Dave's Transformers Animated Rant: Two-Pack Wave 2 Jetfire and Jetstorm: Rise of Safeguard Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/TFA/TwoPack2 Well, looks like the "two Deluxes in a thematic pack" thing is no longer a one-off format. At least in the first batches, these are shipping three to a case with one of the Battle Begins set. This is Animated's first Combiner set, and the first Transformer to use the Symmetric Docking style of combination (which was introduced for GaoGaiGar's Choryujin and Shouryujin teams, and later used in Webdiver's Golem-on). Where the Battle Begins set came with a DVD, this comes with an exclusive comic. CAPSULES Jetfire and Jetstorm: A cool idea, but the engineering isn't quite up to the design, and the vehicle modes are kinda iffy. Mildly recommended. $21.99 at Target. RANTS: Background Geekery: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Japan/choryujin is my old review of the symmetric dockers from GaoGaiGar. Safeguard is an homage to Choryujin, in both the symmetric docking combination scheme and the whole "fire and ice" theme. And I've read that this was indeed deliberate, not coincidence. On the somewhat less child-friendly side, one of the GaoGaiGar manga once made the point that brother robots using symmetric docking was kinda anlogous to the human sort of "hooking up", and the whole "Jetfire and Jetstorm are doing twincest" discussion has been running for a while now. The comic doesn't really help stop that. The comic does add to the Choryujin parallels, though, by explicating the fire and ice powers of the two (so it's not just visual 'chrome'). Packaging: Same shape of box as the Battle Begins set. Instead of a DVD case behind the two robots, there's a sideways-packed comic, full sized. Both are in robot mode, with Jetstorm on the left with his right arm raised to wave to the consumer, while Jetfire is on the right with arms at his sides. The package art on the front right is of Safeguard, but we get upper body art of the two brothers on the top panel. A small image of the comic book cover is on the left front. The left side has a slightly bigger version of that image and a summary of the comic: "The early life of the newest AUTOBOT heroes is revealed in this exclusive comic. See all the incredible details of the creation and training of the most advanced warriors ever to fight alongside the AUTOBOT Elite Guard. Learn the secret origin of JETFIRE and JETSTORM, as they discover how to use their power to combine into the mighty SAFEGUARD for the eradication of the DECEPTICON threat!" The right panel has photos of both robots and the combined robot mode. The bottom panel has co-sells of Swindle, Blazing Lockdown, Blurr, Shockwave and Skywarp. On the back are larger versions of the right panel photos, plus photos of the vehicle modes and combined vehicle, plus yet another picture of the comic. The inside tray has the usual bluescale Detroit cityscape. Both figures are twist-tied only to a blister that's taped to the backer tray, as ties all the way through would pierce the comic. The comic is in a bag taped to the backing tray behind the blister. The instructions sheet is in the bag with the comic. 5 twist-ties each on the two robots. No rubber bands, no loose accessories. Comic: A standard size comic, 24 pages with no interior ads. The inside back cover is an ad for the 25th Anniversary line, and the back cover is an ad for Roll Out Command Optimus Prime, Shift Tech and Cyber Speed Bumblebee. This is clearly an IDW product, but their name appears nowhere on the comic, nor does their logo. Written by Eric Siebenthaler and Marty Isenberg, art by Boo (pages 1-12) and Matthew Frank (13-24). It's meant to be in-canon with the cartoon, in the same way that the Arrival comics are (telling background and side stories that fit with the main storyline). The story's timing is a little unclear at first, but the opening scene is meant to happen some time before the opening scene at the space bridge in the "pilot movie" of Transformers Animated. It's revealed that proper flight requires coding that only Decepticons have (so either flying "Samurai Prowl" contradicts this, or the upgrades he was using contained Decepticon code), and the Jet brothers were chosen to be the subjects of an experiment in adding this code to Autobots. They're NOT based on Starscream's cloning tech, although the bio note on the toy suggests this. They just have Starscream's code in them, they were naturally occuring twins. The Jet brothers read as if they were scripted for Balki...they speak Cybertronian as if it were their second language. Almost no contractions (in fact, the one I did spot may have been an error), weird grammar, etc. And they love to fight...each other. To the point that one might suggest they get a room already. As for the story, it's pretty straightforward training exercise stuff, with a little bit of real threat here and there. In addition to the featured brothers, there's several guest characters, both pre-existing (Sentinel Prime is prominent here) and new (Perceptor, Wheeljack and the female Red Alert). Most of my issues with Boo's art come when he draws humans, and they're totally absent. The visual storytelling is sometimes muddled for both artists, though. AUTOBOT: JETSTORM Altmode: Fighter Jet Function: Air Warrior Previous Name Use: G2, BW, BMac, Armada, Cybertron, Movie Previous Mold Use: None Robot Mode: 5.5" (14cm) tall, reasonably well-proportioned in the Animated style. A bit leggy, but that's normal for the line. The dominant colors are medium blue and light blue, with some black and yellow bits. He has a helmet head with shallow-V visor. The smirk molded on his face rises to his right side, and seems wryer than Jetfire's. He has a vague resemblance to Beast Machines Jetstorm, but his boots are much bigger and his arms smaller. You could almost make a case for him looking more like Blue Beetle (Ted Kord) than BMac Jetstorm, really. The upper arms and thighs are made of a light powder blue plastic. The abdomen/pelvis piece, the inside of the chest (behind a panel that flips up for transformation), a flattened Superman-style pentagon on the chest panel, the lightpiping, ice blades on the forearms (sorta Batman-glove-ish) and shins are a clear aqua plastic. Everything else is a medium blue plastic. The only plastic with any UV glow is the clear stuff. He has hip pads (one becomes a shoulderpad on Safeguard) that are painted powder blue for the most part, and his helmet's chinstrap is also powder blue. The clear plastic on his abdomen and pelvis are painted matte black, and the fronts of the tops of his thighs are also black, making it look like he's wearing black bicycle shorts. His face is silver, with V-shaped visor left unpainted. The shoulders are painted medium blue, a good match to the plastic. There's lots of yellow-gold accents on the toy: Prime-like stripes on the helmet, trim on the pecs, hip pads, hands and "spats". There's a red and white Autobot Elite Guard symbol printed on each hip pad. The head is attached to the neck with a hinge that lets it tip back, important for flying poses so he can look where's flying. The neck itself is on a swivel base, plus another hinge that can tip it back. The waist does not turn. The shoulders are ball joints, but the ball part is on a strut that sort of pegs into the side but may not stay in place very well. There's a swivel above each hinge elbow, and the wrists are swiveled. This helps a lot, since the hands are molded into the sides of jet nose pieces and don't really look hand-like until you turn them. The hips are on weird universal joints connected to the hip pads, not to the pelvis. Functionally, this means that they really only have front-back swivel motion, since moving them out to the sides moves the hip away from the pelvis and it looks weird. There's swivels below each hip, hinge knees, and toes that can point down. There's also a hinge that lets the knees bend inward sideways, but those are for Safeguard mode. All in all, though, the backpack is minimal, and the only real vehicle mode issues for robot mode are the funky hands and the somewhat iffy looking shoulder area. This mode doesn't really suffer for the engineering compromises required to have a symmetric docker. Transformation: Face the head backwards, flip up the cockpit from the backpack and the chest to hide the head, and then do a dance of joints to get the arms to join together around the head as the nose of the vehicle. Collapse the upper legs into the boots and connect tabs on the bottom of the hip flaps onto the shins, and then it's all just messing with joints to get the legs into the right position. Finish it off by folding out the ice details from the shins to make an excuse for wings. While collapsing the legs down, the ice pieces will be bumped up a bit and then settle back down. Also, it's easy to pop the arms off while trying to get them in position. And the hip pads? Gah, they pop off REALLY easily, and then getting them back on can be tricky. Vehicle Mode: 7" (18cm) long with a "wingspan" of 5" (13cm), I've heard it described as a Colonial Viper (Battlestar Galactica) with robot legs hanging off the back, and that's not too far off. It looks like a 4.5" (11cm) long space fighter with boosters stuck on the back, the robot legs really don't do a good job of looking like something other than robot legs. The cockpit is made of clear aqua plastic (lighter than the ice details) with yellow trim, and it opens. There's yellow stripes leading back from the cockpit between the stubby vertical tail pieces that are part of the robot's backpack. The yellow bits on the hands become the nose tip, and the hip pads are now a sort of engine cowling front ahead of the boots. You can get a sort of gerwalk mode by untabbing the hip pads and swinging the legs down, but only slide the thighs out the bare minimum. The joints are wrong to take advantage of the full leg length. http://www.dvandom.com/images/safeguardgerwalk.JPG Overall: For the most part a good robot mode, but the vehicle mode is pretty "it's a vehicle because it has a cockpit" bad, like a Pretender inner robot. I like the colors on this one. AUTOBOT: JETFIRE Altmode: Fighter Jet Function: Air Warrior Previous Name Use: G1, G2, Armada, Energon, Cybertron, Classics Previous Mold Use: None Robot Mode: He's a goggle-head...this is Sam "Cannonball" Guthrie (no relation to the Decepticon space pirate) as a Transformer. The top of his head is flame-molded lightpiping, and his smirk rises to his left side. Same as Jetstorm, but with a new head and the ice details replaced with flames, and the following color differences: medium blue plastic becomes light warm gray plastic, light blue plastic becomes orange plastic, clear aqua plastic becomes yellow-orange clear plastic. Mostly, anyway. Some of the medium blue plastic becomes orange instead and some of the clear plastic becomes yellow. The shoulder roots, hip pads, head and toes are places where the medium blue plastic of Jetstorm becomes orange plastic rather than light warm gray. the chest and abdomen clear plastic bits are yellow rather than yellow-orange. The clear yellow plastic has a moderate UV glow, the orange plastic has a moderate UV glow, while the clear yellow-orange has a strong glow. The goggles and chinstrap are painted faintly metallic red-brown, and the accent colors that were yellow on Jetstorm are mostly red-brown here. However, the "spats" and the backs of the hands (the nose tips) are orange, and the entire tops of the toes are painted red-brown. The black paint applications on the torso and hips are the same. The hip pads are left orange other than the accents rather than painted over as they are for Jetstorm. The shoulders are painted light gray where Jetstorm's are medium blue. Transformation: Identical to Jetstorm. However, when going back to robot mode, you'll find there's some mirror elements, such as the leg that will lengthen extra is the left leg rather than the right. Also, his head fits better left facing forward. Vehicle Mode: Same as Jetstorm, but with flames instead of ice, and slightly different color accents. The overall look is light warm gray with some orange and a little red-brown, and the cockpit is clear yellow. Overall: Well, same as Jetstorm, really. It's not like they're available separately. :) There's really no G1 Jetfire homage in this, though, which could be good or bad depending on your preferences. I do prefer Jetstorm's color scheme. AUTOBOT: SAFEGUARD Altmode: Super Jet Function: Super Fusion Warrior Previous Name Use: Cybertron, Universe 2 (team name) Previous Mold Use: None Callouts: "JETSTORM and JETFIRE combine to form SAFEGUARD!" Motto: None Galactic Powers & Abilities: > The only AUTOBOTS that can fly. > Youngest Elite Guard members of all time. > The first robots with the ability to combine. Created using the most advanced techniques known to AUTOBOT science, JETSTORM and JETFIRE were cloned from tech recovered from STARSCREAM. Brought onine in a secret laboratory deep beneath the surface of CYBERTRON, they are the first AUTOBOTS created specifically to battle the DECEPTICONS. Though they are young, they are extremely intelligent, working their way through Elite Guard Boot Camp in record time. Together, they are potentially the most powerful AUTOBOTS of all time, especially when they combine into their SAFEGUARD form. Vehicle Combination: Snap them together, bottom to bottom. That's pretty much it. Dreadwing Duo this ain't. Vehicle Mode: Well, it's two jets stuck together. It's as long and wide as the individual jets, but twice as thick. It reminds me a little of my updated Bullet design (http://www.dvandom.com/drawings/bullet08.JPG) in terms of the symmetries. There's rumors out there that the combined mode was supposed to be a bit more elaborate, though. This might be what they mean: http://www.dvandom.com/images/safeguardxwing.JPG In fact, I kinda like the looks of the individual jet modes better when they're in this general shape. Larger wingspan (about 7.5"/19cm) and the legs look more like engine nacelles. Transformation: Nope. You can't turn the Super Jet into the Super Robot directly. Pull the two jets apart and then perform a bunch of steps to make Safeguard's robot mode. Robot Combination: This takes symmetric docking one extra step, with the head being split down the middle too. Previous toys of this combination style stored the combined mode head completely on one side. Getting the individual heads stored requires separating the individual pelvises so that there's room for them. For the most part, you're pulling the individual legs apart to become an arm and a leg each, and then shoving the individual arms onto the backpack. The legs that stay legs get a little longer thanks to an extra notch of extension on them, while the legs that become arms have sideways joints to improve arm articulation. The whole thing pegs together down the center, although the pelvis halves don't stay together well unless you get lucky or do some nail polish repairs (I've heard from a few owners by now, and most have the loose connection problem). When separating them, fishing the stowed pelvis bits out of the abdomen area can require small fingers or a knife blade. They don't have to be all up inside the gut, but they can end up there if you're not careful. I should note that the legs that stay legs cannot become Safeguard's arms, despite having the same fist molding on them. The feet can become hands, though, so you can make a "Quaddie" mode (four arms, no legs) for Safeguard. You can even make a sort of spider mode by swinging the individual arms around, but they're too short to look right. Robot Mode: On the small side for a single Voyager, only 6.5" (16.5cm) tall and somewhat spindly. The torso is the individual chests stuck together top-to-top, and the individual legs form all the actual limbs, with the individual arms and the cockpits becoming a backpack. Jetfire is the right side, Jetstorm is the left. There's a slight asymmetry in the mold beyond the color differences. The main one is the flames/ice separation, but the head halves are subtly different as well. Different ears, and the orange side slopes a little differently on the top. The only new colors visible in this mode are on the head. The toothy grin is painted silver on both sides. The orange side has a forehead swoosh in the same dark red-brown as Jetfire's other accents, and yellow-orange lightpiping on the eye. The blue side has a yellow swoosh and aqua lightpiping. The hip pads become shoulderpads, making his Elite Guard symbols a little more prominent (there's also still hip pads on Safeguard's hips, of course). I get a sort of BW Rampage vibe from Safeguard, between the evil grin and the fact that you can position the robot arms in a way that looks like Rampage's crab legs. Officially, the robot arms just sort of splay out in a rough X shape, but they still have plenty of articulation and you can to other stuff with them, like make something that vaguely resembles G1 Jetfire's thruster backpack: http://www.dvandom.com/images/safeguardvalk.JPG You cannot, however, put the arms around the cockpits to make wings from the complete vehicle front ends. The two sides get in each other's way and force the torso apart. The tabs are wrong to connect the arms together in cockpit style up and down (i.e. a Jetfire arm to a Jetstorm arm). The head doesn't turn, nor does the waist, as a result of the way the halves connect. The shoulders are universal joints, but their swivel part has a vertical axis of rotation, and you can't raise the arms above straight forward (and getting them to lift to the front rather than the sides requires a little fiddling). There's a swivel below each shoulder, hinge elbows, and a weird hinge above the elbow that lets you sort of swivel the forearm around 90 degrees. No wrist articulation, but if you swing the heel spurs out it's like he's making a Cybertronian rude gesture of some sort. The hips are the same sort of joints as the shoulders, but their default motion is more natural for legs. It's a bit tricky to move them without popping apart the pelvis, though. The rest of the joints are the same as in the arms (unsurprisingly), but the hinge above the knee isn't useful here unless you want it to look like someone kicked Safeguard so that his knee broke sideways. The flame and ice pieces can swing out, but don't look that good. Stability is okay, other than the tabs holding it together. At least on mine, none of the joints is floppy, nor are any so stiff that they can't be moved without pulling the rest of the toy out of alignment. The only real visual bleh is that the tops of the forearms have the indicia stamps and so forth, plus all the screw heads, so they look a little unfinished. Overall: The vehicle combined mode is practically an afterthought, but the robot mode is decent. A good effort on making the symmetric docking style into a poseable figure, although it cheats a little too much in terms of just shoving pieces to the backpack. Set Overall: This is one of those cases where you have to admire the ambition, but regret that the execution wasn't up to snuff. And I'm not just talking Hasbro's endemic quality control issues (although those are present), there's just some design choices here and there that don't work as well as they should have. Maybe a little larger budget would have helped, maybe not. Dave Van Domelen, needs to clear some space on the Autobot shelf for these guys.