Headless Wonder

Belated appreciation for The Worst Transformer

If you pay any attention to modern Transformers, you’ll be aware that there is now an intense focus on making the toys look as close as possibly to a wobbly, hastily-produced, error-strewn cartoon which aired in the mid-1980s. But at that time, the gulf between toy and toon character designs was often enormous.

For reasons of artistic ease and expediency, the cartoon versions of the Robots In Disguise toy phenomenon were massively simplified compared to their original plastic incarnations. Clean, clear, relatively humanoid lines, often outright removing most of the wheels, doors and other vehicular furniture which belied a robot’s real-world ‘alt’ mode, plus shearing away all the tech-y detail of the fiddly little stickers that festooned the early toys.

Because it’s a lot easier to draw hundreds of frames of basically a guy with some cardboard boxes stuck to him…

…than it is his more obviously automobilic plastic counterpart:

That’s Jazz, by the way - in case you’re not as versed in all this ancient brain-rot as I am. And he’s actually one of the more minor offenders in this regard: at least we can recognise the cartoon and toy as Probably The Same Dude.

Others fared more poorly. Most anyone with a robot mode that didn’t easily map to the aforementioned Basically A Guy aesthetic came in for far more drastic screen (sorry) transformation. I suspect this was more about issues of relatability than simplicity. Due to their origins as fairly disparate Japanese sci-fi toylines, some of the very early ‘Transformers’ repackaged for the West were gloriously weird - very much representing a wider exploration of ‘robot’ than the effectively superheroic interpretations of page and screen.

None more so than the toy that came to be called Ironhide (if you bought the red one) or Ratchet (if you bought the white one; apart from colours, the only difference was an ambulance lightbar on Ratchet’s roof). I’ll focus on Ironhide in this letter, for reasons that will become apparent, but the situation was the same for both of them.

Here’s Ironhide as he appeared in the 1984 cartoon series:

Pretty cool, as boxy Saturday morning cartoon characters go. His persona was a tough-as-old-boots cowboy type, and battle-ready right-hand to Optimus Prime himself.

Which is quite a reach from this:

Any kid breathlessly demanding Ironhide for his birthday was in for a painfully rude awakening. Instead of Cybertronian John Wayne, they got this skeletal, headless oddity with a massive crotch orifice and whose play features (outside of transformation) began and ended with ‘shoulders.’ But please bear with me: in due course I’ll be explaining why it’s actually fantastic.

Anyone who wielded one in the playground instantly plummeted to the bottom of the social hierarchy, while all the alpha kids swooshed around their incredible, intricate Starscreams and Optimuses and Sideswipes and Soundwaves.

Inevitably, Ironhide was my very first Transformer. Was I doomed to be a loser from that moment onward? Worse, it was by choice. After months of negotiating, I had finally convinced my frugal parents to take me to Woolworths one weekend, where I would choose my inaugural Transformer.

(I was already obsessed despite owning none yet, because a) the wealthier kids at school kept showing off theirs and b) the blanket saturation of Transformers at this time was like nothing I’ve experienced before or since. It made promotion for your average Avengers movie look rinky-dink).

I’d had it in my head I was going to get an Optimus Prime, because he was already The Transformer. This was, of course, the pipiest of pipe dreams, because my parents were never going to stump up that much cash - and in any case, in late 1984 the popularity of that toy was so extreme that even minor royalty would struggle to find one.

I stared at Woolworth’s cavernous shelves in horror, seeing the empty space where a convoy of Primes should sit, trying to will one into appearing. My father grew impatient, telling me to hurry up and choose a robot or we’d have to go home without one.

In the absence of Optimus Prime, my five-year-old imagination could stretch no further than ‘I want a red one’. I cannot remember which other Transformers were there, with the exception of the aforementioned Jazz - now widely-regarded as one of the all-time coolest Transformers.

And Ironhide, packaged neatly in his van mode. Which was red.

I was helpless to resist. Jazz didn’t stand a chance.

I dimly recall my father looking at the pictures of the bizarre, faceless robot on the box and offering a half-hearted ‘are you sure?’, aware that trouble may brew if I found I’d bought a shit one. But I could not be dissuaded.

And you know what? I loved him. I hadn’t seen the cartoon or read the comic yet. I’d just seen other kids’ toys, and the TV ads for said toys, and some bootleg pillowcases and slippers emblazoned with Optimus down the local market. I didn’t know that Ironhide wasn’t ‘supposed’ to look like that. I was a mite confused that his ‘head’ consisted of just a black and white sticker affixed to the front seat behind his van windshield, but I just rolled with it. It was a car that turned into a robot. Robots were amazing! Job done.

When Ironhide was brutally murdered (along with most of his 1984 & 1985 toy contemporaries - Hasbro house-clearing for 1986 range) in the opening act of the 1986 Transformers movie, my heart broke. Everyone remembers that film for the shocking and prolonged death of our collective Giant Robot Dad, Optimus Prime, but for me it was seeing my first Transformer, my robot, dispatched without mercy or mourning.

As for play features, I was cynically selective earlier. While Ironhide the lone robot was basically a couple of sticks with a window on top, Ironhide the complete toy entailed most of his van mode separating and opening up into a strange sledge. A spring-loaded rocket launcher and an oversize laser of nebulous nature was mounted to it; you could stand Ironhide at its rear and he looked like he was rolling into battle. Glorious! Apart from the fact he’d apparently left his whole head at home. And still didn’t look anything like the cartoon.

As with the curious case of the secret white Optimus inside Ultra Magnus, the truth about Ironhide would not be widely-known until many years later. As has been repeated ad nauseam here and everywhere, many Transformers were originally ‘Diaclone’ - a Japanese toyline in which the robots were non-sentient mechs, piloted by little human figures. The reason Ironhide didn’t have a head is because he was never supposed to.

That seat upon which his sad, 2D excuse for a face was stuck? It really was just a seat. A little dude sat up there and steered ‘Ironhide’ into battle. The face sticker wasn’t even included.

Meanwhile, a couple more little dudes could man the weapons, when sat in additional seats that the Hasbro version’s instructions didn’t even acknowledge the existence of.

Ironhide (and indeed Ratchet) weren’t just transforming robots - they were full-on playsets. Lay hands on three drivers and it is, to this day, just about the most fun you can have with a 1980s Transformer. It’s genuinely tragic that the pilots were removed from all the Diaclone toys repackaged as Transformers - you may dimly recall some of your own having mysterious cockpits and chairs.

So, absent their intended drivers, Ironhide’s (and Ratchet’s) toy remained a laughing stock even as collecting Transformers became an adult pursuit - the worst of the lot, the headless horror. When I entered into that strange, guilty and then-lonely world, I resisted reacquiring one despite the obvious pull of nostalgia - my first Transformer! I had only contempt for it at that point: it looked dumb, it didn’t even faintly resemble his butch cartoon incarnation, and, before too long, we started getting our first more ‘accurate’ takes on screen Ironhide, making it a moot point.

If you’re a vintage collector and/or don’t want to spend a large sum of money on a modern one, then third-party kits to ‘correct’ Ironhide and Ratchet by adding toon-styled heads and shoulders became (and still remain) available. Currently there is even a rumour of an upgraded official ‘Missing Link’ remake intended to achieve similar. Once, I thought I needed that. No longer.

This too is another story, but at some point I passed through the eye of the needle and cartoon-styled Transformers suddenly seemed to be missing the point of those wonderful and strange, extremely fucking weird early toys. To my eye now, rather than looking pathetically outdated, they’re like an aesthetically fascinating retro-futurist vision of another tomorrow.

And then, finally, I understood Ironhide all over again. I saw what it was, rather than what it was not, and I was beyond delighted to hear about the forgotten pilot feature. Validation at last, the riposte to those Jazz-toting bastards who’d mocked my poor taste back in a 1984 playground. The last laugh!

Except they’ve probably got amazing jobs and remarkable lives and never waste even half a thought on the dumb toys of their childhoods, and here I am writing a newsletter about it. The worst Transformer - and wholly responsible for the cupboard full of ridiculous plastic items I own today.

Goddamn you, Ironhide, you faceless freak.