There was a time when I was utterly fascinated with the background characters of the G1 cartoon series. As a kid, I had dismissed them mostly as animation mistakes. After all, the cartoon was made to promote a toy line, and therefore if there were characters who didn't accurately represent the product line, they were either created for the show (like Devcon) or were accidents.

But, as an adult fan, having seen every episode dozens of times, it was time to dig deep into the minutae of the series. It's the same very comfortable familiarity that compelled Star Wars fans to attach ironic importance to background characters like Jek Porkins or Willrow Hood (aka the Ice Cream Maker Guy who appears in one scene of The Empire Strikes Back). It dawned on me that while, yes, a lot of the background characters were just miscolored, a number of them had been created deliberately and purposefully. It wasn't the case at all that the toy line represented the only characters who mattered, as I had once supposed. The toy line represented only a small subset of the many robot characters in existence!

I spent a lot of time researching the background characters who had, up until this point, gone largely ignored by both Hasbro and the fandom at large—giving them my own unofficial names, writing up fan profiles for them, and doing color models for what they transformed into (since generic background characters typically only appear briefly and are almost never shown transforming to a different mode). There were many new dozens of new characters to discover. The only difference is that while a brand like Star Wars was good about assigning official names and back stories to every little random background droid and alien, Transformers as a brand was slow to adopt these things.

You'd think, then, that I would have snatched up a toy like Sunstorm almost immediately. It's an official acknowledgement of the exact sort of thing I'd been celebrating. An actual, physical toy of a one-shot background character, finally made real. I don't know why it took me this long. I know that, back in 2003, the Japanese toys still felt unattainable and impossible to collect. Also, I was still living in a single income household and was struggling to just keep current on the regular retail releases, to say nothing of hunting for elusive Takara toys from the other side of the ocean.

However. At the end of October, I happened across an auction for a Sunstorm toy that was not selling for the many hundreds of dollars that I've usually seen him go for. So, this became my November purchase. I suppose that, being the end of 2022, this has since become a vintage toy of sorts. He's totally going on my shelf of G1 toys, and will look wildly out of place amongst the 1984 Decepticon jets!

Sunstorm was originally sold in 2003, but I got the Encore version released in 2008.

There's not much to say about the actual physical toy that I haven't said many times in reviewing the various incarnations of Starscream and his ilk. He's almost more of a construction set than a Transformer, with sixteen pieces that need to be assembled. He was manufactured using the same ideas that were in play when Starscream/Thundercracker/Skywarp were reissued by Takara—original missiles and bombs (none of that extra-long missile nonsense that Hasbro ended up doing), a tampographed Decepticon badge on the jet nosecone, tampo-printed stripes on the rudders, and tampographed wing stripes and Decepticon insignias on the large wings. He also got painted silver stripes on the jet cockpit, meant to evoke the separate glass panels.

Starscream and Thundercracker had differently-designed stickers during the Diaclone days, and Skywarp (who had no Diaclone equivalent, being a Hasbro creation) got a third style of stickers. These three designs were also used, in different colors, for Ramjet and Dirge and Thrust. Sunstorm got the Starscream/Ramjet sticker design, with the crosshairs in the air intakes and the arrows on the toes. The color of the crosshairs stickers was changed to orange to better match Sunstorm's body colors, and his eye stickers were also changed from yellow to red. Nowadays, Hasbro just paints the eyes right on the toy, but for the longest time, the Decepticon jets only had stickers for eyes, which has always looked kind of terrible. (Oddly enough, his official box art is a color-corrected version of the 1984 Skywarp art, only with Starscream-style stickers.)

Sunstorm is based on his screen appearance from "More Than Meets the Eye" part 1 in which he is seen, briefly, as part of the Decepticon barricade trying to stop Wheeljack and Bumblebee from safely entering Iacon city limits. (He is NOT the same Decepticon who appears in "Divide and Conquer" and is yellow from head to toe. That is Nova Storm.) His color mapping as seen in animation is typical for Transformers characters of the day (alternating colors on adjacent parts: grey fists, yellow forearms, grey biceps, yellow upper chest, grey midriff, yellow pelvis, grey upper legs, yellow lower legs, grey feet) but was not typical for Decepticon jet toys (who always had a die-cast metal chest section that was a different color from their main body). However, in an effort to match the animation colors, Takara painted the die-cast metal chest the same orange color as the rest of Sunstorm, an unprecedented move for this specific mold.

One might argue that he should have had a Cybertronic vehicle mode, not an Earth design, since we see the character on Cybertron. However, there is a scene from "Roll for It" in which the foot of a schoolbus yellow Decepticon jet is visible, landing in the immediate foreground, so it's possible this is Sunstorm on Earth.

As a product of Takara, producing toys for a market with slightly less stringest safety restrictions, Sunstorm has fully-operable spring-powered missile launchers that propel the bombs and missiles several feet. This is a rare treat (back in the day, most of the G1 launchers still had springs inside them, so you could coax them into being more powerful launchers if you stretched out the springs).

From an aesthetic perspective, he really is something else. He's so orange.. Like a creamsicle. It's such a bold color scheme that Hasbro would never have considered it for a bad-guy toy back in the 1980's. He's more like a Care Bear. So bright and cheerful. But, I kind of love him because he defies convention. He makes me question all the things I thought I knew about the Decepticons.

There are lots of other generic Decepticons in the show, and a few of them got considerably more screen time than Sunstorm. I tend to think they would make great armybuilder toys. But, evidently I'm in the minority, since Sunstorm is the only one of them to ever be added to the ranks of the G1 jets. (It's kind of a shame that there weren't a bunch of Diaclone jets who never made it into Transformers, since it seems like that's where the focus is these days.) But, at least I was finally able to add this guy to my collection after wanting one for about 20 years!

Zob (now to decide whether he'll look better with stickers or without... hmm...)