Dave's Transformers Classics Rant Masterpiece Starscream Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Classic/MPSS Well, it doesn't actually say "Classic" on the package anywhere, but it's clearly Classics packaging/graphics style, so I'm putting it in as Classic, so there. :) The Masterpiece line has a spotty history. The first one, Masterpiece Convoy, got brought over as 20th Anniversary Optimus Prime, and was later re-released in tweaked colors in Classics-style packaging. Masterpiece Ultra Magnus did not come out here, and the third Masterpiece toy was Exkaiser, which Hasbro had zero reason to import. Fourth was Starscream, but in a more realistic paint job. Next was Megatron, who turned into a rather huge pistol and caused importers many hassles what with the laws regarding realistic toy guns. Sixth was a Skywarp recolor of Starscream. And then, finally, the seeker mold got brought over as a Wal-Mart exclusive in G1 colors as Masterpiece Starscream. Although I hear an "Anime Starscream" recolor has recently hit Japan as well, close to ours, but with less gray "weathering" paint and maybe some other small differences. [Later corrections: Exkaiser was a separate line, the other TF MP was Complete Convoy, with a trailer. And Anime Starscream isn't out yet, but will be by early 2008.] CAPSULE Masterpiece Starscream: Looks good in both modes, although the robot mode suffers from some odd kibble bits and the hands pop apart too easily. Transformation has some significantly frustrating aspects. Recommended. $48.88 at Wal-Mart. RANT Packaging: As with DVD Prime, it's a mix of the keystone shape of Voyager Classics and an inverted keystone base to give it more stability and strength. Total height is 11" (28cm), the top 9" (23cm) of which is clear, the top keystone being made of clear plastic with cardstock inside of it on the sides and back. The top is 10.25" (26cm) across and 4.25" (11cm) deep. The bottom is 10.5" (27cm) across and 5" (13cm) deep. At the narrowest point, the box is 8" (20cm) across. The generally "saggy hourglass" shape works well for packaging the toy in robot mode. On the front, the clear part has just the character name near the bottom inside, and an "Only at WAL*MART" white on blue sticker on the upper left. The front of the lower section has the Classics TF logo. The bottom side is just legalese and UPC. The top is clear with embossed Decepticon symbol and "MASTERPIECE STARSCREAM" picked out in silver paint. The sides of the bottom piece both have the name and Decepticon symbol. The upper section on the right has images and call-outs showing off various vehicle mode features: display stand, swing-open nosecone, opening canopy and adjustable thrust vectoring. The upper section on the left does the same for robot mode, touting "Amazing detail!", hidden missile pods (in the chest) and two different heads (one frowning, one smirking). The back is pretty standard Classics bio note, techspecs and photos of both modes. The lower box is empty, just a stand. To remove it, just pull it apart from the upper box, it's held on by three pieces of doublestick tape. There's nothing inside it, although I suppose you could keep it to use as a display stand for other Classics toys. The bottom of the clear box is just folded/tabbed together once the doublestick tape is broken, and you can easily pull out the instructions bag and the base. In a bag jammed into the underside of the base are the clear strut for using the base for jet mode or letting the robot be in flight, a small clip to let the Megatron gun from 20th Anniversary Prime (or Masterpiece Convoy) attach to the jet mode, and a little Diaclone-like Dr. Arkeville figure. The head swap does not involve a separate piece, by the way, so there's no extra head in with Arkeville. There's enough flex in the inner tray to just pull it out through the bottom, although it's not likely to go back in cleanly that way. :) Seven twist-ties hold the robot to the tray, all easily removed. It's not the epic struggle that 20th Anniversary Prime was. Seven rubber bands hold bits together (one per forearm, one around head/scoops, two on each boot). Instructions are double-sided with black linework and purple highlighting. [Clarification: yes, you can open it from the top without having to remove the bottom piece. I opened the bottom to make sure nothing was in it.] DECEPTICON: STARSCREAM Function: Air warrior Altmode: F-15 fighter jet Callouts: "Amazing detail!" "Highly articulated and poseable!" "Includes display stand!" Reproduced exactly as he originally appeared in the hit cartoons and comics of the 1980's; this is a figure worthy of one of the most sklled and deadly DECEPTICON warriors. Chosen because of his phenomenal skill and bloodthirsty nature to lead the elite air warriors of the DECEPTICON army, STARSCREAM is a name known and feared across the face of CYBERTRON and beyond. So supreme is he in his element that wherever he goes, the skies belong to him alone. STR 7 INT 9 SPD 10 END 7 RNK 9 COUR 9 FRB 8 SKL 8 Avg 8.375 Gets proper credit for brains, but perhaps a little too much for courage. :) ROBOT MODE 8.5" (22cm) tall at the head, 9.25" (24cm) at the top of the scoops on his shoulders. Wingspan is 8.25" (21cm), which you'll notice later isn't the jet mode wingspan, as the wings tip inward/upward a bit in this mode. There's very little metal in this toy, just a few struts and pins, so even with the base it only weighs in at 15 ounces (426g). The general look is very close to the cartoon design, but with some extra kibble. He has armor chunks on his forearms, several small kibble bits on his shoulders and back, and big chunks of the tail section of his jet mode hanging off his hips. There's some weird combinations of plastic and paint colors here that in part betray the fact that this is a repaint. For instance, while I'm pretty sure the chest turbine fans, heel thrusters and insides of the wrists are gunmetal metallic plastic, the face piece is blue plastic painted gunmetal. And while the forearms, hands and blue shin pieces are a medium-dark blue plastic, the toes and part of the tail kibble are ghost gray plastic painted a well-matching blue. The shoulder scoops, pectoral pieces, pelvis armor and upper thighs are bright red plastic. The "ankle" joints, helmet, knee joints, elbow jounts. shoulder joints, wing flap joints and a mysterious little flippable slot piece on the shoulders are black plastic. The cockpit on the chest is clear amber plastic. Pretty much everything is ghost gray (very very light gray) plastic. An aside, I really don't know what those little bits on the shoulders are, the instructions don't even show them in the line art. It has a small (about 1mm by 2mm) slot in it, and can swivel 90 degrees (from side to up). [Update: fan speculation is that these bits are for attaching a cape that is yet to be released. A crown also seems likely.] The paint job is big into panel lines, with a dark gray paint used to fill them in on the red and light gray sections, and a medium gray paint used on the blue parts. The helmet is painted a dark slightly metallic gray, significantly darker than the gunmetal seen elsewhere on the toy. The classic red and silver stripes are found on the wings, along with upside-down purple Decepticon symbols. Silver and gold details are painted on the insides of the shoulder scoops. The eyes are painted red. Jointing on the neck is a little weird, a pair of ball joints connected by a rod. To turn the head to the side requires lifting it up some, which makes it look like his head is just sort of floating there above his torso. No waist articulation. Well, okay, there's a joint there, but so much stuff in the way that it can't turn even a tiny bit. The shoulders are universal joints, ratcheting on the swivel and smooth on the lift. Upper arm smooth swivel, double hinged smooth elbow that lets the arm bend to an acute angle of about 45 degrees. The wrist is a swivel, plus an inward hinge for transformation that gives some useful motion. The thumb is on a ball joint. The index finger has a ball joint at its root and a hinge halfway up. The other three fingers are a single chunk with a ball at the root and a hinge halfway up. These hinges pop apart really easily. The stiffness is okay...less than I'd like, but good enough that Starscream can hold the Megatron gun...barely. He really needs to brace the stock to keep a good grip. The hips are theoretically universal ratcheting joints, but the tail section kibble hanging off the leg keeps the legs from moving out to the sides more than a single click. There's a thigh swivel just below the hip, and ratcheting knees that can almost make it to a 90 degree bend. There's some poseability of both the toe piece and the thruster that forms the heel. However, the boots are a bit loose and wiggly, so you're probably better off using the flight base than trying to get this to stand long-term on its own. [Update: the knees are actually double joint, mine were kinda stuck and required Excessive Force (TM) to free up. That brings the maximum bend to about 60 degrees acute.] Starscream, appropriately enough, is two-faced. He doesn't have two separate heads as the packaging implies, rather his face can be turned around inside the helmet. To do this (the instructions are kinda vague), you need to lift the head up so that the face points straight up. Then pull the face chunk out through the bottom of the helmet and turn it around 180 degrees to reveal the other face, and shove it back into the helmet. You can also put it back in halfway for some weird mutant face action. One face is serious, even frowning a little. The other has Starscream's trademark smirk. The other main gimmick in this mode is the missile racks. The turbine chunks on his pectorals can flip up to reveal two racks of anime-style cylindrical missiles (non-firing). SRM6's, to be Battletechy. :) Display Stand: The main base is a solid piece of dark slightly metallic gray plastic 7" (18cm) wide, 4.25" (11cm) deep and molded to be about 2cm tall (but hollow underneath). The top is mostly molded in various tech details, with two slots in it for the support strut, and two peg-holes for weapons. A Decepticon symbol is molded front and center on the top and painted purple, and there's a sort of placard section on the front with Starscream's name printed in ghost gray. On the underside is another peg-hole for storing the clip that attaches gun-mode Megatron to jet mode. There's no place to store Dr. Arkeville, though, which is a shame...it would have been so easy to mold a little chair for him into the side. You can sit him with his legs down in whichever slot isn't holding the support strut, but it's not the same. The other piece is a clear plastic strut that looks like a cross between girder work and crystal. It's 6.25" (16cm) long, has two tabs at one end for mounting at different angles, and the narrow end has pegs and tabs for holding each mode. For robot mode, the strut goes in the rear slot pointed straight up. A hole in the tip goes around a peg on Starscream's butt, and a little shelf helps support his crotch. Explains the high-pitched voice, anyway. When on the strut, his feet don't quite touch the base, so it's meant to be a flying pose stand. Arkeville Figure: Made of very light gray plastic, a single piece in a seated pose with hands in his lap. There's a single (somewhat sloppily applied) bit of fleshtone paint on the face. Hard to be sure from the mold, but I think he's mirror-swapped (the left arm looks kinda cyborged, but not the right, a reverse of what he's supposed to be). 25mm from head to toe, would be 28-29mm tall if straightened out, so he's almost to scale with the SWTF minifigs, somewhere around 1:64 scale. While there's no place in the display base for him, Starscream can hold him firmly in either hand, and his shoulder scoops are nice chairs for Arkeville. http://www.dvandom.com/minis/MParkeville.JPG for my repaint job (might not be up right away). TRANSFORMATION In rough form, it's the G1 transformation, but with a lot more panel fiddling and in theory no partformering. In detail, though...ah, that's where the devil is. The key problem, for me at least, was what to do with the red plastic torso flank pieces. They rotate and swivel and swing and lock together into a chunk where the display stand lock sin. The joints are a frustrating combination of loose and stiff, and even once you know where they're supposed to go, getting them there and locked together is non-trivial. The other major problem is likely also a serious long term issue. There's tabs and slots that need to go together to hook the thigh panels into the forearm armor to hook up the sides of the fuselage, but there isn't enough freedom of movement (that I could find) to do this without serious forcing and flexing and some mangling of the tabs. Below those two are a number of niggling problems, the biggest of which probably involves the tail fins, which keep popping off while you're struggling with the two big problems. Also, the cowling on the sides of the intakes (I think these are the "conformal fuel tanks" I see reference to in my big book of warplanes) is theoretically just rotated into place, but I just can't get that to work and have to unpeg it and repeg it in position. Finally, the finger joints are easily popped, and there's several opportunities to pull an "ACH, MEIN DIGITS!" on Screamer during transformation. [Update: The instructions are unclear on this, but I'm told you need to rotate the fuel tank covers into place before straightening up the red intakes.] All that said, though, it's something of a testament to the toy that in all my "pre-instructions-reading" stumblings around and forcing pieces the wrong way, nothing actually broke. I do hear that the Japanese one started to show serious stress after several transformations, though. Sadly, you have to make a choice when transforming which weapon loadout he'll have. There's only one hardpoint on each wing, and the peg holes on the arms are in such a position that weapons can't be placed in them and on the wings at the same time. VEHICLE MODE An F-15 Eagle. To be more specific, I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be an F-15E Strike Eagle, although without the copilot seat of that version. It might be an F-15C with Strike-like conformal fuel tanks, but every picture I've been able to find of the Eagles shows only the Strike with that particular shape of bulge on the side of the intakes. For reference, a Strike Eagle is 19.43m long and has a 13.05m wingspan. The toy is 13" (33cm) long, with a wingspan of 8.5" (21.5cm). That makes this roughly 1:60 scale. Yep, an Optimus Prime to scale with this would be, well, more or less G1 Prime sized. To be in scale with Masterpiece Prime, he'd have to be about twice as big (with a likely shelf price about three times as much). Robot bits are pretty well hidden unless you're looking from below, and even then there's not much shape-wise, it's just the robot colors showing. A paintjob focused on a more seamless jet mode could all but eliminate the kibble effect. Speaking of seams, it might just be my clumsy early attempts at transformation to blame, but it doesn't seem to fit together 100% smoothly. [Later notes: others have had problems with this, notably the panel along the top centerline not sitting flush.] Most of the toy visible in this mode is very light ghost gray plastic. The cockpit is amber clear plastic, the nosecone and thrusters are gunmetal plastic, the jet intakes are red plastic. Sticking out like sore thumbs are the joints of the wing flaps, which are black plastic. There's red paint on the wing roots behind the intakes, but it's a very bad match with the plastic color. He has the classic G1 red and silver stripes on wings and vertical stabilizers, and gray paint in all his panel lines along with some gray smudges. He has nice purple Decepticon symbols (G1 style with triangular eyes) on his wings, and below the cockpit where most F-15s have a national insignia (or nothing), he has an insignia showing his King Starscream crown on a purple cloak-like background. The vertical stabilizers are painted medium-dark blue other than the red and silver stripes. There's a little bit of gold on the edges of the wingtips. Unlike a lot of Starscream toys, the underside of the wings is painted the same as the tops. For a jet, there's a pretty good amount of poseability here. The usual opening cockpit and deploying landing gear (I need a knife to get the front gear out, though. The wheels are black plastic) are present. In addition, the nosecone swings open...not for any transformation purposes, but simply to display the radar unit inside. An airbrake with metal hydraulic strut lifts up along the spine of the plane, a feature of the real F-15s. The flaps are all hinged, although this is mainly for transformation and they can only fold down, not up (although, for all I know, this is authentic to the F-15 too). The thrust nozzles are on ball joints for limited thrust-vectoring, a feature I'm pretty sure is not possessed by any real F-15, although I suppose Starscream could easily have added it himself to allow for greater air superiority. Additional features include the earlier-mentioned Arkeville figure, and a little clip that lets you mount the Megatron gun from bighuge Prime under Starscream's nose. It doesn't quite fit with the stock on the gun (it has to bend a little), and since the clip goes around the silencer, it's a somewhat iffy connection given how loosely the silencer stays on (at least with mine). Display Stand: The clear strut installs at a different angle for this mode, and there's peg holes to place whichever weapon loadout isn't on the wings. The jet is positioned flying up at an angle of about 15 degrees from the horizontal, a nice display look. Overall: Very nice jet mode. Robot mode is a touch kibbly, and the weak knuckle joints bother me, but on sheer looks it does quite well. The transformation is an odd combination of obvious and frustrating, though, a mark against the toy. Dave Van Domelen, should probably take some nail polish topcoat to some of those joints.