I can also remember being somewhat interested in the BotCon 2005 'Descent into Evil' repaint as Outback (named Fallback in that set for legal reasons), but have never felt like paying the secondary market prices for it... It's possible I bought this to see if it would be worth trying to acquire Fallback, or it may simply have been a substitute.
Either way, this is the first - and, so far, only - iteration of this mold I own, so let's have a look...
Vehicle Mode:
So, here we have a good, chunky, futuristic Jeep-style offroad vehicle. At first glance,
it doesn't look particularly interesting, beyond its strange proportions and
odd, harsh angles, but it's surprising how much detail was packed into the
design. It's not as detailed as a 'proper' movie toy, but there are sculpted
springs and suchlike inside the front wheel wells, and there's a canteen and some kind of box atttached to the back of the vehicle... though it doesn't feature tail lights
unless that's what the circular protrusions behind the rear wheels are
supposed to be. The front is a bit more traditional, with massive bullbars
over the grille, along with painted headlights and unpainted indicators. While the interior of the vehicle can hardly be described as realistic - not least, it's fairly obvious that it's made up largely of the robot's groin and upper legs, with gaps around them - it's interesting to note that some effort went in to sculpting seat detail onto the backs of the robots, and there's even gearstick and handbrake detail sculpted into the structural plastic on the back of the groin. I also like that the windscreen can be folded forward, down on to the bonnet, just like an old-style military jeep.
The wheels themselves have matching hubcaps, each painted silver, but the rear wheels are far
larger than the front pair, giving him an even more rugged, beach buggy look.
Emphasising this, he has the sort of ground clearance you just don't see in
TransFormers toys these days, though the appearance of this is a little
misleading, as the front wheels are attached to panels that effectively follow
the curve of the wheels, reducing that clearance for the width of the
mounting. Similarly, the back wheels aren't as wide as they first appear, with
only an outer shell spinning freely while the inner section accommodates both
a transformation joint and the robot's shoulders, but is only minimally
smaller than the wheel.
The majority of the vehicle is molded in an olive green plastic - perhaps a little too light to really work as a military vehicle. Evidently, it's supposed to be military, given the tampographed Sector 7 logo right near the sculpted Autobot insignia on the raised side panel over the left side rear wheel. The doors and the upper section of the
back are molded in a darker green plastic, a little too vibrant for a proper military green, while the
central block has mostly been painted a rather unhealthy shade of brown. Silver paint has been applied to the tops of the sculpted bars either side of this block, leading to the hinged grey plastic bar section behind the seats and some additional applications of brown paint on the sculpted detail below. The front end of the vehicle and the frame of the windscreen are also painted brown. It looks as though they were aiming for a subdued colourscheme... but didn't quite manage it. Overall, I quite like the colourscheme, though the black plastic bars running down the middle of the bonnet just look like mismatched parts rather than a deliberate stripe, and that mismatch is exacerbated by the brown paint on the windscreen's hinge parts. To be fair, though, this issue was present on both versions of Strongarm released in the Energon toyline, and only marginally reduced by the more complementary colourscheme of the second version.
Along with his Energon chip, Strongarm comes with three accessories, and all
are cast in an off-puttingly murky translucent brown plastic. The two loosely
semicircular parts connect to form something resembing a spare tyre case - approximately the same diameter as the rear wheels, but substantially slimmer - which
can then plug into the robot's head, in the middle of the back of the vehicle.
The main accessory is a long arm-like structure, which can plug into the grey,
hinged block on the righthand side at the back, and acts as a gun, but also
features a hook on one side, implying an alternate use as some sort of winch
or lifting arm. Each side of the arm also features a Mini-Con socket, just
behind the gun barrel, so the arm can be attached to any Armada, Energon or
Cybertron figure with the complementary port. It's the same accessory that was packaged with Superlink Roadbuster W, but cast in a vastly less appealing colour as a concession to the 'gritty realism' of the movies.
Robot Mode:
In the heirarchy of good-looking Omnicons from the Energon toyline, Strongarm isn't at the very bottom (that honour obviously goes to Signal Flare), but he's not far off. With a broad and clumsy-looking upper body, he almost looks as though another, taller robot's upper body has been split in half down the middle and tacked onto the sides of his torso. That said, his arms appear to be about the right size and length, and are even mounted at about the right height relative to his head. Plus, it's not as if later lines were averse to making a robot's upper body look disproportionately wide in service of their vehicle modes... and it's even been done - to great effect, I think - with movie characters. Still, here, with such a boxy design, it doesn't look that great... and the great chunks of vehicle mass on the shoulders, making the head look sunken and small, really don't do Strongarm any favours.
The colourscheme is, at least, rather more coherent and complementary than that of either Energon toy, though the brown paint still doesn't look great. He ends up looking quite plain also because there just aren't that many paint applications on this toy, not just in robot mode. There are, however, a handful of applications that are unique to robot mode. The raised linework on the thighs has been picked out in silver, giving the impression of a metallic framework added to the fronts of the legs, though it stops dead at the edges rather than wrapping fully around the thighs along with the sculpt. There are also applications of the brown paint to the upper arms and, surprisingly, the same detail - the trapezoid at the level of the shoulder joint - has been painted on the backs of the arms as well as the fronts. The layout of paint applications seems to most closely resemble that of the second Energon release - tautologically named 'Energon Strongarm' - but without the weathering effect around the wheel wells and the red paint on the sculpted Autobot insignia.
Strongarm is one of those toys that looks absolutely awful from behind, as the void between the vehicle mode's rear wheels emphasises the impression of Strongarm being a smaller robot wearing parts from a larger robot. The groin section and the forearms are full of empty spaces and, while the legs appear solid from behind (because of their role in vehicle mode, the voids appear on the inner faces) the lower legs are cavernous as they have to accommodate the thighs in vehicle mode.
While the Energon accessories don't look like much, they are ideally suited to this figure, in that the attachment for vehicle mode is still available in robot mode - giving him a shoulder-mounted crane arm/gun - but he can also wield the larger accessory in his hands in two different ways. In its basic form the main component can be flipped onto either side and pegged into his fists as a very long handgun, or it can be combined with the two halves of his 'spare tyre' as a large Energon battle axe. The fact that the 'blade' isn't remotely sharp doesn't really matter because it's an energy weapon rather than a true blade... but the fact that it actually looks cushioned does make it look a little daft. The two 'blade' parts can also plug into ports on his shoulders, but their purpose in that configuration is a little unclear.
Strongarm's head sculpt is very simple and quite blocky, but it's nevertheless an interesting head, and possibly one of the few highlights of the figure... I can certainly see why it was repurposed as Outback/Fallback for the BotCon 2005 set, as it looks like a development of the G1 character's head - mostly square-ish, but with a subtle tapering-in toward the top, and the bold brow panel almost looks like a raised visor. The eyes are comparatively large on the face and appear to be painted the same colour as the vehicle mode's headlights, but the colour looks pale and quite dull in the shadow of his square, protruding brow. The silver-painted face is pretty neutral of expression and looks quite G1-ish, in the tradition of the likes of Prowl due to the way it's fully framed by the 'helmet'. The block in front of his chin protrudes surprisingly far - just over the edge of the angled, central portion of his chest - giving him a fairly distinctive look... though it's very much not in keeping with the movie aesthetic.
Strongarm's transformation isn't dissimilar to a G1 Mini Autobot in a lot of ways, just that the arms swing out from the underside via hinges hidden within the rear wheels rather than just pulling out on a slide joint, and the legs don't need to extend, the lower legs simply swing away from the upper legs on what is effectively the knee joint. The head reveal is probably the most G1 thing about the toy, since the head isn't actually hidden in vehicle mode, just rotated 180° so he's facing the ground. The hinged grey bar is a bit of an oddity, in that it has to be flapped down over his groin in robot mode, and thus becomes an obstruction for his waist joint... though, technically, that waist joint is there as part of transformation rather than as an additional point of articulation for the robot, and it almost feels as though that function is an unconsidered and unintended bonus. Also, given its position in the middle of the vehicle, it could have caused instability in that mode, but the arms peg in securely on the underside with the hands and cuffs bridging the gap and forming an obstruction for the rotation joint.
Energon's Omnicons and Terrorcons all had great articulation for their size - some even better than the larger figures - but the location of their joints and the range of their joints were occasionally questionable. Such is the case with Strongarm. The upper body is surprisingly well-handled given the massive bulk of the torso versus the comparatively stick-thin arms - the shoulders are ball joints where the lack of clearace between the inner face of the arm and the base of the shoulder joint makes for a tight, stable joint for outward swing, and the only hindrance is the nub of rear indicator light sticking out just above each arm. Even so, the arm can rotate a full 360° and raise 90° outward. Additionally, the transformation joint allows the arms to angle forward, though the bulk of the torso means he can't even get close to crossing his arms. As mentioned, the transformation joint at the waist also works for articulation so long as the bar piece is raised out of the way, but the legs are just plain weird. The hips are fairly stiff ball joints, and can comfortably lift 90° forward and almost as far out to the sides once the hip skirts are raised... but there's practically no backward swing because of the seatbacks sculpted onto the back of each leg. There's no mid-thigh rotation, and then the 'knee' joint is pretty much halfway down the lower leg, leading to that strange and rare situation where the robot's thighs are significantly longer than the shins. The windscreen joint can act as a toe joint, but it becomes very loose once snapped out of its standard position - fine for vehicle mode, not so good for robot mode, though he can be balanced adequately with a little fiddling. The main problem for posing is that his heel is virtually nonexistant - being made up of a nub protruding from the vehicle shell on the outside and the black structural part on the inner face of the lower leg. This latter is shorter than the former, forcing the figure to adopt a stance where his legs have to be set at about 30° to grant him any stability. At this point, the windscreen is at an awkward angle to the ground, so he looks less stable than he actually is... but the meagre heel bumps mean that he's very much inclined to falling over backward, however solidly-placed his feet appear to be.
As I said at the start of this write-up, it's possible that I only picked up this figure to see if it was worth paying the premium for BotCon Fallback on the secondary market... and, if that's the case, I'm glad I paid the £6-7 for this figure back in the day. There's something endearingly goofy about him - he is very much a figure of the Energon/Superlink toyline - and the fact that the transformation harks back to G1 so clearly is cool. Vehicle mode is a little bland due to being a store exclusive movie cash-in tie-in figure, and the choice of colour for his Energon weapon - while very much in keeping with all these cheap, recycled figures added to the movie toylines - does the original concept a huge disservice and lowers the overall tone of the product.
In and of himself, this version of Strongarm is not as interesting as either of the two versions from the Energon toyline... for the money I paid at the time, he was a decent purchase and, if nothing else, he likely saved me ten times his cost on the BotCon homage to G1 Outback.
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