Found this handsome lad at Walmart today. I had him on pre-order with Hasbro Pulse, with an expected ship date around January 21st, but this way I got to use my employee discount, and I also got to take home a toy today instead of waiting. Both good things!

The box is very different from previous G1 reissues, with the gold-colored Transformers: the Movie logo displayed prominently, and the windowless box featuring Starscream attacking Autobot City, as per the animated film. (It's not a drawing of the G1 toy, though. It looks like the Earthrise toy, actually.) I like that it's fresh-looking, and really pops on the shelf, but I also love a good G1 tribute so it's a shame that they weren't able to do something that more strongly evoked the 1980's look.

Because there's no window, there was no reason to worry about Starscream's presentation in the packaging. He looks like an utter doofus strapped to the cardboard tray, mistransformed in a sort of conehead robot state with no arms and upside-down wings. His missile launchers are mounted to the main wings, but the 13 other parts (rudders, tail fins, missiles, fists, etc.) are wrapped in tissue paper.

Instead of recycling existing assets, the instructions feature all-new line art, and it's laughably bad. It shows the incorrect assembly of the plane mode (using the robot-mode null ray missiles instead of the jet-mode cluster bombs) and doesn't explain how to get him out of derp mode, suggesting they were planning on just selling him as a pile of parts at one stage. Not that he's a difficult toy to figure out by any stretch of the imagination.

So, what they've done is given the G1 toy a makeover to get it as close to the cartoon look as possible. He's a flat light grey, rather than the shimmery metallic plastic they tend to use. All black plastic parts are now a dark charcoal grey, and all the blue parts are a sky blue. They had to deviate from the color mapping of the 1984 toy to really get this to work, so they also made the rubbery nosecone grey instead of blue, and the cockpit is translucent orange plastic with some stripes painted on it. They also played with the gang-molded parts so that the rear thrusters are dark grey instead of blue, which is cool. They also painted the blue rings on the front of the missile launchers to make them grey.

As a jet, Starscream looks REALLY good in these colors. Like, I know most people are used to the G1 version looking a certain way, but to bring him so closely to his animated look using only alternate colors? It kind of elevates the toy to a whole new level. He does use the obnoxiously long cluster bomb missiles, though. I might have to cut them and shorten them, because I kind of hate them.

Also, the box kind of lies, because it shows short cluster bombs that are flush with the launchers. Nope. These are the gigantic long-ass ones. You have been warned. (But, seriously, it's so easy to modify with a sharp knife and some super glue and a little bit of ingenuity.)

He's got no factory-applied stickers (or consumer-applied stickers, for that matter) to ugly him up this time. He relies entirely on plastic colors and paint and a handful of tampographs. He's got the classic upside-down Decepticon symbols on the main wings, along with the thick red stripe and a thin white stripe on each wing. He just looks good. Really. He's so pretty.

I'm honestly a little surprised that the instructions don't call for you to leave the rudders and tail fins off to the side, since removing them from the toy arguably brings him closer to his cartoon appearance.

You can tell they did some work on the mold to clean it up a bit. It seems like the arms and the nosecone get a little looser and a little floppier every time we get one of these Decepticon jets (the Target-exclusive Coneheads 3-pack from 2015 had some issues, for sure), but the nosecone and robot arms are nice and tight on this toy. Probably the tightest I've ever seen. And unlike the Coneheads, the arms are held on with screws again instead of those annoying bolts.

Furthermore, the inside of the air intakes have almost always had some kind of alphanumeric designation (often a capital letter "A"), and it usually gets covered up with a sticker. I guess Hasbro figured since this version of Starscream wasn't getting stickers, they'd better get rid of that mark. It looks very clean!

Interestingly, when the jet thrusters changed from blue to black, the robot fists got changed as well. So this version of Starscream has black fists that are painted blue almost in their entirety. Kind of funny. The insides of the fist holes remain unpainted.

The paint deco in robot mode also tries to match the cartoon as closely as possible—there are dark grey panels on the tops of the robot feet, and grey painted vents for the knees. The robot face is painted grey with red eyes, and they even painted the helmet vents black (these "ears" are normally part of the nosecone, so they tend to be grey most of the time for Starscream). Again, he gets the gigantic null ray missiles from the 2003 reissue. Thrust had normal-sized missiles, but they were of the non-launching variety. I'm sure somebody will 3D-print some better ones at some point down the road.

Starscream comes with a Megatron in gun mode, which separates into two parts so you can plug them into the top and bottom of Starscream's fist. The gun can also mount to the underside of Starscream in jet mode. It's the same accessory that came with Starscream the last time he was available at Walmart in 2018, borrowed from Takara's own "anime" version of Starscream. I think this toy has supplanted that one!

The only issue I had with the toy was that the peg for the right rudder does not fit correctly into the right tail fin. I think it's just a molding error, and I'll have to shave it down a bit. But, considering how the original version of this mold is ancient in the extreme, I'm honestly surprised the toy functions as well as it does. I bet whichever Takara employee originally designed it didn't expect it would still be pressed into production some 40 years later!

I know there are probably fans who would prefer the G1 toy in its original G1 colors. I tend to think of this as a supplemental purchase, not the definitive G1 toy of Starscream. But, it's fun and different, and they got me to spend another $33.99. So, there's that.

Zob (keeps meaning to buy the Wolfang reissue at some point, but I haven't done that yet)

On Tuesday, January 10, 2023 at 4:37:01 PM UTC-7, Zobovor wrote:

> Starscream comes with a Megatron in gun mode, which separates into two parts so you can plug them into the top and bottom of Starscream's fist.

So, I didn't bother to actually do this as I was writing the review, since I already had the last Walmart reissue and I was well accustomed to how the accessory worked. But then I actually tried it, and the bottom half of the Megatron gun basically doesn't fit into Starscream's fist. I don't know if it's a result of the paint on the fists, or a molding issue, but it's a bad fit. It basically does not work as intended.

Obviously you could shave off some plastic and fix it pretty easily, if you were an enterprising fan with an X-Acto knife handy, but a consumer shouldn't *have* to make modifications to these toys just so they will function as intended!

Zob (still hasn't seen Hot Rod in stores... yet)

On Wednesday, January 11, 2023 at 5:44:21 PM UTC-5, Zobovor wrote:
> On Tuesday, January 10, 2023 at 4:37:01 PM UTC-7, Zobovor wrote:
>
> > Starscream comes with a Megatron in gun mode, which separates into two parts so you can plug them into the top and bottom of Starscream's fist.
> So, I didn't bother to actually do this as I was writing the review, since I already had the last Walmart reissue and I was well accustomed to how the accessory worked. But then I actually tried it, and the bottom half of the Megatron gun basically doesn't fit into Starscream's fist. I don't know if it's a result of the paint on the fists, or a molding issue, but it's a bad fit. It basically does not work as intended.
>
> Obviously you could shave off some plastic and fix it pretty easily, if you were an enterprising fan with an X-Acto knife handy, but a consumer shouldn't *have* to make modifications to these toys just so they will function as intended!
>
>
> Zob (still hasn't seen Hot Rod in stores... yet)

I've never handled the G1 Starscream mold in my life, and this seems like a prime opportunity to pick it up, but the color scheme hews so closely to Coronation Starscream that I'm on the fence.

<snip>

I should probably add that at least a handful of people have found this toy on clearance at Walmart stores for $15, which seems absurd considering that it's brand-new. But, Walmart has done some wacky things in the past few years, and honestly nothing surprises me any longer. Happy hunting!

Zob (it triggers me when people spell it "whacky")