Jetfire
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So yeah, this guy is biiiiiiig, really big. Like, Armada Unicron big. Combiner Wars Combiner big. And he’s really impressive. And his core robot and vehicle modes are an impressive recreation of his cartoon character design, which no other G1 Jetfire toy has done before.
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As a STE GE toy he’s got the line-wide gimmicks – an attempt at consistent scale, tons of poseability (you’d never know it to look, but he has a waist swivel), 5mm ports on his calves, forearms, feet and back to mount extra weapons, little posts to mount blast effects and all that. And a bunch of gimmicks unique to him (in ascending order of cool)
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5. You can open up his jet mode cockpit, remove the greeblie in there and seat a Titan or Prime Master in there. Also, there are seats for another two hidden in his backpack.
4. When transforming into jet mode, instead of folding his head away, there’s a trapdoor in his backpack that opens up and the head just slides in there
3. In jet mode, there are 4 handles you can swing out that other bots can hang off, representing various episodes where he carried Autobots into battle.
2. His insignia flips around, swapping from Autobot to Decepticon to recreate every time he’s switched sides
1. Rather than have lump hands with a 5mm port for a gun, or having poseable fingers that aren’t always great at gripping weapons, there’s a 5mm port in the hand, but Jetfire’s fingers are a single piece that opens up, and when you open them up, the port slides into the palm. It’s not perfectly seamless, but it’s such a nice touch and I really like them trying new stuff.
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Jetfire also comes with a ton of bits in the box, sufficient to turn him from big-ass science robot to a DEATH DEALING MURDERBOT of science. And, uh reference the VF-1’s FAST Packs from the original Jetfire toy: There’s a chestplate which declares him to be an out and proud Autobot, a faceplate/mask/helmet, a pair of armour pieces with double-barrel cannons, 2 large-ish weapons and another 2 smaller ones, and a gigantic double-barrelled cannon that resembles the cartoon design gun, but can split into two as well. And the whole lot can connect together into a big wodge of gun that can fit on his backpack for storage or to give the jet mode a massive gun turret. In a very nice touch, there’s an opening hatch in the chestplate with a space to hide the mask. There’s also two massive weapon effects that can split into three smaller pieces, giving a lot of options to show engine exhaust, damage, weapon fire and so on. In a nice touch, they all have a little lip that’s big enough to fit into the larger weapon barrels (like, say Optimus Prime and Megatron), while also having a hole that fits the smaller weapons and damage ports. This is very welcome given the only big effect this far – Blowpipe’s – didn’t properly fit into the bigger guns.
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All that said, this toy is far from perfect. In Jet mode it looks great from above and the front, but there’s a gap between the body and bits of the backpack – at the front it means you can see a bit of the head sitting between the body and the backpack, but between the clearance and that the legs don’t come together flush (this last bit is accurate to at least some lineart though), the back is gappy as all hell. There’s really cool stuff going on – you unfold the inside of the lower leg and peg it to the back of the leg, letting you fold the whole thing up, and there’s a big bit of thruster mounted there that pegs into the backpack – but a little bit of extra work would have improved here.
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Red Alert
I skipped Sideswipe, and this was my first exposure to this mold. He’s pretty good! Robot mode is very Red Alerty, he comes with a pretty cool looking gun (forget the gun and lightbar axe mode, it’s really stupid). Car mode is pretty cool, transformation is quick and easy – it’s notable that the robot and car modes strongly resemble the classics Sideswipe/Sunstreaker/Red Alert mold, but is simplified in a good way. There are some bad bits: A lock a shoulder cannon, which was always more Red’s thing than Sideswipe in terms of character design, but also a lack of 5mm ports on his shoulders means you can’t pop anything on there save STE GE Sideswipe’s specific shoulder launcher that fits on there, or get a third party add-on. And my Red Alert’s left arm is misassembled, meaning I need to pop the arm off to transform him because the pin in there resists all my attempts to knock it out and reassemble. I’ll fix it eventually.
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Brunt
I was looking forward to this guy because, you know, he’s a fucking Centurion Drone from Stormbringer, in purple, and here we are. Like all the weaponisers, Bront’s a bit of a mixed bag, but the good outweighs the bad – he’s got the usual level of Deluxe poseability, with added clamp or clamp-like devices on the end of those wrists. His head is a stylised Cylon Centurion noggin and it works so well. My only Robot mode meh is that there’s no way to tilt that shoulder gun downwards. I’ve tried using MSG and Neko Buso parts to make a hinge or L-adapter, but they’re too small
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Did I ever talk about Neko Busou? They’re little toy cats! That come with little cat houses, and you can bolt weapon bits to them! They’re so cute!
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Achem, Brant. Tank mode is a lot of take him apart, put him back together, but the finished mode is pretty cool. The arms collapse down in a cool way, but I hear if you extend the arms out incorrectly they can snap? The really innovative bit here is that the big gun is mostly his lower legs – unlike the other weaponisers, Brint has two different feet, with one having a fold-out post that fits into the port on the other one. Turning him into weapon bits is a touch less free-form than Cog or Six-gun – his Torso will be a backpack or gun, legs and hip a backpack, turret a backpack or shield, and then arms or legs used as guns, New Rock soles for some bots, or maybe a grabby arm assembly, like the instructions suggest. Overall he’s fun, I bought two of him, and I may have bought Zetar as well. Clamp Clamp ka-bamp!
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Refraktor
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Yeah, I bought three of him. He’s there, and good, but hard to put into words why. Like, his robot mode is pretty generic, has good poseability like every other siege toy, and that’s a really good complaint to have I guess? Like this is sooo boring, he’s a lot of fun to get into dynamic poses like all the other toys in this line? And like, he’s generic, but he’s designed to look like the guy they put into the background to fill out the scene until they had more toys to advertise.
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The individual alt mode is kinda bullshit. It’s basically a slab with a gun on the front end and a single landing gear, and real talk here, we’re using a ton of imagination to see this as a space cruiser or whatever and not like, another transformer to get the designation ornament from the Functionist Council. Galling for Rung when he finally get a toy in the same line as this guy, but he transforms into a gun! This is total stolen valour.
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That said, camera mode. It’s also sorta bullshit because you basically make three Refraktors into cubes, then mush them together, make the shields into a lens, the guns and one bellybutton into a tripod, and put the other belliesbutton somewhere else – in a bag somewhere, or on the back or top to emulate a shutter release or camera controls. And it works? It’s more a sketch of a camera than an actual one, but it’s stupid fun to handle. It did make a friend of mine at a con say “is that a real camera” when I combined them, so mission accomplished, I guess.
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And there are a literal metric shitload of fan-devised fan modes to mush a bunch of these together as slightly more convincing spacecraft, combiners, Transformer-scale movie cameras (well, using one as the camera with all the accessories lumped on there), so there are options.
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There is, of course an exclusive box of three of these guys, coloured to match the 80s toys with additional accessories to make them look… like the 80s toys, and to give a more convincing camera mode. And a STE GE damage port-compatible Kremzeek. And I didn’t buy that set too. Partially because it would have been at least a tenner more, partially because Reflector never appeared in the old comics and the toys never made it over here (I had some seacons that had a mail-order offer for them but it was priced in dollars so I guess these weren’t European releases) , so my only real connection to them is as background guys in the cartoon and as a result the plainer, cartoon-esque guys appealed to me more.
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Seekers
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I skipped Srarscream, liking the PotP one well enough and intending to get Thundercracker and maybe Skywarp. Got Thundercracker and loved him, ordered Skywarp, and then Mark got me Starscream as a birthday present, so I have the classic trio in matching bodies.
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Burying the lede there, I did love Thundercracker. I gotta say, this is definitely one of the figures that’s waaaaaaay better in hand than the photos make it look. Or at least the alt mode is better than the photos look, the robot mode always looked great IMO. I’m legit running out of things to say here, poseability is great, there’s a ton of character on display here (I may have swapped Thundercracker and Starscream’s heads to give the latter the smirk). I have thus far resisted the urge to track down the rainmakers and Redwing, but really, it’s because I’m already spending too much on these things. If I win the lotto on Friday I’m all on board.
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Transformation is just brilliant. Granted, all of the robot parts are separate from the jet parts – you could literally separate the arm that connects the two and have a functional toy robot and a fairly hollow toy spacejet, but the way they shift about is pretty smart – most notably the folding up of the legs includes calf panels that slide inwards, Macross-tastic fold-in feet with engines in them, and the way the spars that reach up over the heads are part of these really long bars that swing out and tab together to make a stupidly long jet-mode nose.
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To justify being an Amazon exclusive and $50 price tag, Skywarp comes with a trio of Battle Masters – Fracas is a repaint of Firedrive, and is based on Scourge’s Targetmaster partner, Shrute is a repaint of Aimless, and while apparently named after someone from the US Office, he’s a modernised Hairsplitter, one of Spinister’s two guns, and Terror-Dactyl is a repaint of Pteraxodon with an even cooler name. They’re all the same as before, pretty cool, but really, I’m more excited about having another 5 weapon effects, bringing my total to 19.
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Well, until I got a set of 3D Printed weapon effects from Shapeways, to get some more action on. These guys fit really well into the larger weapons, which is good because Refraktor and Jetfire come with them, and the Seeker feet can fit them, and… Yeah, they’re pretty cool, but they don’t really work with the smaller guns or damage ports on account of the post sticking out of them – but I can probably file them down.
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Nice.
