Hound may have been the first official TF I ever owned¹. I was lucky to have received this as a gift from my older cousin who had just visited Japan. She knew I loved robots and saw this was a craze with all the kids, so she picked up this little guy for me. How sweet. Unfortunately, throughout the years – actually almost immediately, to my memory, I lost his box, and the majority of his many accessories: gas can, spare tire, missiles, and standing machine gun. But even with just his hologram rifle and missile-less launcher, he still looks pretty good in bot form IMO.

These are repro stickers, with some extra ones not included in the original, I believe. It’s been so long since I got these stickers, in the early 2000’s, so now even these stickers are vintage. (I also am aware that the Jeep plate originally went on the front, but I found another spot on the back which made more sense to me as a license plate.) The strip of yellow squares and red circles looks like fog lights or a grill of some sort, and although they don’t fit without cutting, I decided to put them on the front to resemble some sort of lighting panel. (UPDATE 8.19.24: Looks like the inimitable Maz tracked down a source from a Diaclone catalog that shows these on Diaclone Hound’s hips. Go figure.)

Hound is a Jeep of course, but specifically a Mitsubishi J59, an official license-built copy of the US-made Willys CJ-3B, complete with the Jeep logo but a diesel Mitsubishi engine. Apparently, Mitsubishi made 200,000 of these, up until 1998. It’s cool to see Japan and the US cooperating in business besides Hasbro and Takara, even if it’s because of history. It makes Hound one of the most historical and quintessential Transformers from the original Diaclone Car Robots line. Hound is one of the OGs, you just can’t think of Transformers without him.

Now that’s a (Japanese) Jeep! The car mode is probably one if not the best alt modes Takara has done, to replicate a full die cast 1:44 (or whatever) scale car toy, and chop it up into pieces, that bend at perpendicular angles and swivel to form this handsome little fella. We can obviously see that these seats were designed to perfectly fit the Diaclone drivers that were omitted from the Hasbro release. The styro insert for the box though, I remember and later confirmed when the Internet came about, had a spot for the original Diaclone driver. That’s a big reason why I love Diaclone so much, beyond the history. It was just so complete and well thought out.

Side by side comparison from Jeep to robot form shows just how proportionately Takara designed this figure such that the legs, arms, and head are in good scale to one another, and his feet almost look like they’re in boots. Even the windshield forms a nice back plate to cover up any internals, sort of forming an upper back for the figure. Not so impressive of a back for a robot when compared to later designs, but considering J59 was one of the first ever Diaclones released in 1983, it’s a great looking bot from all sides.

I know he may be one of the blockiest of the bunch, but that’s one of the reasons I love this figure. The way his car parts arrange to form the robot body, including the chest and legs, the feet that look like boots, Hound just has a classic transformation that epitomizes the G1 80’s aesthetic. I imagine Hound to be like an artifact you’d find in a museum in the future, recording the evolution of human design, from basic stone and wooden carved toy sculptures resembling human figures to concept cars, eventually to robots – and then there’s car robots. Makes total sense to me. And even if it doesn’t, I don’t care but I’m so glad we have transforming car robots as a story concept and the toys to play with. Some humans have incredible imagination. Good stories with good characters inspire more creativity and imagination, and the cycle continues. Let’s hope people continue to be inspired and their works are realized commercially for the rest of us to enjoy, without just filling greedy corporate coffers. For that to happen, however, some things to stay obscure.

Typical of any hinge mechanism after time, Hound’s head no longer stands perfectly upright at 90 degrees, but the gimmick of popping up when you convert the car’s hood into his chest is always a delight to see, each and every time, even 40 years later. It gives the impression that Hound is a little bit of a shy guy. And that’s perfectly fine with me. After all, this is just a hologram.