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Mock Up Found for Cancelled Combiner Wars Technobot Ironclad

Date: Tuesday, August 15th 2023 3:48pm CDT
Categories: Toy News, Collector's Club News
Posted by: Sabrblade

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Have I got some news for y'all!

Jesse Wittenrich has found and Tweeted a pic of Hasbro's old mock-up for Combiner Wars Ironclad. Who is Ironclad? Well, here's a quick history lesson:

Back in the Combiner Wars line, Hasbro had pretooled almost every Deluxe and Voyager mold with a second alternate head for later use of each mold. Most of these alternate heads saw use in the line, but some of them never saw the light of day. One such head was the pretooled head for the Rook mold. Originally, Hasbro had given the Rook mold a second head based on that of the Combaticon Brawl. Before the release of the Combaticons, Hasbro had planned to use the Rook mold for Brawl, but ultimately ended up making a completely new mold for Brawl instead (and one that didn't have a pretooled secondary head, but rather had a pretooled secondary drill turret instead).

When Hasbro decided to make a Combiner Wars giftset release of Computron, the original plan for that set was use the Legends class Groove mold to make Afterburner, while an all-new Technobot would replace Afterburner as a limb (just as Combiner Wars Rook had replaced Groove as a Protectobot limb). This is where Ironclad comes in, who would have been a redeco of Rook finally using the mold's secondary Brawl head. What's more, at RoboCon 2018, it was further revealed that the identity of Ironclad wasn't a whole new character as originally believed, but that he was actually meant to be a Trademark-friendly rename of Ironfist!

In the end, however, these plans fell through when Takara decided to make their own Computron (or "Computicon" in Japan) in the concurrent Unite Warriors line, and opted to heavily retool their Unite Warriors Deluxe-sized Groove mold into a Deluxe-sized Afterburner. Due to the relative closeness in timing, Hasbro was able to acquire the new Deluxe-sized Afterburner from Takara and add it to the Combiner Wars Computron giftset, nixing their original plans for a Legends class Afterburner and the replacement-limb Deluxe class Technobot Ironclad.

And now, after all this time, we finally have a look at what Hasbro had envisioned Ironclad (and its Brawl-based head) would look like:

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1688012846058164224

Hmm I also found this.

It's... uh... NOT my creation. Should I show it?

Okay... well...

Remember how I name-dropped "Ironclad" in the one TCC prose story, because Hasbro had given us early mock-ups for the Technobots?

Well... uh... if you wanted to see...