ZeldaTheSwordsman wrote:Unless there's an extreme degree of alternate tooling baked into the mold, there is no way that SS86 Hot Rod can become anything more than a sloppy second head swap (to borrow your term) Override. The transformation design is too different. The build of the arms and legs is too different.
The 3P thing worked because in modelling Hot Rod's IDW design the look and transformation scheme wound up being close to Override's (curvy, feet at the front, etc). That is not the case with SS86 Hot Rod. SS86 Hot Rod's design bends over backwards and cheats with a faux-parts chest (that there is zero room to swap with a convincing imitation of Override's cockpit chest) to get a hyper screen-accurate Hot Rod in both robot and vehicle modes, and is thus inherently specialized to that. He could be retooled into an okay Hot Shot (because Cybertron Hot Shot was himself a heavy homage to Hot Rod, to the point of having a stylized representation of Hot Rod's hood chest in robot mode), but Override? I don't see how that's happening in any sort of satisfactory way. An angularized Override as a heavy retool of SIEGE Springer seems more feasible than pulling off a good one from SS86 Hot Rod (although only so much of an improvement).
And it bugs me that they're branding the line "Velocitron" but apparently phoning in Override.
See, you're pre-judging the figure based on a gripe you have with the Hot Rod mold and the fact that you at least seem to want as close to 100% accuracy to the original Override design as possible, or at least that's how it reads to me. I am waiting to see the actual figure before making these kinds of judgements, since I don't care about 100% accuracy, I just care about it looking good to me and looking enough like Override to work for me. Considering the Velocitron line is supposed to be the replacement for the Netflix line, and the Netflix line had the retooling budget to replace 3/4ths of Soundwave's parts, I have belief that they CAN make a decent Override in this scenario, we just have to wait and see. They're using Warpath to make Cosmos, radical retools seem to clearly be on the table here.
I also don't have SS86 Hot Rod (nothing against the figure, I just don't care enough about Hot Rod to replace the TR one), but I would think having a fake chest would actually make it easier to swap that part for a more accurate chest piece, would it not?
ZeldaTheSwordsman wrote:Considering that mold would need to be reshelled at asbolute minimum to be repurposed at all anyway, hopefully it would come with better arms if it did. And why would it be too big?
From what I've seen, that mold is around Hoist/Ironhide/Rotorstorm height, so the large end of Deluxe, whereas Ironfist's only media appearances in the comics have put him at average Deluxe height or below and definitively shorter than Rotorstorm.
ZeldaTheSwordsman wrote:I dunno, SIEGE Hound's silhouette seems closer to a Humvee than Crankcase's Land Cruiser-esque silhouette (assuming his new toy retains that).
If we're going for as-accurate-an-Ironfist-as-possible (which is I think what you're arguing for, but again, I could be misconstruing that), then they would still have to retool the whole backpack if not half the figure to give it an enclosed cab and the boxier back half. I don't see Hasbro doing that and a new head for a comic-only character like Ironfist unless that remold was planned from the start, and I'm assuming the remold that would be planned for Hound would be a more-G1 Earth mode version, which isn't the same Jeep and wouldn't solve most of that. Crankcase is already a self-enclosed boxy Jeep-thing, at least, so the only retooling needed would be the new head and maybe a fake hood-chest panel (if they didn't just paint it on like Rotorstorm).
ZeldaTheSwordsman wrote:How so? What Ironfist had was a big turret that became a stand-supported gun, so neither is super-close there IMO.
It was, but 90% of the time it was shown in the comics he just carried it around as a backpack. I'm pretty sure he only used it in Wreckers once and it was right at the beginning, and I think he used it more in the FunPub stuff but that's had way less exposure. With that in mind, then if they do Ironfist as a minimal-remolding new head repaint like Rotorstorm, I assume they would go for him having a big gun backpack but not actually prioritize it being functional as a removable turret. Depending on how they implement Crankcase, they may at the very least match in terms of having large gun backpacks and/or a way to plug the large rifle into the backpack to make a large gun backpack. Hound, meanwhile, has no real way of making his guns stick up over his head if you plug them into his back unless you use both of them pegged together (I checked on Selects Hot Shot a ways back), let alone a bulky backpack.
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