Why is it always Ironhide?
It's Masterpiece Ironhide all over again, sorta. Instead of going from a fully toy style to an attempted blended style, in that case they went from a blended style to an attempted fully toon style. And the same thing happened. It doesn't do one thing convincingly enough. Aside from the weird hip kibble issue, the proportions are just all wrong everywhere you look. This isn't Diaclone. That wasn't toon. Everywhere you look something throws it off. The line was changing its aims, Ironhide was a taste of what the line was trying to become, but they just hadn't nailed the new thing yet.
And then Ratchet comes along and wears the mold better.
Well, Ratchet
was always more interesting than Ironhide....
(No, I'm not getting ML Ratchet, either.)
(what follows is not a comment on the above... just me taking the opportunity to air some thoughts)
I've mostly tried to stay quiet, since there's already enough (very legitimate!) concern that some of us are just repeating ourselves and that the thread is stuck in a cycle of negativity. To the extent I've said my piece already, I'll try to leave it at that.
That said, I see ML as taking figures that look exactly like already existing figures or concepts from the 80s, simply doing those designs up with better articulation. So, sure, give us protoypes! Either one of those 80s-era Unicron toys would work fine! But the toy should still look like the original one did when not posed in ways the original could never have accomplished. Otherwise, I might as well be buying a modern toy that isn't attempting to emulate the 80s one. We've got lots of lines for those already.
And all this attention given to designing ML Ironhide... it's probably too much to say "it took up a slot," per se, but it
has been time and effort that wasn't given to some other concept. Would that "other concept" have been a different ML toy? (Let's assume ML Ironhide simply was
never going to be possible to fit the parameters I've suggested... so ML Prowl, perhaps. It could be literally anything) No way to know what the "other concept" would have been, but
something hasn't been worked on that those designers would have been doing as part of their jobs instead if they weren't working on this. Maybe we don't have sufficient language for this concept, but if "slot" is too reductionistic, what should we say instead?
One final comment, for now. I don't use the numbers of over a dozen figures in my version of the claim that some others have done to cite ML precedent. After all, most of the ML toys to-date have been redecos of previous ML molds, often done in colors and/or as characters that
didn't exist in the 80s. "Anime" variations and such. When these simply use the molds (or slight remolds... for example, anime ML Arcee vs. prototype ML Arcee), I consider it that the original concept is still at play, but it still only counts as "one" ML mold. I don't count the Arcees as two separate examples. So, we have Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, Cliffjumper (one could argue these two are remolds of each other, but that's not how we've historically treated them), Sunsteaker, Arcee, Ultra Magnus, and Grimlock. That's just 7 (with Ironhide being the 8th). Citing double-digit figures to make any point against ML ironhide seems, to me, a bit disingenuous. I'll try to avoid that, myself.
It's so disheartening to see it seeping into Missing Link. "...what could have been..." Hey, guess what? There was a G1 Ironhide toy!! And it's fun! And I own one. And I'm going to play with it now instead of looking at pictures of Missing Link's Sunbow Ironhide.