Encore 5 and 6 headless chickens

[UltraMarginal]

I recently bought both encore's from chopstick9558, he was gentleman enough to include the older style custom heads for them, the shoulders are a little low but i think they look pretty good.

as mentioned above the original toy has a sticker that shows a face, I think they took a lot of good liberty's when designing the animation model for these guys.

[griffin]

Looking at where the shoulders are on the toy (below the windshield), and the way the original Ironhide & Ratchet were first drawn on the Techspecs and in Issue one of the Marvel Comic, the windshield isn't their chest, it's a blast shield for the head (which is represented by the seat, but wasn't drawn that thin in the comic of course).

[GoktimusPrime]

Yeah, that's how I used to play with them as a kid -- and I used to pretend that they had a kind of HUD that constantly fed them live visual information (much like seeing Tony Stark in his Iron Man armour in the movies ). When I was a kid I would draw Ironhide and Ratchet with their cartoon-like heads, but with toy-accurate bodies, so the heads sat behind the windows. Many many years later we got War Within Ironhide which did just that! (great minds think alike and fools seldom differ )

[Sky Shadow]

This mould is by far the greatest from 1984 if not the entire GeeWun era. For the price of an Autobot Car one got a robot and base that turned into a realistic vehicle. I don't know why alien robots should need to be anthropomorphic anyway, but since the toys were first released as Transformers nearly three decades ago, they have always had heads and faces, and if it weren't for cartoon-indoctrinated misinformation, this headless/faceless fallacy would not keep rearing its ugly you-know-what.

[kup]

I have the 3rd party heads and although they are very well sculpted, they don't fit the G1 figures so I don't use them. The proportions look to wacky with them on so I prefer stickers.

[Mr Ed]

I have the 3rd party heads and although they are very well sculpted, they don't fit the G1 figures so I don't use them. The proportions look to wacky with them on so I prefer stickers.

i thought those heads fitted well?

[kup]

i thought those heads fitted well?

From a visual aesthetic I mean.

[liegeprime]

I use the third party heads for both my vintage G1 and encore figures. It takes getting used to it, coz the shoulders tend to look sooo low but I prefer having it, and its nice that I dont have to remove the heads coz it folds down .. sorta transforms with the rest of the figure and is well tucked in Alt mode. Even gave 1 set to a friend and he was pretty happy with it as well.

[GoktimusPrime]

Yeah, the problem with add-on heads (be it the legit cardboard ones or unlicensed sculpted ones) is that the rest of the body ends up sitting too low, so the new shoulder line has no arms, and the arms look like they're coming out of the ribs.

What someone should do perhaps is to make a cartoon-like head that attaches to the Diaclone seat-cavity inside Ironhide and Ratchet -- making it look similar to War Within Ironhide in that regard. Best of all you wouldn't necessarily have to remove the head to transform them to vehicle mode -- yeah sure, the heads would be visible in vehicle mode, but that's already always been the case with their original G1 heads anyway.

What you could do is cut off the Encore cardboard or 3rd party sculpted heads and attach them to the original G1 faces, that way they'd cover up the original heads, but they'd still behind the windows which wouldn't make the body look "deformed". And they'd still keep that G1 toy-accurate charm () - something which War Within used with Ironhide and Kup, suggesting that somehow the "old" Autobots have the windscreens in front of their faces (War Within Ratchet has his windscreen on his back since he's technically not one of the "oldies" like Ironhide and Kup ). In fact, I've noticed that Generations Sergeant Kup (and thus I suspect United Kup would have this too) has a small window sitting in front of his head. Nice.

[bowspearer]

I actually love the fact that these two Encores were very poorly received. I just scored both of them from Hong Kong for $20 + shipping. Made a great stuffer in with a MOSC Talon, as well as replacements for my 2 Classics versions which are sun yellowed like nobody's business.

I actually find that I have mixed feelings about the encores, specifically Ratchet.

I'll get into the bad first. The palms on Rathcet. On the Classics and original versions, they used a sticker. Sure, it eventually got lost but when it was new, it at least looked like a sold white square and blended in well.

While with the encore version, they made a step in the right direction by painting the palms in white, they probably needed another 2-3 coats of white on there for it to be effective. As it stands, it honestly looks transparent.

In terms of engineering, it would have been great had they altered the turret gun slightly to allow for clearance under the van when the gun is stored there in vehicle mode (1-2mm would do it easily). Much like every other release of the mold, it cannot roll when kitted out in vehicle mode.

However these are minor complaints in light of what they did do right (something which going back to at least the Classics release, Hasbro didn't) was that they actually made both launchers fire.

Honestly, with how unpopular they are these 2 are a no brainer to buy. They're still great toys, but not only that; depending on where you buy them, if members here have kids who love G1 toys, it's a great way to give them something decent without breaking the budget.

EDIT: To clarify, when I said these were a no brainer to pick up, I meant on eBay. I'm probably "preaching to the choir" here, but comic shops and the like will charge you upwards of $70 each for these guys. eBay in comparison usually has them as a pair for no more than $30-40+shipping, making them great little package stuffers..