...Only for Takara Tomy to later return to the originally intended colourscheme and release it within their Arms Micron spin on the TransFormers Prime toyline, along with a single Mini-Con weapon in place of the twin cannons from Christiansen's original design.
Really makes you wonder what's going on behind the scenes at both companies, doesn't it?
Vehicle Mode:
Ironhide's traditional red certainly makes for a more pleasant-looking pickup truck than the odd green Hasbro chose to apply to their Sergeant Kup toy. It's a very burly pickup truck, not entirely dissimilar to the Topkick used for the live action movies, but perhaps a little exaggerated it its details. The front end almost feels Super Deformed due to how tall it is versus its width, and the raised section at the back of the bonnet emphasises this still further.
Given that the Arms Micron line tended to skimp on paintwork in favour of stickers included with all the toys, I was pleasantly surprised by how much paint has been used here - it's almost on a par with Hasbro's Kup toy - the entire roof of the cab and the window frames are painted red, with the roof light panel, headlights, bullbars, and a section of the bumper painted silver. The stickers here are used in place of any supplementary paintwork on the doors, truck bed and on either side of the front bumper. Down each side of the vehicle, a set of four stickers adds a strip of metallic red and dark gunmetal panelling to the doors and sides of the truck bed, while the tailgate gets a gunmetal panel. The final sticker visible in vehicle mode is the Autobot insignia on the raised portion of the bonnet.
All of this does leave the back end without much detail or colouring. Neither version has the tail lights painted in but, where Hasbro's toy had a painted rear bumper, this one is plain red plastic. Perhaps worse than this, though, is that the frontmost sections of the front wheel wells were actually molded in black plastic rather than red, meaning there's a small, but odd-looking panel at each side of the front of the vehicle. There's no apparent reason for this, since these parts end up inside the robot, and it clearly wasn't deemed necessary on Kup. The concept art actually suggests a likely reason for the use of black plastic, as the entire bottom half of the vehicle was supposed to be black/grey/gunmetal depending on one's interpretation of the artwork. Takara Tomy may have been better off molding most of the truck in black plastic, painting the bonnet along with the roof, and just adding the coloured stripes on the sides as stickers...
Somehow, I'd forgotten how downright ugly the truck bed is, with the gappy insides of the lower legs - and the massive space between them - on full show. Sergeant Kup's main advantage was that he could disguise this whole area by having his twin cannons plugged in at the back. Ironhide has the same weapon ports as Kup - one on each side of the vehicle, one on each side of the robot's feet inside the truck bed - but the supplied Arms Micron, Iro, is too large to fit in either socket at the back unless laid across the bed, which then leaves half the cannon sticking out of the side anyway. It is possible to slot him into the sockets of Ironhide's ankle ball joints, but the connection there is looser than the dedicated 5mm ports, so the only viable option is using one of the ports on the side doors. My main gripe, weapons-wise, is that only one copy of Iro was included, where Kup has two of his slightly more compact cannons.
Robot Mode:
Arms Micron Ironhide is immediately far more striking than TF Prime Sergeant Kup thanks to his vibrant colourscheme. A good, deep, rich red has been coupled with a darker grey compared to the Hasbro toy, and it fits both the character and the toy perfectly. It makes me wonder why Hasbro even bothered repainting him as Kup rather than just releasing it in the intended colourscheme. The long, slimline waist is, perhaps, a little more jarring here, since the contrasting colours somehow accentuate the weird proportions of the body.
As with vehicle mode, there are a few touches of paintwork in robot mode - red on the 'belt' area and on either side of the belly, matching the green paint on Kup - with the rest of the colour coming from stickers. As well as an additional Autobot insignia on the chest, in the middle of the armour panel just below the faux-windscreen, Ironhide gets an utterly inexplicable set of six dark gunmetal panel stickers for his kneecaps, shins and ankles. This appears to be because Ken Christansen's concept artwork gave Ironhide mostly dark grey/black legs, with just a strip of red on the lower part of this shin, but the way it's been handled here really doesn't look good. The knee and shin stickers only cover the rectangular front panels and, while the ankle sticker wraps around to the outside, the inside features all the hollow sections visible in vehicle mode, so attention is drawn to those gaping chasms in a way that wasn't so bad on Sergeant Kup. Additionally, the concept art had the forearms and hands mostly black, with just the small panel leading off the elbow joint being red. Naturally, that just wasn't possible without additional paintwork... Though, again, it would have been easier to achieve had the majority of the vehicle been molded in black/grey plastic, per the concept art. To be honest, I think anything - even leaving the legs bare - would look better than the stickers provided... but I'm quite tempted to repaint this guy.
While the pair of cannons provided with Sergeant Kup seemed a little undersized, Iro seems far too big, and the bright orange, shimmery plastic clashes with Ironhide's fairly basic colourscheme. The size emphasises the reference to movie Ironhide's oversized cannons, but with only one Arms Micron in this set, this incarnation of Ironhide looks unbalanced. Granted, you can plug the weapon into one of his fists, but it's very clear from the design of the figure that his weapons are supposed to be mounted on the sides of his forearms. The other problem is that Iro's 5mm peg is a good 2-3mm longer than the pegs on Kup's cannons, and they were already a little bit too long. This leaves Iro sticking out quite a way from Ironhide's arms, rather than hugging them closely. Given that the sockets are already raised, it feels like allowances should have been made in Iro's design to allow him to sit closer. If nothing else, there's no reason the peg couldn't have been shorter.
As stated in my Sergeant Kup writeup, the head is unmistakeably Ironhide. The overall shape of it is a direct homage to the G1 animation model, while the level of detail and overall style - particularly the angular, seemingly segmented helmet - are closer to some depictions of the character in IDW's comics. The flattened nose and jutting jaw are almost a caricature of the original Autobot tough guy, but it fits the body perfectly (aside from looking a little small inside the massive frame of the vehicle's bonnet spanning his shoulders). The only oddity is that his eyes are painted yellow... though the same was true of Sergeant Kup.
Arms Micron: Iro
Iro essentially becomes an upscaled, slightly more detailed and/or movie-influenced version of the weapons provided with TF Prime Kup. He works reasonably well as the majority of his seams might otherwise by sculpted panel lines, but the barrel of the cannon looks pretty terrible. It contains both a 5mm socket (toward the bottom, using the weapon's main 5mm peg as orientation) along with exposed parts of a transformation hinge and, being an Arms Micron, there's no plastic colour variation or paintwork to disguise either.
He comes with his own stickers - three sections of gunmetal to go around the outer rim of the gun barrel, two red panels with black linework for the back end of the gun, a couple of red strips with gunmetal linework for the underside (these being mainly visible in his robot mode), a further red panel with a curved gunmetal strip for the robot's shoulders, and the Autobot insignia to go inside the jewel thing on his right leg. The problem with these stickers is that so many have to be applied to curved or otherwise uneven surfaces, and they just don't stick very well. The largest of the three around the barrel regularly peels up of its own accord, and is even more inclined to do so during transformation because of the other parts brushing against it.
The sculpted detail in gun mode looks OK and, if anything, the stickers get in the way of truly appreciating what you're looking at - simpler painted detail would have been far preferable, just to add some colour variation to the shimmery, vaguely metallic orange plastic. The two stickers on his back end are direct references to red panels on the concept art, but Iro's molded in entirely the wrong colour of plastic to match that. It's even worse in robot mode, as Iro wouldn't have looked out of place in Pokémon or one of the Megaman games due to his very basic head sculpt, but there's very little sculpted detail and the four stickers on his front add nothing of any real interest to his appearance. Some paintwork on his visor, or even just one more sticker to cover up the two vertical slots in his chest, could have made a difference but, as he is, he looks unfinished.
His articulation all comes from transformation so, while the arms have reasonable range (360° rotation, and they can swing forward, across his chest) the legs are joined at the hip, while the back end of the gun acts as a support to keep him upright, and prevents the legs swinging backward.
I have to admit that I wish I had a few more Arms Microns, so that I could combine them into larger weapons. With the handful of these I own, there are only about four gestalt weapons I'm able to create. Sadly, individual Arms Micron packs are fairly expensive for what they are, so I don't forsee myself acquiring more anytime soon.
Arms Micron Ironhide is an excellent figure, marred only by the reduced paintwork, the weird stickers Takara Tomy applied to the whole toyline and, strangely, the misapplication of the Arms Micron gimmick. I don't think it's become law that an Ironhide figure must have a huge cannon mounted on both arms, per the Bayverse movies, but Ken Christiansen's concept art was the basis for this figure so, weapons-wise, Sergeant Kup definitely did it better.
Lacking any means to cover the utter wreck of a truck bed certainly doesn't help Ironhide's vehicle mode but, on balance, I think he's still the better looking of the two. The mold could have done with being shorter, more squat... or perhaps just a bit wider in the body, since that would also have made the vehicle mode's width more in proportion with its height.
As far as I can see, this mold has had no further usages so far, which is a real shame - it has a lot of character and, with a different head and weapons, could have been used as a TF Prime version of TF Animated Sentinel Prime, even an adaptation of movie Ironhide, a bulked-up remake of the original Dropkick toy. I'd also say it could make a passable TF Prime version of G1 Brawn, given the right colourscheme. Given the mold's age, though, it seems unlikely to return in any form unless a new Collectors' Club were to emerge.
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