I also know that I first saw X-Brawn, Prowl and Side Burn before I bought my first few RiD toys and, at first, really didn't like the look of any of them, so the fact that I own not just them, but two repaints each of the latter pair, just goes to show how my tastes changed over the course of a few years.
Vehicle Mode:
While the vehicle forms of larger toys like Ultra Magnus and Optimus Prime were entirely the creation of Takara's designers, the Deluxe class cars - much like the Diaclone-derived cars of Generation 1 - were each barely modified versions of real-life cars. Thus, X-Brawn transforms into something that is essentially a Mercedes-Benz ML320, though Hasbro made some additional changes to Takara's original mold and paint job to further differentiate them and so stave off any legal problems due to lack of licensing. The most obvious is that the headlights are mostly painted over, with only the raised circular details which Hasbro added left unpainted.
However, much like the Takara version, there's very little on this vehicle mode that isn't painted - aside from the windows, it's basically just the spare tyre on the rear, and the rack surrounding it - and what a paint job it is. The majority of the body is painted silver, with metallic green on both front and rear bumpers, along with the bottom rim of the car on either side, between the wheels. Further shaming Hasbro for the miserly paint jobs we get these days, window frames have been painted black, along with the wing mirrors, door handles, front and rear bumper trim, and the sculpted lines across the doors on each side (rubber or plastic strips on the real-life car, I believe). While the rear indicator lights haven't been painted in - or sculpted, for that matter, Hasbro having fudged the sculpt here as well (seemingly with some impact on the petrol cap) - there is a nice metallic green gradient at the rear of the car, which extends to just above the rear wheel wells. The front grille and all the hubcaps have been chromed and all the tyres are rubber, with 'TRANSFORMERS' branding. Compared to recent toys, this is pretty stunning presentation.
Pretty much every part of the car shell is made out of translucent plastic, with the paintwork being the only difference between bodywork and windows. This extensive use of translucent plastic does start to suggest one of the potential problems with this mold. While I've generally had very few problems with translucent plastic on TransFormers toys (Dark of the Moon Crankcase being one memorable exception), it does have a reputation for being rather fragile compared to the opaque kinds. In many ways - and considering the number of broken tabs I had with Side Burn - I'm surprised X-Brawn has lasted as well as he has.
Even given that this toyline preceded Binaltech by only three years, it's still surprising to see a toy of this size class with a hinged bonnet containing a chromed engine - Side Burn features the latter, but not the former, since his engine pokes through the bonnet in vehicle mode, while neither feature is present on Prowl. There are odd little patches of yellowishness in the indentations of the sculpt, as if an attempt was made to make the chrome look gold using a clear yellow paint which mostly drained off before setting, leading to a slightly weathered look. For the size, both the engine and its compartment are really nicely sculpted, and it almost feels as though the chromed piece should pop out and become yet another weapon for the robot to wield. Sadly, it doesn't, but it's still a nice detail to see, and speaks to a pride in the toy that is curiously absent nowadays.
All the robot's weapons stow on the underside, with the weird-looking missiles providing the car's chromed step rails on each side, and then something that looks very much like a one-handed mezzaluna adding bullbars at the front. This is probably one of the smartest, tidiest, most unobtrusive methods of weapon storage I've ever seen on a TransFormers toy, and very much counts in its favour. Interestingly, there's a note on TFWiki about the weapon sculpts having been changed on Hasbro's release, such that the weapon that attaches on the righthand side cannot sit flush with the underside of the car because of the raised Autobot insignia... I can't say whether there may have been a running change, or if the previous owner of this toy (assuming I bought it second hand!) simply cut a piece of the tip away, but the underside of the tip on mine is flat, and so sits perfectly in place.
Other robot parts that cannot be described as 'perfectly in place' include the head - which honestly looks as though it's sitting on one of the seats on the righthand side within the car - and the right arm, which is wrapped around behind the head and points forward on the left side. The former is certainly one of the most bizarre instances of Visible Head Syndrome that I can recall, while the latter merely looks untidy, since there's just about enough space to accommodate the forearm running down the side of the car, pretty much between the side doors, but the protrusion from the elbow means there's not enough clearance to close the door.
I'm not a great fan of SUVs, but I have to admit this is one of the better looking ones from any TransFormers toyline.
Robot Mode:
The primary reason for my initial dislike of the RiD 'Car Brothers' was that their robot modes' use of car parts tended to be inelegant, not to say clumsy. They all looked like weirdly skinny, gangly robotic action figures with arbitrary car parts hanging off them, and X-Brawn certainly exemplifies this. His disproportionately chunky lower legs are the entire back end of the car (much like Binaltech Skids/Broadblast), with his feet made up of the spare tyre and its enclosure, the latter hinged forward to act as 'toes'. The upper legs, body, right arm and left upper arm all suit each other quite well, but then the left forearm is the entire front of the car, with his hand coming out of the right wheel well. The left side door flaps about behind his elbow while the right side door sticks up to the side from the shoulder. While it could be argued that he wears his car panels rather more tidily than Side Burn, the bulkiness of them - particularly the left forearm - and the unwieldiness of them - the doors clashing with each other, the roof and windscreen on his back clashing with them both - makes him look generally untidy, and oversized on his left side.
All of the robot-specific parts are thankfully molded in opaque plastic, with a metallic/pearlescent green used for the head, upper body, thighs, right forearm and left upper arm, as well as the inner faces of the lower legs and the left forearm, with its raised Autobot insignia picked out with the toy's one and only instance of a gorgeous red chrome. This seems like a really odd choice given that you'd have to give him quite an awkward pose to display that insignia, while this Hasbro version has a large, white-outlined, plain red insignia stamped in a far more visible place on the front of the bonnet. These chromed insignias are a common feature of the Car Brothers, though, so really, it's just a shame it's in such an obscure location, essentially below the wrist. The left elbow and hand, right upper arm, groin, the lower sections of the knee joints are molded in the same shimmery grey plastic as the weapons and the 'toes', making for a nice contrast. The bulk of X-Brawn's paintwork is on the upper body, but he also has some silver paint picking out the sculpted fingers of his right hand, black paint around the tops of his hips and on the left shoulder, and the large, protruding chunks on his shins have been painted red, with silver paint carrying over from the outer car shell parts on the lower legs.
Say what you will about the overall look of the RiD Car Brothers, there's certainly a lot of intricate sculpted detail on show on this toy. In many ways, the upper sections of all his limbs resemble the level of complexity on the movie toys, even though the precise style of detail still tends more toward 'robot action figure' than 'marvel of modern CGI'. Add to that, X-Brawn's torso reminds me a lot of the Micronauts figures I briefly dabbled with in my youth. It's mainly armour panelling with a handful of raised details of indeterminate purpose, but the central part of the upper chest resembles both an engine and a car grille. As a whole, the chest looks more like a kind of sci-fi uniform than anything genuinely robotic, and the paintwork on the outer parts of the upper chest - the red disc bisected by a green band on one side, the two green tags on the other - look like badges of rank or similar. The belly details look slightly mechanical, but it's all still surface detail rather than any exposed inner workings. Probably the strangest aspect of the sculpt is on the groin section, which features a raised detail on one side closely resembling the chamber of a revolver, alongside what looks like a very simple vent.
At first glance, it might look as though X-Brawn's bulkier arm is his primary weapon - perhaps some kind of power punch augmented by revving his engine? - but his smaller, skinnier, blockier right arm houses a spring-loaded launcher for the two most unlikely 'missiles' you'll ever see. Both look too long to be practical, one looks more like some sort of bludgeon than a missile, while the other has a weird kink in it due to the way they peg in below the vehicle, so they look like parts of his exhaust system more than weapons. The left hand has been given an articulated thumb to allows it to grasp the third weapon - the one that looks like a single-handed mezzaluna - by hinging out of the way so the handle can be slid into the slot carved inside the fingers, then closed again to hold it in place. This same feature can be used to let X-Brawn hold the step rails, giving the spring-loaded weapon some extra support. When not in use, the two missiles can be plugged into the underside of the car roof, attached to the robot's back via a long column that allows it to rotate for transformation. While this sort of storage is all well and good, they can only be arranged with the step rails facing outward, since they would otherwise clash with each other. The missile pegged into the lefthand side instantly clashes with both of the car doors, hindering the movement of the left arm.
Another vaguely movie-like feature of X-Brawn is his head - it's very much toned-down, but has a similar 'made up of lots of little parts' kind of aesthetic, and the weird bobble on the right side of his forehead looks like just the sort of redundant detail the designers working on the movie characters would throw in because it looked cool. The battlemask kind of reminds me of the insectoid Decepticons, too. Most of the paintwork - the battlemask, headband and the front of the forehead bobble - is silver, while the triangular patch on his forehead is red (reminiscent of the Autobot insignias on some of the movie bots' foreheads). The eyes, meanwhile, appear to be gold chrome, and their sparkling helps them stand out very well despite being comparatively small.
Finally, just to note, I know you're supposed to fold his rear wheels over his shins rather than leaving them in their vehicle mode positions, but it looks like I forgot to do that when I took my photos... I didn't feel like taking a whole new set for this write-up and, honestly, he doesn't look significantly better with the wheels facing forward because it leaves the wheel wells awkwardly empty.
There are lots of familiar aspects to X-Brawn's transformation - the legs in particular fold up like some of the movie figures, with a hinge below the knee allowing for most of the compression. The left arm basically just concertinas up against the body, with the hand folding into the wheel well... but that's how my breakage happened. Because the hand is on a ball joint, it has to be worked into the void below the engine before the wheel can be rotated back into place and, upon transforming X-Brawn one way or the other, the hand caught somewhere inside and the silver-painted, translucent plastic socket for the joint cracked right down the middle and along the base on one side, leaving the wheel barely hanging on. That one aspect of transformation feels poorly designed and executed, and there's no good reason for that part to have been molded in fragile translucent plastic. However, it's interesting to note that he left wrist doesn't just fold out 90° - there's a notch in the underside of the car specifically to accommodate the wheel at a slight angle to the rest of the forearm. The remainder of the upper body is rather more complex than either of the other two Car Brothers, with the right arm folding onto the robot's back and wrapping round the roof's mounting column, while the head swings back, the roof turns to one side, then the entire upper body hinges up to the left to expose the joints required to compress the hips and torso together at the back. Once everything is compacted in as far as it can be, with the roof lining up with the rear of the car, the doors peg into place, and the missiles plug into the underside for additional structural integrity.
Aside from the left arm, which clashes with itself and X-Brawn's car roof backpack, he's a remarkably well-articulated figure, with no loose joints on mine. The left arm in and of itself isn't too bad, but the range of both the shoulder and the elbow are impeded by the two car doors. The one on the shoulder means he can't raise that arm to the side beyond about 45° (versus 90° on the right arm), while the one on the elbow means he can't straighten the elbow. He does have a rotation joint above the elbow, and the wrist is a ball joint, so it should have been a more expressive arm than it is. Meanwhile, the right arm has ball joints at the shoulder and elbow, and is small enough that none of the car parts inhibit its range of movement. The hips, too, are ball joints, both offering 90° outward swing - practically unachievable for the left leg due to the bulky forearm in its way - about 130° swing forward, but only a couple of degrees back due to the car's windscreen ending up just behind his thighs. The knees have a total range of about 180° forward and back, but most of that comes from the forward swing, due to transformation, and the backward swing is inhibited by both the car's windscreen and the large panels from the sides sticking up behind the knee. Just below is another joint, primarily for trasformation, but also acting as a supplementary knee bend (though it only really offers additional range if it's bent slightly before the knee joint) and allowing the lower leg to twist, in lieu of any thigh swivel. The feet don't offer any real articulation, but they are surprisingly good for posing, given that halves of the spare tyre make up his 'heel', and the framework for it acts as his 'toes' - both have been designed to offer a surprisingly stable footprint regardless of the angle of the leg.
X-Brawn really is a prime example of the way my feelings about certain toys - and groups of toys - have changed over the last 20-odd years. I would maintain that, of the three Car Brothers, he looks the least like a traditional TransFormer, though Side Burn would come a very close second. He is ultimately about 75% of an action figure jammed inside a car shell, but the way it was done was novel and interesting, leading to a unique-looking robot with some weird-but-cool accessories which are well handled in vehicle mode, and enhance to his unique appearance in robot mode. When I first saw him, I thought he looked terrible, and was still pretty ambivalent about him after picking him up, yet I was absolutely gutted when the left wrist broke. At some point, I hope to be able to replace him - possibly with the Japanese version, or maybe the 'Super' variant with its entirely different paint job. What's really mind-boggling is that, back in the early 2000s, the differences between Hasbro and Takara's paint jobs were minimal, with changes made only to disguise unlicensed vehicles, or to add an Autobot insignia in a more obvious place. Compare and contrast to 2020, where the two toymakers share the same paint job once again... but it's all so much less.
Apparently there was some talk of this mold being repainted to be Trailbreaker for one of the early (3H-run) BotCons but, other than his own 'Super' repaint (and, terrifyingly, a clear version made available only in Japan), the only other usage of this mold was as Universe Ratchet... which, bizarrely, features a ladder, a hose and a lightbar painted onto the roof, rather than as additional accessories. The weirdest thing about that is that the sunroof on vehicle mode is a separate part, clipped into place to conceal the screw holding the roof to the body, so they would only have had to retool that part to give him a three-dimensional lightbar, making the ridiculous painted roof details unnecessary. Personally, though, I'm surprised it was never turned into Skids rather than Trailbreaker, given the fairly compact look of vehicle mode...
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