that they have little of any consequence to actually say about the character. In the worst cases - such as with Rodimus, unfortunately - they hint at a backstory far more interesting than the Shattered Glass comic from BotCon 2008, which itself devoted a full double-page spread to its own backstory.
With the Club's typically loose grasp on the construction of grammatically correct sentences, it paints Rodimus as rebellious, though only in the sense of not wishing to follow Optimus Prime's crusade. Being a mercenary (supposedly - the bio also describes him as a 'warrior'), he's willing to work for Prime for a profit... Yet he apparently joined the cause anyway after a particularly fierce battle that left Rodimus the only survivor of his group (naturally named 'The Wreckers' because they have to exist in some for in every continuity). It adds at the end that he wants to be Autobot leader himself, almost turning him into a Starscream analogue, except that he then wants the Autobots to become a mercenary group. None of this is apparent from the BotCon 2008 comic, in which Rodimus features only briefly at the start, then in a couple of panels later on... and neither he nor the fateful battle that wiped out the rest of the Wreckers are even mentioned in the two-page backstory segment. Nothing is said about his handgun, his wrist-mounted blasters, or the fold-away miniature circular saw that was held over from the original toy's homage to Hot Rod's saw, as seen in the animated movie.
Derivative as it may be, I really like Shattered Glass as a concept concept, and it was a little bit better fleshed out in the Club comics (intermittently). Even so, in retrospect, I almost wish Shattered Glass happened a little later, so it could take advantage of the Titans Return mold, just because that vehicle mode was so much better than this... but then, that would have been around the time the Club reached the end of its license from Hasbro. This version of Rodimus was the first use of the mold by Fun Publications, and it was later reused - arguably to better effect - as a Timelines take on RID Side Burn. though I'd debate whether this mold - which had already been reused as various different takes on Hot Rod - was worth using for any kind of exclusive, even a few years after its first appearance.
One thing this mold is particularly prone to is plastic stress on the upper arms - partly due to the fact that the shoulder ball joint is actually a separate piece, pinned to the comparatively thin plastic of the upper arm, inside the front wheel well, and partly because the simple act of transforming the toy ends up being quite abusive to that joint due to the collapsible chest sections having to be tugged out by the arms. My original Rodimus has been showing signs of stress on both arms for many years, but it's only just starting to appear on SG Rodimus. It isn't visible on Side Burn because that whole section is painted white on both arms. It's probably worth keeping an eye on the upper arms around this joint, as I suspect it'll eventually break on one iteration of the mold or another.
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