RID "Car Brothers" Pictorial

Tonight's TFSource Blog article "Blast From The Past" was entirely inspired by a friend of mine bringing back my RID Side Burn, Prowl and X-Brawn after over a decade of having them in his garage. To quote from the article: ''Car Robots is now almost as old as Generation 1 was when Car Robots first came out''. Profound, no?

Playing with these toys again, I realised how many elements of their concept, design and transformations have now been incorporated into Binaltech, Alternators, Alternity, Classics and Masterpiece. I expected them to be so much harder to transform but they were in fact easy, Side Burn included. I've clearly learned some new tricks thanks to those aforementioned lines, those of the fiddly transformations.

Again, to quote "Car Robots marked a return to vehicle-based main line characters by Takara and then Hasbro in Robots in Disguise, but with a distinctly different flavour. While later Generation 1 and Generation 2 started to introduce more poseability to robot figures, the Beast era took that even further and the technology and designs in CR/RiD reflect that, especially for the Car Brothers. It may no longer have been cool for Transformers to have massive paneled chunks of vehicle bodywork as limbs, but real world vehicle modes were back".

I am absolutely thrilled to have been given the chance to rediscover these toys, and with the amount I am missing my JRX, I wonder if Car Robots and Robots In Disguise are the long lost friend I never got to know well enough when they were around? One day, this will be corrected. For now, finishing with another snippet from the article:

"Somewhere along the line the Generation 1 aesthetic became cool again, and was exploited thoroughly in harmony with the concepts borne out in Car Robots/Robots in Disguise via Binaltech, Alternators, Classics and Masterpiece. The Car Brothers of CR/RiD were that entirely necessary and memorable step between what we got - those of us who are lovers of vehicle based Transformers and Generation 1 - and what we always wanted".

All the best

Maz