We’re only days away from the release of IRON MAN 3, and from the looks of the trailer, one of the major themes of this newest IRON MAN movies has to do with Tony Stark building lots of suits of armor. With this in mind, let’s take a look at a few of my personal favorites of Iron Man’s man, many different outfits over the years.
“The Classic”
This one, to me, will always be the gold standard, if you’ll pardon the pun.
It’s slick, it’s streamlined, and it looks intimidating. The color mix works really well , and it still probably holds the record for the longest-lasting set of armor, as it appeared from the 1960s through well into the 1980s, and still shows up again from time to time.
The only time it didn’t look cool? When Stark would occasionally add on the accessory roller skates…
And to be honest, that brief window in the 1970s when Stark added a nose to the faceplate didn’t really work for me either:
For a while in the 1980s, Tony was big on building specific-duty armored suits. My favorites were the Hydro-Armor for undersea work (mostly because I’m just a sucker for the retro-looking bubble helmet):
The Stealth Armor, which was really just “The Classic” with a new paint job, but man, did it look slick:
And the Deep-Space Armor, which didn’t quite have the styling panache of the others, but there was something about the mouthless faceplate that always looked cool to me.
Every now and then Tony would take his “base” suit in a whole new direction, as in the “Silver Centurion” suit of the mid-1980s:
At the time, I hated this suit, thinking it looked clunky and awkward, with the big “Dynasty”-style shoulder pads and the bullet-shaped helmet. Today, I have to admit to a slight fondness for it, although that may just be nostalgia talking.
They can’t all be winners, of course. The Jim Lee-designed model for HEROES REBORN, with its mysterious “shoulder-bugles,” never made much sense to me:
And the Extremis armor always looked a little too slender and dainty to really do much damage:
But my favorite armors were always the ones designed for the express purpose of kicking someone’s ass. Such as the Asgardian armor, just in case you have to show a Thunder God who’s boss.
And the granddaddy of them all, the Hulkbuster Armor. Even though it never actually seems to work against the Hulk, I’m always happy to see this one come out of mothballs and back into action:
Will we see any of these in IRON MAN 3? From the looks of the trailer, we may just see all of them. Can’t wait.
Scott Tipton still wants to see MODOK on the big screen. There’s always IRON MAN 4…
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