What a long-winded reveal, but as of today we can officially talk about Sideways! This was an awesome robot design that we sadly only saw a glimpse of as he transformed through a building before transforming back into a vehicle mode. Similar to Jolt though, a lot of work went Into this robot mode, so it was great to get the opportunity to revisit the character.

I won’t linger on the vehicle mode for long. Similar to Dino, we needed to work from a generic vehicle form. I tried to keep it in the vein of a similar European mid-engine supercar while making some deliberate deviations from the original design. Regardless making up cars is always a fun exercise. One thing that I didn’t realize prior to scanning for frames of the character from the film, was that the original movie car was two-toned with a black hood/roof, and silver pinstripes traveling over the center body. I always recall it being silver in the movie, but I guess I had never examined this opening scene closely enough. 

Sideways was a lot of fun to develop. Kunihiro Takashi absolutely killed it with this figure and did an amazing job of adapting the film’s CAD to our proposed vehicle form. It’s a pretty rewarding transformation, with a pretty minimal backpack. The original character never wielded a weapon in the film, and we didn’t want to sacrifice that fantastic articulated hands to make them compatible with the 5mm port system. We ended up scanning through a bunch of the ROTF video game footage to settle on a multi-barrel rifle that his arm would transform into as it could be adapted with a sleeve over mount to the hand.

Deco-wise, similar to ROTF Sideswipe, I wanted to paint the panels of the car silver, and keep the robot parts darker gray. This also enabled us to get the two-tone effect out of the base color. The only downside was that the nylon hinges couldn’t be painted, making them more identifiable on the doors and the roof. 
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Overall I’m pretty happy with how this ultra tertiary character came out, and few that he is a nice update from his 2009 ROTF figure. 

What are your thoughts on Sideways? Was he with the wait? Or will be sticking with the original figure?