Cybertron Brakedown GTS

I noted in my writeup of Galaxy Force Autolander that he seemed to be a homage to Kup in his overall appearance, but that it took a repaint to make it more apparent... and here is that repaint!

 

I'm not sure I ever understood what the whole 'GTS' suffix thing was about (outside of allowing Hasbro to release repaints that weren't even new characters) but it certainly brought with it some interesting reuses of a variety of molds... at least some of which were better than the original.

But is Brakedown one of them..?

 

TransFormers Legends (Titans Return) LG46 TargetMaster Kup (aka Chear)

Kup doesn't often appear in TransFormers toylines - coming from the latter part of Generation 1, and introduced to most audiences in the 1986 animated movie, he's never been one of the 'must have' characters. Much like Hot Rod and Blur, his original toy was a bit of a brick, designed to resemble the ridiculously stylised Floro Dery animation model, which took the TV show's habit of fudging the toys' transformation sequence and cranking it up to eleven because he (and/or the rest of the design team) were working from scratch rather than from existing toys and box art.

Thus, Kup became a futuristic, Cybertronian pickup truck and, bar his appearance in a BotCon set as a repaint/retool of Galaxy Force First Aid (representing a young version of Kup, a new recruit in the Elite Guard), his only other appearances in the toyline have been as a more traditional terrestrial pickup in the Generations toyline back in 2011 and a bulked-up repaint of a mold intended for Ironhide in the TFPrime toyline.

Titans Return went back to the original Cybertronian vehicle style, albeit perhaps more functional-looking (G1 Kup's cargo bed didn't look very useful, after all), but the colourscheme looked a bit too lurid for my liking so, coupled with a typically miserly paint job, the lacklustre weapons and a rather bland face sculpt, I decided not to bother picking him up. Then Takara Tomy revealed their Legends version, with an animation accurate desaturated colourscheme, several remolded parts (including a more grizzled face sculpt)... and a TargetMaster weapon too... So I decided to take the plunge after all.

Generations Sergeant Kup

One of the things I really liked about the Classics line, particularly as it evolved into the earlier stages of the ongoing Generations line, was that it wasn't content to simply re-do each and every character in much the same form as their G1 original - the designers took risks and came up with original concepts for some wholly new takes on the older characters.

Few Generations toys exemplify this better than Generations Kup, which finally gave the old Cybertronian warhorse from the 1986 animated movie a proper, contemporary Earth mode. Naturally it was a pickup truck... but really not the sort of thing I'd have expected. He'd also developed the 'Sergeant' prefix on his name, likely for trademark reasons, which would carry forward to the TF Prime figure (itself a sort of 'pre-paint' of a design intended to represent Ironhide).

There are some characters that shouldn't be altered too far from their original designs, but is Kup one of them?

TransFormers: Prime Sergeant Kup

Having seen all three seasons of TransFormers: Prime/Beast Hunters and the feature-length finale, Predacons Rising, I'd  have to say my biggest complaint was the lack of characters in the show. Whereas Generation 1 had masses of characters but very little in the way of decent narrative, TF Prime essentially had the opposite problem. I guess there's a balance to be made between number of characters available for story and overall coherence of story, and TF Prime certainly didn't have any filler episodes (that I can recall). The problem with a small roster of characters is that Hasbro has to make its money on toys... and while it seems happy to repaint Bumblebee every five minutes, it's always done better when it creates new characters with unique molds - or even repaints.

Thus, we get a unique toy of a character who never appeared in the TV show and, arguably, isn't even quite the right style, modelled as it was on concept artwork by Ken Christiansen, created before TF Prime was even called "TF Prime". Oddly the Cyberverse model came before this, in its intended colourscheme, as Ironhide, but I don't recall seeing that on the shelves in the UK. Kup seems like a strange choice for the Deluxe class 'repaint' - not least because he's now lumbered with the 'Sergeant' prefix just so they can use the name - but it was left up to Takara Tomy to release a Deluxe class G1-referencing Ironhide. Of course, if it's a good enough model, I might be tempted to pick that up, if I can...

When the character of Kup was first introduced to TransFormers fans, he was a curmudgeonly old-timer, full of tall tales and scorn for anyone younger than himself (but particularly Hot Rod). He was also a futuristic/Cybertronian pickup truck which, so the story goes, is the source of his name: picKUP truck. Tenuous... but I guess they were running out of cool names by that point.