Fallback - aka Outback, another name Hasbro lost for a few years - was one such figure. Clearly based on the G1 character, going by his colourscheme, yet a repaint of the movie version of Brawn. So... technically, while I thought Legends class Ravage was the final Revenge of the Fallen toy in my collection, it seems it's actually this one!
Vehicle Mode:
The weird thing about Brawn's Revenge of the Fallen remix was that it more closely resembled G1 Outback - a heavy-duty off-road vehicle with a gun mounted on the roof. Granted, his vehicle mode was dark brown... but even that was closer to Outback's beige/tan than Brawn's military green. Here, the vehicle has been repainted along the lines of those generally deployed in the desert, his bullbars are black rather than grey, and he doesn't sport the N.E.S.T. logo anywhere but it's certainly the sort of vehicle one might expect to see the military driving around in one of the movies.
Fallback's paint job is a bit of a mixed bag. Overall, he appears to have a greater number of paint applications, and probably a greater surface area of paintwork than Brawn's vehicle mode. In some ways, though, it's just not used as effectively. The rollbars around the open rear of the vehicle and the rearmost side windows are painted black, while the bars running along the bottom rim of the vehicle shell are not. Armour strips on the side doors are painted gunmetal, there's a strip of gunmetal at the front of the bonnet, and the odd disc on the left side of the roof, behind the gun is also painted gunmetal. The headlights, roof lights and front indicators are painted in, but the tail lights and the lights on the bullbars have been left unpainted. Where the minimal paint applications worked on Brawn, Fallback comes across as the typical unfinished-looking Hasbro release, particularly due to the unpainted rear end.
The roof-mounted gun is exactly the same as Brawn's though it's a little off-centre here - either due to plastic tolerance issues or some minor assembly error. Along similar lines, I have trouble keeping the main panel on the righthand side of the vehicle pegged in, and there's some slight misalignment in the roof.
Robot Mode:
Where Brawn's robot mode magically introduced elements of green and gold that weren't present anywhere on his vehicle mode, just to better resemble the G1 character, Fallback remains mostly consistent, with beige/tan still being the predominant colour. Some warm brown materialises for his torso, the bulky upper sections of his lower legs and his feet, while black and dark brown plastics add some variation to his limbs.
Here again, the paint job is much reduced - where most of Brawn's torso was painted gold, with red details were added here and there, Fallback has a gunmetal strip down the middle of his torso and three blocks of orange paint on his belly details. The feet are painted brown rather than being molded in brown plastic, and that's pretty much the sum total of the robot-specific paintwork. Still, it works, and it's not as if Hasbro were going to chrome his whole arms (or even paint them with a suitable metallic colour) just to match the G1 toy.
In a lot of ways, this mold really suits Outback/Fallback far better than it ever did Brawn. Sure, the two shared the majority of their mold, but Brawn wasn't weaponised, and had enormous wrenches for hands. Outback came packaged with a gun to mount on his vehicle mode's roof but which couldn't be wielded in robot mode, and this update corrects that oversight in a big way. Not only does he have a gun in each hand the moment you transform him (the sights being tabs that slip into slots on the robot's back), but the vehicle's roof gun unfolds to become an over-the-shoulder weapon. I do like that it can be switched from left to right, or even balanced directly over Fallback's head, but the twin handguns are really what makes this mold, especially given the poseability of the arms and freely rotating hands.
The head sculpt is a weird midpoint between G1 Brawn and something unique, so it's really not appropriate to Outback, who was one of the later G1 Mini Autobots who got a unique torso/head sculpt rather than being a straight repaint. While the shape and style of the helmet could be considered equally fitting to Outback seen through the lens of the live action movies, it's largely unpainted beige plastic, with only the battlemask painted gunmetal. The battlemask is really what lets this figure down in this form, since Outback had a very humanoid face with a wide visor. The beady, light-piped eyes remain, albeit with colourless light piping, which also don't do him any favours.
While playing about with Fallback and taking the photos - since it transpired that he's yet another figure from ten years ago that I didn't bother to photograph at the time - I found that his hip joints are marginally tighter than those on my Brawn. He's not so inclined to topple over in awkward poses, but they are loose enough that posing him can be challenging, particularly when his knees and ankles are ridiculously tight, and those bonnet panels hanging off his thighs quickly get frustrating.
There are a couple of issues with this iteration of the mold, at least with my copy. As mentioned above, the roof gun parts are misaligned and one of the vehicle's side panels doesn't like to peg in securely for vehicle mode. The rear view of robot mode possibly provides some explanation for the latter, since the panel hangs at an angle on his back. Either it's misaligned on its pin, or the hinged arm it's connected to is twisted. The gun fares better in its unfolded, extended form in robot mode, but it feels a little loose in its mounting and tends to droop back down to horizontal when aimed upward, unless raised beyond a certain point.
I've said it above, but I'll say it again: the mold definitely works better as Outback/Fallback than as Brawn, with the twin pistols and over-the-shoulder gun really making up for the G1 toy's inability to wield his cannon in robot mode. The funny thing is, while I noted in my Brawn write-up (posted about a week shy of being ten years ago to the day!) that I wouldn't be averse to picking up an Outback repaint, it was contingent on a unique head sculpt being "particularly good"... and yet I snapped him up regardless. That probably says something about the mold... but possibly more about the state of my collecting mania at the time. It's a great mold but, in retrospect, very much of a quality where buying one or the other should be sufficient.
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