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.