Dave's Transformers Power of the Primes Rant: Voyager Wave 1 Starscream (jet, combiner torso) Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Gen/VStarscreamP I almost ended up flipping a coin to decide which Voyager I wanted to review first, but curiosity about the running change decided it for me. There's a reported running change in how the wings are attached on Starscream, and I wanted to check mine before the emails I got about it drifted off the front page of my gmail. :) I got the original version, without the modified socket for the wing backpack. Amusingly, this mold will be retooled to make Elita-1. Prototype pics of Moonracer (new mold) have already been released, and there's Novastar (trademark tweak of Firestar) on the way, but there doesn't seem to be a dedicated full team of femmes (or Carcerians) for her. (Jazz has Elita's combiner on his package, so he's one of her harem I guess.) CAPSULE $25-30 price point. Starscream: Good robot mode, if a little puffy in proportions. So-so jet hampered by really bad stickers, good combiner torso. Recommended. RANT General Stuff: So, we're back to combiner teams, and thus the Voyagers are back to being cores. Technically still triple-changers, I guess. They did learn from the awkwardness of the "hand or foot" accessories in Combiner Wars, though, and Voyagers now come with two dedicated feet that become armguards or shields on their own or combine with the spare hands to become feet. (Technically, the heels aren't necessary and they end up looking a bit long, but it gives you someplace to put the spare hands and it helps with stability.) Unlike the hand pieces that come with Deluxes, there's no lid pieces to fill the gap when there's no Prime Masters installed. There's an ankle peg on top, a fold-out peg on the bottom for use as armor or shields, an peg hole at the back for connecting a hand as a heel, and a peg hole on top behind the ankle peg for weapons or the like. In Starscream's case, his Null Rays can plug into the heel spot and make the armors into super cannons. Each also comes with an Enigmia, which is a Matrix-like shape that will fit into the gap in a foot...and can be used as heads for Titan Masters that have gone all Functionist. The Enigmas are single pieces of plastic, hollow in back, that have the same shape and general connection ability of a folded over Prime Master or Titan Master. No 2mm peg holes, though, just a fake head and a heel spur. Unfortunately, one other thing they kept from Titans Return is the use of crappy foil stickers. Packaging: Standard Generations-style window boxes using the same trade dress as seen on smaller toys as far as colors and logos go. The front has art of the character in non-combiner mode with glowing Prime symbols in the mix somewhere. The left side has art of their combiner mode, the right has the twelve Prime icons in medium gray on a black field. The top is just logo stuff and a window to let light in from above, the bottom is done in the faction color and has legalese. The back panel shows photos of robot and alt modes, plus insets showing the armor feet pieces and the Enigma. No actual photos of the combiner...in fact, the cropped side art is the only suggestion that the toy combines with anything. Odd, that. The co-sells are for the three first wave Prime Masters, with an inset showing one of them in the character's Prime Armor. The instructions and trading card are loose behind the tray. The background of the inner tray uses the Prime "Zodiac" in large enough format to actually read the names of the Primes, as written in Cybertronian script. DECEPTICON: STARSCREAM Assortment: E1137 Altmodes: Jet, Torso Transformation Difficulty: 11 steps (just robot to jet) Previous Name Use: Yes Previous Mold Use: None Prime Master I Got: Onyx Prime Prime Master Ability: Gains the patience of a vulture. Weapon: Null Rays Function: Decepticon Air Commander Motto: "Megatron isn't in this year's toys! I, STARSCREAM, am now LEADER!" How will the scheming DECEPTICON air commander wield the POWER OF THE PRIMES? Packaging: 7 ties on the robot, 1 each on the two rifles, the two feet armors, and the Enigma. The wings are flush against the back, but the instructions seem to show them angled back a notch. (I prefer a compromise that angles the root parts back but then bend the rest of the wing back to parallel.) There is no indication on the package or in the instructions that the combiner has a name, I suppose "King Starscream" works. Robot Mode: This is like a Cyber Stomper with articulation and the ability to transform. Big "Popeye" forearms, big boots, thin upper arms and thighs by comparison. If you put the Prime Armor pieces on the upper arms, there's a vague resemblance to the lines of Cybertron Starscream. The head also has more of an Armada/Cybertron look to it than a strict G1 styling. The chest has a fake cockpit (the actual one is on the backpack) and the modern "turbine nipples" design element on the chest. 6.75" (17cm) tall at the head, the Seeker Collar and the backpack rise up slightly higher than that. He's in the standard G1 Starscream colors of bright red, light gray, and dark blue, with some black parts and metallic sticker accents. Other than the collar area, the torso and pelvis are bright red plastic, and the Seeker Enigma is a chunk of bright red plastic. The collar, arms below mid-bicep, toes, and some struts (inside boots, in backpack) are dark blue plastic. The head and the bulk of each Prime Armor are black plastic. Everything else (including the guns, the pegs on the Prime Armor, and the lock tabs inside the forearms for combiner connections) is very light gray plastic. There's dark blue paint (good match) on the kneecaps, shin details, and some vehicle bits to be discussed later. The chest has black paint on the pectoral vents and the fake cockpit, light gray on the fake fuselage parts, and silver on the abdomen flanking the fake fuselage. The face is silver with red eyes. The thrusters on the heels are also painted black. The face of the Seeker Enigma is painted magenta or hot pink. The foil stickers in this mode are okay: the "Seeker collar" details, the Decepticon symbol on the belly, gold triangles on the kneecaps and arrow details on the tops of the toes. There's also some small "BEWARE OF JET BLAST" stickers on his forearms. The head is on a restricted ball joint, but the waist does not turn. The shoulders are universal joints with stiff ratchets in each direction, important because they become the combiner hips. Mid-bicep swivels, smooth hinge elbows that stick a little when the arm is straight. No wrist articulation. The hips are universal joints that soft ratchet in the out-to-the-sides direction and are smooth in the forwards/backwards direction, with smooth upper thigh swivels and smooth hinge knees. The toes are hinged but this is mostly cosmetic as there's bits inside the toes that don't hinge up. The Null Rays are 3.25" (8cm) long and a bit flattened and hollow but otherwise look reasonably like the G1 weapons. They have long grip pegs for going in the upper arms or being held like pistols, and the butt of each weapon is also a 5mm peg so it can connect to the Prime Armor pieces to make a super gun. The Prime Armors have a sort of three-toed look, with ratcheting side-to-side hinged ankle connection pegs and fold-out handles on the underside for use as shields or weapons. The hands can hold 5mm pegs, and there's 5mm peg holes in the outer facings of the upper arms. There's one 5mm peg hole on the forward-facing underside of each wingtip. There's a 3mm stand peg hole on the underside of the pelvis. Undocumented feature: When you combine the Prime Armors and Null Rays and attach them to the shoulders, the regular Null Ray grips can fit neatly into the bottoms of the fists when the forearms are in palm-down orientation. (There aren't really many good places for the Prime Armors other than this configuration, putting them on the wings is sort of GP-01 Full Vernian Gundam in appearance, I guess.) Transformation: The whole wing section rotates 180 degrees and pegs back into place, a feature that is reportedly not always fully functional on the original version of the mold. Panels on the forearms open up to let the fists rotate into storage...the combiner sockets aren't exactly jet-like themselves, but at least there aren't robot fists sticking out from under the wings. Panels on the inner faces of the boots open up to unlock the knees and let the boots collapse up around the thighs, forming the thruster and tail of the jet. Getting all the various tabs and slots together can take a bit of massaging, especially the leading edges of the wing roots. The toes don't fold up for jet mode, just for torso mode. You can cover up the upper arms for a smoother undercarriage kibble look, but the pegs there are intended for the Null Rays. Vehicle Mode: Unfortunately, the jet mode is positively covered in bad stickers which don't really conform to the molded details and which started curling at the edges before I could even finish reviewing the toy. While mostly based on the F-15 that was used as the basis for the G1 Seekers, but with small canards flanking the cockpit (smaller than those on the Gripen or Rafale). 8" (20cm) long with a wingspan of 6.5" (16.5cm), making for approximately 1:100 scale (Master Grade Gundam kit scale, Gundams in that scale are slightly taller than Starscream's robot mode). "Of course I'm Master Grade. It befits my role as master of Cybertron!" Shut up, Starscream. The only newly revealed plastic in this mode is the nose wheel, which is light gray plastic. There's dark blue paint on the vertical tail parts and the tip of the nosecone. The bits of wing root over the intakes are painted bright red, slightly more orangey than the red plastic. The cockpit window is painted black. There's F-shaped stripe stickers on the outer facings of the vertical tail parts, a Decepticon symbol flanked by "D-22" (Starscream's original Japanese package designation, also printed in small type on the tail stickers) on the nose, a cluster of Autobot symbol kill symbols below the right side of the canopy, and a load of crappy silver and red stickers all over the wings. The details on the wing stickers include D-22, repeated "NO STEP" and "CAUTION" warnings, and "GHOST ATTACK," plus some panel lines. The usual red stripes along the wings are part of the stickers, and a darker red than the plastic or the paint. It's clear that the stickers don't match the actual pattern of the wing molding, and gaps to let pegs and slots show through are not properly centered. Okay, now that I've reviewed the wing stickers, I am removing them. Might get Reprolabels, but I'll probably just paint the red stripes on the wings by hand. I'll have to clean the wings off first, though, because of course Hasbro uses adhesive that sticks to the plastic but not to the stickers. The shape of the wing stripes is outlined in mold lines, so at least it'll be easy to get the edges sharp. The bits with red paint are painted under the stickers, so there's even a template for starting the stripes. (Of course, since I *want* to pop the wings off for cleaning, most of the bits are pinned in place and the ones that aren't pinned are nice and secure. Goo Gone sprayed onto a paper towel seems to have gotten rid of the residue without removing the stickers I wanted to keep or hurting the paint, not sure if it'll make it hard for me to paint over anything later.) The 5mm peg holes on the upper arms are now on the sides of the undercarriage junk, and intended for attaching the weapons (it's an iffy fit, though). The peg holes under the wingtips are also accessible but very shallow. There's three 2mm pegs spread out over the top of each wing. The cockpit opens up via hinged doors that open up part of the fuselage and not just the canopy, with room for an Enigma to store. Titan Masters and Prime Masters can fit in that space in head mode, but whether they'll stay in depends on how thick their heel spurs are. A quick check of the ones I keep at my desk shows two Titan Masters stay put, but Micronus rattles around. *Masters cannot ride there in robot mode, though, even if you bend their knees backwards all the way. Torso Mode: Like Silverbolt, this one does a headstand to use the robot arms as thighs and the boots fold around and peg in place to yield shoulders. The wing root fronts clip onto the tailfins to make a high collar for the crowned head, and the wingtips flank the cockpit for the chest. A little low to be proper pecs, though. They wisely didn't try to make the crown removable, the combiner head is just a larger version of Starscream's head with a version of his TFTM crown molded in place. The "Popeye" forearm panels cover up the robot upper arms and make the thighs look more solid. One downside of devoting some of the plastic budget to dedicated feet is that there's no super weapon...the Null Rays just mount on the back as part of the decoration, and the limb figures' weapons look kinda puny held in the big hands. Combined, the figure stands 11" (28cm) tall at the head, with the collar and Null Rays rising up to 12" (30.5cm). The new head is made of black plastic atop a narrow piece of blue plastic that snaps into the back of the cockpit, all attached to the robot torso front by a red plastic strut. The face is silver, the grown is the same dull gold used on Dinobots, with a gem the same color as the magenta used on the Seeker Enigma. Red eyes, and a neutral expression. The cockpit splits open for placement of the Enigma, but this is a display location rather than storage, as the cockpit pieces can't close over an Enigma. http://www.dvandom.com/images/KingStarscreamPoP.JPG assembled with the wave 1 Deluxes, and a few borrowed Wonder Woman weapons. I didn't have much trouble getting mine to transform, despite reports of the original wing linkage causing issues. However, I did have to shave a little mold flash off the robot mode collar piece to let that head rotate into the abdomen. The trickiest bit otherwise was figuring out that a tab on one boot and a slot on the other connected to each other rather than to the spine. Once they're firmly together, that and the wing root pieces tabbing onto the tail fins around the collar area are enough to keep the torso together with arms added. Otherwise, it'll fall apart under the weight of the arms. Note, getting the arms back OFF may be difficult for those with large fingers, because the jet thrusters overhang the tabs that need to be pressed to unlock the connectors. Overall: Really, my main complaint is the stickers, and that's not too hard to fix. I don't mind the somewhat odd proportions, I like the robot mode in general. The jet is so-so (some difficulty getting all the panels to stay lined up), but the combiner torso is good. As combiner cores go, I prefer it to the Silverbolt and Optimus Prime families of molds. Dave Van Domelen, now to see if Grimlock is any good.