Retro G1 Brawn

After struggling through my write-up to Retro G1 Gears toward the end of last year, I intended to fast-track this one, to get it out of the way and - with any luck - prevent any ruminating. Thing being, Brawn was always one of my favourites, partly because of the early Marvel UK strip, The Enemy Within, in which he basically gets a blow to the head and goes nuts, then has to prove his loyalty in a battle to the death with Starscream, who's on Megatron's naughty list due to his scheming. The fact that his G1 toy was, let's face it, a little on the goofy side - lanky, with short arms featuring tool-like claws rather than hands, and little 'wings' on his shoulders - just added to his appeal.

The one glimmer of hope I've had for my continued collection of Hasbro's output was kicked off by the last two War for Cybertron chapters, Earthrise and Kingdom, which brought back some of the original, first year Mini Autobots in Deluxe class form. It hasn't all been great - Cliffjumper was a partsformer, and Huffer had the animation-style head - but the most recent bone Hasbro have thrown their GenX audience has been the Retro G1 line as an alternative (and presumably the eventual Retro G1 Huffer will use the toy-accurate sculpt which made its debut as the Go-Bot Road Ranger in a Generations Selects 2-pack).

Their failure to create a new toy-accurate head for Bumblebee meant I had no reason to acquire that one, but Gears got a decent update to the G1 toy's head sculpt, though the toy as a whole was somewhat disappointing (leading Courtney to name him "Gears Starmer"). I've been keeping my eye out for new Retro G1 releases since then, and the second pair came out in the late Autumn/early Winter of 2025, coupling Brawn with... Seaspray, a wholly new take on a figure from 1985, just as we're getting a new Deluxe class Windcharger, the last of the 1984 Mini Autobot set, as part of Studio Series '86.

Brawn is, for better or worse, a retooling of the Studio Series '86 toy which, despite being leagues better than the Titans Return toy, didn't interest me in the slightest due to it having another ugly, animation-style head sculpt. Once again, the question here is whether or not the new, toy-inspired head sculpt is enough of an improvement on this mold... so, let's find out.

Packaging:

I'm still not entirely convinced by the packaging of these things... but 90% of that is down to the horrifically truncated character bio on his Tech Specs card, with just a couple of sentences from Bob Budiansky's original work and only half of the original categories on the graph. Admittedly, the use of the 1985 battle scene for a 1984 character is also rather jarring, and I still feel they should have packaged these in vehicle mode, if only to save on packaging plastic and to reduce the area of the character art that's covered with glue... but that's just my preference.

I do appreciate the 'cut-out-and-keep' angle on these Tech Specs... I just wish they'd printed separate black plates for the various language markets... and properly aligned the red bar across the top. As with Gears, all you get is a couple of sentences:

To Brawn, Earth is essentially a hostile environment - and he loves it. Strong, rugged, agile. Sorry for those not as tough as himself.

Which his original bio followed up with:

To Brawn, Earth is essentially a hostile environment - and he loves it. Strong, rugged, agile - the most macho of all Autobots. Delights in challenges. Sorry for those not as tough as himself. Second strongest Autobot - can lift 190,000 pounds and knock down a small building with one punch. High resistance to artillery fire. Vulnerable to attack by electromagnetic waves.

It's a bio I remember quite well, because I bought Brawn around the same time I bought Windcharger whose main power is - you guessed it - electromagnetism... and also because of the argument I had with my father over which kinds of 'electromagnetic waves' it meant. He disliked the lack of specificity, and insisted that visible light, being an electromagnetic wave, must surely count, effectively making Brawn one of the most useless Autobots.

That aside, like Gears, the most important information about Brawn has been cut out for this truncated bio, and what's left makes him come across like an arrogant high school jock. But also, what little remains describes him as 'agile', which just isn't reflected in his chunky, animation model-derived toys, least of all this one based on the Studio Series '86 mold.

Vehicle Mode:

While the original Brawn toy was an unlicensed Land Rover/Jeep hybrid, they've created a whole new, legally distinct vehicle mode based wholly on the animation model, but with just enough of the original toy's DNA left intact. Its proportions are straight out of the G1 cartoon, particularly the ridiculously oversized windows, but it's still recognisably a pseudo-military offroad vehicle. The spare tyre remains on the roof, as does the petrol can mounted (or, more precisely, shallowly sculpted) onto the rear. I like that they included this detail from the original... but it's so shallow, they may as well not have bothered.

Like Gears, his windows are painted black, but vehicle mode overall seems rather more detailed, with sculpted wipers on both windscreens and sculpted hinges on the rear. Indicators and a selection of headlights are sculpted in, though only the central panel on the front end is painted, with the outer pair of headlights left as bare green plastic. A couple of transformation pegs do a reasonable job of sneakily doubling as wing mirrors, but the sides of the vehicle mode are otherwise extremely untidy due to the - admittedly quite clever - transformation of the legs and feet. My main objection to the sides is the triangular hole behind the rear wheel well on each side, which could surely have been covered by extending the rear canopy piece slightly at the front.

Strangely, though, while Gears had his Mysterians logo stamped onto the bonnet of his vehicle mode, Brawn does not... nor is the logo sculpted into the black panel, per the G1 toy. Instead, there's an Autobot insignia stamped on there, which makes this whole 'Retro G1' thing, and the way it crosses over with both Legacy and Studio Series '86, seem rather disingenuous. Clearly these are all the same toyline, with minor variations in sculpt (ie. battle damage for SS86) and colouring, and, while I can't help but applaud Hasbro for their sneaky marketing - after all, some folks will actually buy the same mold, of the same character, multiple times due to the way they're released - I still find it utterly cynical.

A major fandom bugbear these days is the use of plastic clips to attach the wheels, and that's on full view here: all four are clipped into place, leaving green plastic protruding from the hubs. It's easy enough to paint these oneself, and I understand Hasbro's decision on the cost saving front, but it's still a desperately ugly means of attaching wheels to a toy. It's not even as if this method is now consistent across the entire brand - some toys still get their wheels pinned, others have them clipped on in ways that don't expose the clips themselves - and whatever balancing act they're trying to pull with the budgets, the end result here is less than ideal.

One quite interesting feature is that Brawn comes with a pistol of some kind, which can mount in the spare tyre on his roof - Outback-style - but this spare tyre is, itself, removable - attached via the standard 5mm peg - so the gun can be attached directly to the roof if preferred. This makes for a smaller, tighter silhouette but... I kind of object to the idea of Brawn having a gun in the first place. That was Outback's thing, and something quite novel for a G1 Mini Autobot, even if he couldn't wield his gun in robot mode. Plus, there's so much empty space inside this toy's vehicle shell, it wouldn't have been too difficult to design a gun that could be stashed on the underside, disguised as his exhaust pipe, for example.

I'd like to say this vehicle mode is better than Gears's and, for the most part, I do think it is... The gaps in the sides aren't quite so egregiously ugly as the oversized barrels sticking out of Gears, but some of the decisions made at the design stage haven't done it any favours, and I'm generally not a fan of cartoonishly proportioned vehicle modes, outside of the original G1 Choro-Q-style Mini Autobots.

Robot Mode:

I've never really been a fan of the animation model for Brawn, which is often compared to Man-At-Arms from the Masters of the Universe line. As a result, for me, the idea of this chonker being "strong, rugged and agile" is something of a joke. He looks like the stereotypical short-arse tough-guy, constantly looking to prove himself against bigger, tougher 'bots. The stubbiness of his legs is exacerbated by the use of yellow plastic for the hip joints, which elongates the appearance of his torso - already overlong due to the yellow panel behind his head - while artificially truncating his thighs. The wide, boxy lower legs and tiny, almost perfunctory feet don't help either.

Brawn being a former G1 Mini Autobot, he was not exactly overburdened with sculpted detail, and this is mirrored in his update. The chest is disappointingly flat, and far closer to the animation model than the toy - Hasbro were hardly going to remold that for what is essentially a gimmick re-release of a Studio Series '86 toy - and it's obviously lacking the original's tech detail stickers, but the chest's transformation hinge does a reasonable job of pretending to be one of them, and the other couldn't be reproduced properly as his pelvis is tiny compared to the G1 toy. What sculpted detail is there looks pretty good but, overall, he still looks blocky. So far, so G1... but we've come a long way since then, and the current aesthetic feels like a step backwards to me.

On top of that, another defining feature of the original toy was that panels from the sides of his vehicle mode turned into little wing-like armour pieces on his shoulders and, while there appears to be a sculpted callback to this idea, the fact that his upper arms are unpainted renders that almost imperceptible. Silver forearms and green upper arms is very much a feature of the animation model, and not true to the spirit of G1. The greatest travesty of this so-called 'Retro G1' toy is that his hands are normal 5mm ported fists rather than Brawn's iconic square hook hands.

The gun he comes packaged with is utterly nondescript and, frankly, feels like a waste of plastic... on the upside, at least it isn't also a waste of paint. I really do wish Hasbro would stop packaging such perfunctory, generic handguns with characters who - as far as the original toys are concerned - shouldn't have them.

Curiously, there's more detail added behind the head than on the chest, including a couple of little square nubs that are a callback to details on the original toy's bumper. The head itself is everything I hoped it would be - simple, devoid of character, and with a thin sliver of a visor above a battlemask that's barely any wider. The raised detailing on the helmet is spot on, but the shape of the head overall is a bit flatter than I would have preferred - while the G1 toy's head was painted, sculpted detail on a panel that ran the full length of his vehicle mode, I tend to think Brawn's head would have looked circular, rather than ovoid, from above. The silver paint really makes the whole thing stand out, though, and presents a nice contrast to his pitch black visor.

Given this is the first iteration of this mold I've picked up, I wasn't sure what to expect of his transformation, but it's actually pretty clever and interesting - significantly better-designed than Gears - but some aspects are perhaps a little overengineered. The way the legs open out an form the legs is basically a refinement of what iGear did with their Mini Warriors Hench/Bushwacker: the lower legs split and the knee folds out to let the two halves form the sides of the vehicle. The difference is that the hips remain closer to the back of the vehicle, the waist has to rotate 180° to get the legs on the right side, and each leg unfolds from the ankle, not the knee. It's a much cleaner, less fiddly method, but it does leave an ugly section in the middle of each side where the toe and heel spurs don't quite fill out the spaces they fold into. On the upside, it grants the ankles far greater range of tilt, despite that joint not being directly involved in transformation. The chest and vehicle mode's rear end open out to facilitate the rotation of the vehicle mode's grille section - cleverly stashed below the head in robot mode - while the arms swing down from the shoulder before folding inside the torso and completing the cab windows. It's simple, straightforward and fun, but I can't help thinking that a few slight tweaks could have yielded a result more like the G1 toy and also allowed for a tidier vehicle mode.

In common with most of the current line-up, Brawn's articulation is excellent. While the head only rotates (adding tilt would have required raising the joint and leaving an ugly gap between the helmet and the torso, so I'll let that slide), the shoulders are ball jointed, giving full 360° rotation and 90° swing out to the sides. Bicep rotation is unrestricted, the pinned elbows can bend to about 135° and the fists can bend 90° due to transformation. His waist swivel is - suprisingly - not particularly impacted by his backpack, but that can shift out of the way as necessary. The hips have a decent range of swing - 90° forward, out to the sides and technically even backward, though the backpack has to be moved to accommodate that. The knees have the stock 90°, and the ankles the same. Both the toe and heel spur can bend 90° for transformation, but this can also be used to support some poses.

Much as I don't like the overall shape of this version of Brawn, I did quite like the toy, initially. The new head makes such a difference from the hideous face sculpt of the Studio Series '86 version and, while I'd have preferred new hands as well, the stock SS86 fists work well enough, I just wish they'd painted more of his arms and used green plastic for his hip joints to break up the yellow of the torso. In and of itself, this is a fun toy with a fluid and novel transformation, and both robot and vehicle modes are solid and stable - a huge improvement on the disappointment that was Gears. Where it started to go wrong was when I started to customise him...

Because, obviously, I've got those chrome pens, so I was bound to try fixing the lack of silver on his arms, right? Unfortunately, while Gears survived his minor touch-ups, the plastic that makes up Brawn's arms reacted badly to the chrome, developing large cracks on both shoulders, while both elbows essentially started to crumble around the pins. And it's a huge shame, because the chrome shows exactly how much better this toy would look had the upper arms been painted. As mentioned, the sculpt of the shoulder includes the suggestion of the G1 toy's 'wings', and some paint around those details serves to highlight them more effectively.  Adding chrome over the silver of his helmet gives it the kind of shine implied by the G1 artwork and, thankfully, that hasn't shown any signs of cracking as a result.

With a particularly good toy, I'd have no qualms about buying a replacement, even if I would have to do without repainting him... but Brawn isn't quite good enough and, considering this seems to have been made with exceptionally poor quality plastic, I don't feel inclined to replace him. I haven't thrown him away yet... but I can't say that isn't going to happen, and I'm certainly not going to bother with Retro G1 Outback now.