I have to confess a certain favouritism when it comes to Brawn. The
original G1 toy was likely my fourth purchase in the TransFormers line,
and I've always loved its blocky awkwardness, long legs, short arms, and
utilitarian claw/hook 'hands'. To this day, one of my favourite stories in the
1980s Marvel Comics series is The Enemy Within, in which Brawn goes
bonkers after an electric shock, and ends up in a trial by combat with
Starscream.
To say that I dislike his animation model from the cartoon would be an
understatement, since he became too generic among the other blocky,
poorly drawn robots. While the approximate shape of his head remained,
its simplistic, almost featureless mask was replaced by a more expressive,
humanoid face,
even though he was never a particularly prominent character in the show.
I wasn't at all surprised that he didn't appear in any of the first five live action movies
- if anything, I was surprised that he did appear - albeit briefly - in the
Cybertron sequence in the Bumblebee solo movie... There was a toy named Brawn
in the extended Revenge of the Fallen toyline (and which was repainted into a rather more mold-appropriate Outback analogue) but, much as I liked it, it wasn't quite the update to the
G1 character I was hoping for. I quite liked what I saw in the Bumblebee
movie, though, and so was excited when he was announced as being part of the
first wave of Hasbro's 2022 selection in the Studio Series line. Was this
excitement justified..?
