This guy showed up on my doorstep tonight. After busting my butt all day at work (sifted through literally every pallet of toys in the entire store, so now there's zero overstock in trailers or the backroom) it's nice to come home to a reward. The fact that I bought this reward for myself (and was expecting it closer to September) does in no way lessen the experience!

So, being a Starscream redeco, there isn't a lot to say that I didn't already cover in my Starscream review. In jet mode, he's an absolutely beautiful sky blue, accurate to the Sunbow animation as opposed to the very deep blue of the original 1984 Hasbro toy. He comes with the same figure stand as Starscream, and the two are designed to interlock together so you can display them both, either in a jet formation (no, JET TRANSFORMATION!) or in robot mode. And, naturally, Skywarp will complete the trio when he's released.

Thundercracker's got two yellow blast effects meant for his jet thrusters in vehicle mode, and he's got the same purple blast effects that Starscream came with. One of the advantages of getting both toys is that now I have pairs of matching blast effects, since each toy only came with one of each style (jagged blast, round blast, and long blast).

He's got three extra faces, for a total of four. In addition to his neutral face he's got a smiling one and an open-mouth laughing face and an open-mouth angry face. (The Hasbro Pulse web site calls them surprise, smile, and sneer. I'm sure this is translated from the Japanese instructions, which I didn't really bother with. I still remembered, mostly, how to transform him based on my experience with Starscream.)

So, that's it for goodies. He's got a much lower parts count than Starscream, which might be one of the reasons he ended up costing a bit less. Historically, I feel like Takara hasn't done as well with the scene-specific character accessories for the Decepticons as they do with the Autobots. I mean, Thundercracker isn't a super iconic character, and he doesn't have a ton of memorable cartoon moments when he's interacting with a prop or weapon, but there are a few. He could have come with a tiny Reflector camera, for one. That one is obvious. He could have come with a tiny figurine of Nergil, King of Subatlantica, since he seemed to have a particular loathing for the little fish folk. He didn't even get unique blast effects! Thundercracker carries a pair of incendiary cannons, so something like a flame effect would have been great. But, this is a bare-bones budget release compared to Starscream.

The G1 version of Thundercracker was blue with black as a secondary color. In the cartoon, the black colors were realized with shades of grey instead (like Wheeljack). The gauntlets on the Masterpiece toy are a medium grey color, while the boots and helmet are more of a charcoal color. Also, the color models for Thundercracker and Skywarp differ from Starscream in that they had light grey faces instead of dark grey, so this toy is colored accordingly. (You can swap faces between Starscream and Thundercracker if you want to, but due to the different coloring, it would look weird.)

So, on Hasbro Pulse, the mighty Thundercracker is currently listed at $254.99 instead of $279.99 like Starscream (he was originally listed at $241.99).. That's still an absurd amount of money for what amounts to a Leader-class toy. Granted, he's got an enormous number of moving parts, and he's absolutely the pinnacle of excellence, but holy shit. So expensive. It does kind of sting a little, too, to be replacing a Masterpiece character who's already in my collection (I got the previous Masterpiece Thundercracker at the end of 2012, so I guess nine years is a good run).

Skywarp's coming, probably around March or so if there isn't another big production delay. The old versions of these guys desperately needed to be replaced, so I'm glad that they produced new versions. At the same time, though, I think I'm ready for them to start addressing new characters we haven't seen in Masterpiece format yet (Blitzwing! Astrotrain! Galvatron! Cyclonus! Jazz! Springer! Kup! Blurr! The rest of the Dinobots!) instead of retreads of characters we've already gotten.

Zob (got another $30 TMNT Party Wagon today for customizing, but not sure when I'll get around to actually doing it)