Well, at least when his head disintegrated he was more like the original toy.
One thing that's been mentioned a few times, most recently in an interview with one of the ILM bods a couple of SFX's ago is that red, for whatever techno reason, is incredibly hard to do (I assume in the context of real looking metal) in CGI. Apparently Optimus Prime is still a bitch to render even after three films and not being all red. This is likely another reason why Dino didn't do very much. So doing both red Ironhide and Prime in the same scenes in the first film would likely have been a real, needless headache.
Plus, those first film Autobots are all distinctly different colours to help them stand out as much as possible from one another, a fairly sensible move as the Decepticons (mostly stuck in military greys and greens) seem to have suffered a lot more from "I had no idea who was who" complaints from non-fans.
So on the hand of him not being like the G1 version we have: easier to create in CGI, is distinctive from the other Autobots (unless someone thinks Prime should have been the one to lose the red?) and he isn't actually G1 Ironhide anymore than Energon Ironhide is (and no one ever said he'd look better if he was red did they? Though now I've said that it'll turn out there was a red version repaint. And he was still ****).
Plus, and I'll admit this is subjective, does anyone else think his alt mode would look really odd in red? Those big bruiser truck things seem made to be black (though no doubt they come in different colours, you just never seem to see them). Try imagining the truck Marty McFly finds in the garage at the end of
Back to the Future (or, if you like, the start of
Back to the Future II. or indeed, the end of the third one...) in red. It just seems wrong doesn't it?
PS MICKEL BEH SAVED TRANDSFORMRS N U SHOLD BE HAPPY!!1! >:(
I would actually argue that one nice side effect of the films, whatever their qualities is that the general state of the Transformers nation is much better than it was pre-Bay. We've had two cartoons that, whilst not to everyone's taste, have improved tenfold on the Unicron stuff, all the toylines are much improved whether you're looking for something for the little'un or some Classics goodness (a Straxus!) and the comics... Well, OK, two out of three aint bad.
But the general kick up the arse the franchise as a whole has received is down to the films and their commercial success. And that's a good thing. Doesn't mean we should be bowing down and kissing Bay's arse of course, but I do think there's a lot to enjoy at the moment even if you're someone who's perfectly happy to ignore the movies. I think we're going to look back on this period as a golden age for Transformers, and I'm certainly making more of a concious effort to just have fun with it rather than just doing what I usually do and focus on the negative (like, say, totally random example... my Andy Schmidt voodoo doll).
