Datetsujin 17

Daitetsujin 17 (大鉄人１７, said like ONE SEVEN) is a live-action super robot show created by Shotaro Ishinomori and produced by Toei. Despite appearances, D17 is not a Super Sentai show, and has more in common with shows like Red Baron, Mach Baron and Giant Robo.

After Bandai did the last D17 toy in 1999, there hasn’t been a lot of love for the character. To fill that void, a new company out of Hong Kong called WorldScope has come out with this really great representation of the character.

First off, the box is amazing. It’s a sturdy blue cardboard box with an amazing print of the chest of D17 on the front. it’s a simple, striking design.

Lift off the lid and you get a nice die-cut window cover to show off the figure. Behind that, a glorious block of styrofoam.

The toy stands 30cm tall and is mostly high-quality plastic with a few bits of diecast. Pretty much anything you see that is glossy red is metal.

A note about construction – this feels exceptionally solid. The plastic is more like third party plastic than what Bandai uses, but it totally works.

Before we get too into this – no, the toy does not transform. In the show, Daitetsujin transforms into a flying base – here it does not.

From the top, the head has sharp detail and multiple color paint applications. The head rotates on a ball joint, but also has a cool extending feature to give the head a greater range of motion.

The shoulders have a slight bit of forward and back motion, with a hinge that allows you to raise them up. This is in addition to the clicky shoulder joints.

Elbows are a simple hinge which also swivel above the joint.

The hands feature fully articulated fingers and thumb.

While there is a waist joint, it’s motion is severely limited by the wings on the back. There is also a cool feature where you can swap out the panel in the stomach for a panel with an opening feature, revealing the Graviton weapon.

The waist skirt has a bunch of moveable panels, which is handy to get out of the way for the more extreme poses.

As you can see, the hip articulation is awesome.

Knees are clicky, but there’s not a great range of motion.

Feet are on ball joints, and can stay flat even with the legs splayed apart.

The back of D17 features wings that mainly would spread out in fortress mode, so here they are moveable for no real reason.

Fear not, D17 even looks great in a neutral pose.

The main gripe people are going to have with this toy is that it does not transform into Fortress mode. Honestly, it would not have been that hard to do with just a little more engineering. But I guess WorldScope wanted to have a robust action figure that could move without the restraints that a transformation mechanism would put on it. The result is a well-engineered, very large action figure of an under-appreciated robot design.