| RED
ALERT
PROJECT 211.1
CLASSIFICATION: REPAINT/CUSTOM
MATERIALS USED (1986): PERMANENT MARKERS, WITE-OUT CORRECTION FLUID
MATERIALS USED (2002): HOBBY KNIFE; SCRAP PLASTIC; ENAMEL PAINTS:
REPRODUCTION LABELS
MEDIA APPEARANCE: "AUTO BERSERK," ET AL.
"I warned you guys there was trouble!"
"You always say there's trouble, Red."
Preamble: I seem to be drawn to really
quirky characters. I'm usually not a big fan of Autobot characters
unless there's some unusual character trait that really sets them apart from
the typical hero archetype. Maybe that's more a reflection of my own
personality than anything else; I don't know. In any event, Red Alert
definitely qualifies as a freak. The guy always sounded like he was
half a step away from going bananas, and it didn't take much for him to actually
go bananas in his starring episode, "Auto Berserk." (Some fans
may tell you that this episode didn't present a fair depiction of Red Alert.
I guess it's a little bit like basing your first impression of Optimus
Prime after seeing him as the zombie Autobot killer in "Dark Awakening."
As far as I'm concerned, though, Red Alert's featured episode absolutely
made the character.)
Red Alert has always been one of my favorites
from the original cartoon, but the toy I owned had a broken spoiler, was
yellow from sun damage, the paint was chipping off the die-cast metal, and
his stickers were peeling. Since it needed some restoration work anyway,
I thought it would be nice to paint the toy to reflect his media appearance.
(Insert angry fan-rant here about how I'm getting it backwards, that
the toys came first, that I'm a diabolical Satan-worshipper who celebrates
a love for Transformers by ruining the toys, et cetera.)
Construction: I had to do some minor
restoration work to this toy before I could paint it. I'd made an attempt
previously to repair his spoiler by swapping a piece out from a junker Sideswipe
toy and covering the toy in typewriter correction fluid to try to fix the
chipped paint. Not a bad fix for a nine-year-old, I suppose, but I
had to scrape off all the Wite-Out before I could proceed. Also, the
corner of his original spoiler was broken off, so I had to cut some scrap
plastic into the right shape (I had plenty of leftover plastic parts from
my Superion kitbash), gluing it in place
and then carefully carving it down so it would match the rest of the spoiler.
As a kid, I had also tried to color his helmet red by painting it with
a silver ink pen and then coloring over top of that with a red permanent
marker. I had to scrape all that off as well. After that, it
was a simple matter of stripping off what was left of his stickers, and he
was ready to be painted.
This wasn't a terribly involved project; once
I got the preparatory work out of the way, I think I finished him up in two
nights. After drawing up a color model (working from "Auto Berserk,"
mostly, since he gets a lot of screen time in that one), I disassembled him
and laid the parts out. I ended up painting pretty much everything,
except the pegs holding his forearms and shoulders in place, and the bar
that his head swivels on. In some episodes, Red Alert is pure white,
but in other episode (like "The God Gambit") he's sort of a light grey, so
I compromised and went with an off-white tint. I wanted him to look
as cartoony as possible, so I painted over all his chrome parts (which were
all badly worn anyway) and made them light grey. This also included
popping off the tires and painting over the wheels.
Like most of the second-season Autobot cars, Red
Alert has grey-tinted windows in the cartoon, so I took advantage of the
translucent plastic windows by painting the insides of his windows.
Retaining the original outer sheen of the clear plastic still makes
them look like glass windows, but you still can't see inside of them thanks
to the grey paint. The most important change, of course, was to paint
his helmet red. This, more than anything else, is the one detail that
differentiates him from Sideswipe, and he just doesn't look like Red Alert
without it.
Even though I'm officially classifying this project
as a repaint, I did actually do some very minor custom work to the toy as
well. Red Alert isn't drawn with those hook-shaped Snarl-style horns
in the show. He's got these square little head sensors on his helmet
instead. So, I cut the original horns off, cutting some new ones out
of scrap plastic and gluing them in place. They actually ended up being
a little smaller than I wanted, but if I'd made them any bigger, he wouldn't
be able to transform (at least, not without cutting grooves out of his insides
to make room for them, and I didn't want to do that). I also sliced
off his single windshield wiper, since he isn't drawn with one in the series.
After reassembling the toy, I put some brand-new
stickers on him, courtesy of the inimitable Delta Star. The only ones
I actually used were the factory-applied FIRE CHIEF labels,
which I cut up into pieces to match the placement of the logos as seen in
the cartoon.
Addendum: I originally uploaded this
project before it was completed. At the time, I didn't have any of
Red Alert's accessories, and he looked kind of naked to me without his shoulder
launcher. I eventually found a fan who was willing to sell me a Sideswipe
missile launcher, and after I got the Hasbro commemorative edition Red Alert
I used one of the spare missiles for the launcher. I painted the launcher
light grey, and I modified the missile so that it fits into the center of
the launcher, and I also drilled a little hole into the center of the tip
to make it look less like a projectile and more like a gun (since that's
how he's drawn in animation). |
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