Energon Tow-Line

The strange thing about my ongoing sense of ennui about current TransFormers toys is that, for the most part, it has failed to cause me to seek nostalgia in the older toys I have yet to write about. I already have folders full of photos - some of which more than ten years old, and from when I was still growing my collection after moving into my flat - but I still lack the impetus to drag them out and post them. Admittedly, many of these photos were taken with a much older camera, with a much lower resolution and, in some previous cases, I've taken the opportunity to take new photos...

But I don't feel that way inclined about every toy in my collection so, in an effort to just churn through what I've got - particularly as I've been donating batches of my collection to Toy-Fu this year - there are some figures I'm just going to use the existing photos for... Tow-Line is one of them.

Is that because he's not a great figure? Read on, and find out...

Vehicle Mode:
There's something instantly jarring about Tow-Line's vehicle mode. Obviously, it's some sort of van or RV, but there are incongruous elements to the design, quite apart from the sense that they clearly couldn't decide what colour to make him. The back end looks like some kind of security truck, an impression belied by the presence of a spoiler on the roof just above the rear doors. The front end looks like it wanted to be a diesel train or something out of a sci-fi movie, while the sides don't seem to match up from one end of the vehicle to the other: the front wheel wells are angular, the rear wheel wells are curved. There are sculpted details like extra windows toward the front, but precious little else till you get to a ladder mounted on each side, and then the back end features a lot more sculpted detailing, none of which seems to serve any real purpose.

The paint job is similarly inconsistent. The front of the cab is painted white... except where it isn't: the central second of the roof is bare pale blue plastic, the bumper is bare dark blue plastic and the doors are translucent orange painted blue. There's a red and silver stripe down each side, but it doesn't even try to follow the contours of the van, and it goes right over the ladder as if it wasn't there. The back end is entirely unpainted, while the hubcaps and patches of the roof are painted a dull gold-ish colour. The headlights are picked out in a warmer, brighter gold paint and... that's about it. There are odd blocks of unpainted brown plastic visible on the roof and at the back, and the wheels are molded in that same colour of plastic.

The overall aesthetic is jumbled, and neither quite retro nor entirely futuristic, but seemingly trying to be both while also paying vague homage to the much-maligned Cherry Vanette from G1. It looks very much like the interpretation of the concept of 'Retrofuturism' one might expect from a Saturday morning cartoon, but based on a bad verbal description rather than visual references. Kind of 'The Kitchen Sink School of Vehicle Design'.

As with most Energon Deluxes from this era, Tow-Line was packaged with an Energon chip - which plugs securely onto the socked of the left side door... and does nothing - always a disappointment after the Mini-Cons of Armada. OK, I get that the Energon chips are each made with an embedded magnifying lens, but it doesn't work at all well in plastic. Tow-Line's other accessory attaches to the roof in this mode, and is apparently made to resemble a telescoping microwave dish/mast, for transmitting broadcast TV signals, for example. It also looks like a bit of a jumble, which isn't helped by the fact that it's molded entirely in the same translucent orange as his windows, but the fact that the little dish at the front and the boxy antenna at the back are on ball joints is quite neat, as it allows them to be pointed in any direction.

Robot Mode:
Oof... OK, I need to mention here that I - genuinely and unironically - like the G1 Cherry Vanette toy, and I will never understand its detractors. The main argument seems to be that "it doesn't look like the animation model for Ratchet/Ironhide"... but that's because the cartoon was lazy and got it wrong. The earliest Marvel comics used the toy for reference, but that didn't last long once the cartoon took off. A more specific element of that argument is that it doesn't have a proper head, just a panel (which is actually the seat left over from when the mold had a Diaclone driver figure) with a sticker on it showing a sort of video display of a face. That's one of the reasons I like the toy: it was something different. It looked alien. The box art even suggested that Ratchet and Ironhide would project their faces onto their windscreens, and the idea of a robot whose face is displayed on a screen is neither uncommon in other forms of fiction nor subject to the irrational hate that the original Cherry Vanette mold gets.

So I fully expect a lot of fans to question my sanity when I admit that I think this robot mode looks terrible. As separate parts, the upper and lower body have reasonable proportions... but, stuck together on one figure, they look ridiculous. He has a super-wide, but super-short torso with dumpy arms and bizarrely thin thighs leading to great big clompy lower legs, which are completely hollow. The legs attach to the torso via the smallest pelvis I've ever seen on a TransFormers toy, proportionally even smaller than those of Armada Red Alert. From the side, you can clearly see that they were aiming for something like the G1 animation model, but the front of the torso protrudes way too far, making him comically fat, while the back looks incomplete and has a hollow section between the shoulder sockets.

Curiously, lot more of the vehicle mode's brown plastic becomes visible in robot mode - the forearms, thighs, the section of his upper body behind the windscreen, and the lower torso. This latter is probably the most contentions and problematic for his overall appearance, because the sculpted detail clearly suggests it's supposed to be a transformed out of the front of his vehicle mode, but the only parts that got painted were the new bottom parts of his headlights. This gives him an incongruous brown 'belt' that leads directly into his miniscule pelvis, emphasising his strange proportions.

Sculpted detail in this mode is about average for the time - the forearms and thighs have been given a layered look, but the former are very chunky while the latter are disproportionately skinny. There's some line work on the sides of the torso, but the most interesting detail is on the sides of his lower legs. It's not clear what it's supposed to represent - general-purpose tech detailing - but it's sharply designed... the only downside is that it should have received some paint - I'd honestly have preferred the gold paint on the shins to have been applied to the recessed detailing on the lower legs, emphasising that this is the robot's inner workings, seen between outer armour panels.

The whole point of Energon/Superlink was that the Autobots could combine in pairs, and that did result in some curious proportions, but Tow-Line's 'top' form is utterly bonkers. Where other Autobots would end up with their legs repurposed as oversized arms, Tow-Line is stuck with his standard arms while his legs get repurposed as weapons. Tow-Line also stands out by being the only Autobot who can use his combiner ports to join with himself - the sled - since it's actually part of his transformation anyway. This combined form, far from being a faithful homage to the G1 Ratchet/Ironhide toys, is a misshapen mess, neither robot nor car, bringing to my mind those bizarre indie games where some childhood favourite character, like Thomas the Tank Engine, is reimagined as a giant, many-legged cryptid intent on the player's destruction. Rather than being an early attempt at a noble robotic centaur, it reads like something they discovered by accident, when a prototype fell off the table and split open. The additional guns that fold out of the robot's toes feel like an afterthought or a last-minute addition, to reduce the impact of his legs playing no real part in the combined mode.

The sled overall feels like a downgrade on the G1 version, except perhaps in terms of sculpted detailing. The Ratchet/Ironhide mold was only really intended to accommodate a Diaclone driver along with the weapon accessories, so its detailing was minimal. This thing has all kinds of tech detail sculpted into the main platform and the insides of the 'wings', but the only part to get any paint is the triple-barrelled machine gun on each side, which is both shallowly-sculpted and hopelessly waffled. The detailing on the main platform is similarly shallow, and has a kind of perfunctory feel to it, since the Energon weapon is clearly designed to cover at least some of it. The treads at the front are just plain annoying to me: intricately detailed though they are, and while I've no objection to the use of tiny wheels on the underside, the fact that the treads appear to run through the legs they're mounted on is baffling.

Tow-Line's comms pack unfurls into what looks kind of like a sniper rifle, but he doesn't have a great many ways to hold it, since the arrangement of his arms makes it a one-handed weapon whether you like it or not. Its joints mean that it can be reconfigured such that it appears to be a transmitter or scanner, but there's unfortunately no way to mount it on the robot other than in his hands... Unless you think it looks OK mounted on his right shin... Given the waffling on the backs of his forearms, it's honestly surprising they weren't designed with 5mm connections in mind. Meanwhile, there are five 5mm ports on the sled - one on each 'wing', left over from vehicle mode, and three on the main platform. A cut-out on one side of the Energon weapon allows it to be mounted over the Powerlinx connector via the frontmost pair of ports, but the total of four pegs on the weapon accessory means there are plenty of options to attach it elsewhere, potentially making the sled a mobile comms bay rather than a battle platform. It's this very openness that I find particularly lacking in newer TransFormers toys, particularly in the wake of the Weaponisers from the War For Cybertron Trilogy.

The head sculpt is another disappointment. While there are signs of visual homage to the animation models for both G1 Ratchet and Ironhide on the forehead/crown, the helmet shape is generic and blocky, with a very underwhelming face. Hints of the Autobot insignia are also present, and I have to admit that I'm impressed to see the face and the eyes were painted using the two different gold paints used elsewhere on the toy. But here again, the use of brown feels off... In fact, the more I look at it, the use of brown throughout the figure seems like a poor decision. This is one of those occasions where black or dark grey plastic would have been a better choice for robot mode, while also having zero-to-negligible impact on vehicle mode.

I have to say that the G1 homage aspect of the transformation is one of its highlights... but that bar is pretty low. Tow-Line's main 'accessory' has been described as a mobile repair/battle platform, similar to the sled that made up half of the G1 Ratchet/Ironhide toy, but the concept is seriously let down by the reality. The legs of this thing are overlong, and there really was no reason for that. The designers elected to have the vehicle's front wheels fold out toward the back while the tracks are stashed at the back and fold out to the front, with the two parts overlapping along the way. Both could have been shorter, allowing for the tracks to come out from under the bumper while the rear wheels swing down. On top of that, they decided to split the tracks into two parts, pegged together for storage, and connecting to the underside of the sled with ball joints... but this is entirely pointless because splitting them apart means the tracks end up at weird angles that wouldn't be conducive to movement. The sled is a largely flat surface that Tow-Line's feet slide around on and his Energon weapon can peg into various 5mm ports, in various configurations, where the G1 toy had the bipedal robot snap around a raised block at the back, from which the missile launcher would unfold. Ratchet and Ironhide could effectively join with their sleds, while Tow-Line uses it like a skate board. Meanwhile, the robot section of the toy looks exactly like a folded-up robot once freed from the vehicle shell, and has a transformation which, while par for the course for the times prior to the first live action movie, looks both lazy and simplistic. Having not handled this toy for years, the only part that flummoxed me (briefly) was how to get the head deployed: it looks like a simple hinge, but the roof section has to slide back and up, then flip, then slide back down to lock in place. Aside from that, it's basically a case of unfolding the pelvis from the upper body and straightening out its joints, folding the arms back, with the elbows bent and the forearms tucking in behind the pelvis, then folding the legs back over themselves to complete the vehicle roof. Interestingly, it is perfectly possible to transform Tow-Line directly into his combined form, without ever separating the robot from the sled, though it does require the pelvis to be angled upward to allow the van's rear doors to fold down underneath.

The Energon line wasn't exactly widely known for superior articulation - in fact, the combination gimmick was a hindrance in most if not all cases. Back in those days, waist articulation was rare and ankle tilt was nothing but a pipe dream. The feet aren't even molded with an A-stance in mind, albeit partly because of the gun deployment gimmick for his conjoined robot mode. What you get with Tow-Line is very much the bare bones: ball jointed hips that swing about 90° forward (as long as you bend the knee of avoid the truck spoiler hitting the vehicle front), about 140° back due to transformation, and maybe about 60° out to the sides. There's no thigh rotation, the knees bend all the way due to transformation, and the feet tilt down for transformation. The shoulders are mounted on ball joints embedded in the upper body which allow a sort of backward butterfly movement due to transformation. They can theoretically rotate a full 360°, but the vehicle doors folded out above them reduce their range by about 160°, barely allowing them to move above the horizontal either backward or forward. In fact, they get better range swinging out to the side, well beyond the horizontal. The ball jointed elbow is a poor substitute for bicep rotation, but Tow-Line barely has biceps, so their use is understandable. As is to be expected for the time, there's no articulation at the wrist. The head only rotates, and can reluctantly achieve a full 360°, but it feels as though it probably shouldn't be forced all the way around. The head's transformation joint allows him to look up and down, but that does leave an unsightly gap in his collar.

I seem to recall that Tow-Line was one of those toys that was rather hard to come by, at least in the UK, and I can't remember how I acquired mine - bricks-and-mortar shop or online order. I do recall that my main reason for wanting him was the element of homage, before the TransFormers Collectors' Club created a new head sculpt for the mold to make both Ratchet and Ironhide for their BotCon 2005 'Descent Into Evil' set. I suspect that owning this figure put me off bothering with either of them, even before the secondary market bumped their prices up.

Not to say it's a bad toy. For all its flaws, I think it's an important and imaginative entry into the Energon line and a fun if poorly executed homage... but it's perhaps rather too ambitious for its size class, and learned the wrong lessons from its G1 ancestor.