Finally looking at Finback, the last of the original Decepticon Pretenders—and perhaps the most bizarre of them all!

As with a lot of these Pretenders, the character was clearly named after the physical characteristics of his outer shell,and not the inner robot. (One wonders what guys like Skullgrin or Iguanus were even named on Cybertron before they received their Pretender shells.)

Finback's inner robot stands at slightly under 4.5" in height. He's mostly a pale shade of lavender, not quite grey, with some magenta-colored arms and toes, a yellow painted face, and dark grey upper legs and shoulder connectors. His legs can only mode side-to-side, so he has even less useful articulation than most other Pretenders, and his size and styling remind me a lot of the inner robot for Roadgrabber. He carries a lavender stun rifle, an excessively large weapon with a large, cicrular chunk on the back. It feels like it was designed for a robot twice his size, honestly.

Curiously, he has two holes, one in each of his knees, that seem to serve no function. They're just slightly too large to attach his weapon, but they seem to be placed there deliberately. I wonder if they were meant to be functional at one stage, and not just merely ornamental.

He transforms into a hovercraft, allegedly, and he does so by laying on his belly so that his legs can wrap around his sides, like GoBots Pathfinder, and his arms swing up and fold towards his back so they're more or less out of the way. There are two small grey wings that swing out from the legs, ostensibly completing his aerial mode. In this form he has a black painted cockpit, and he equips the stun rifle using a peg hole on the top of the vehicle. He has no landing struts, so any kid playing with this toy for any length of time would eventually scrape up the front of the robot chest during vehicle landings. Makes you wonder if they were planning to use those holes for something.

His outer Pretender shell, meanwhile, is this monstrous, almost indescribable creature. He's mostly a deep grape purple, with yellow armor and black arms. Where his left arm terminates in a fist, his right arm is a flipper or a fin of some kind. I guess Finback is meant to be somewhat fish-like, as it has a scaly body and fins on the legs and back, but he also has a tremendous bony armored head, which reminds me of one of those prehistoric extinct placoderm-like fish, like the dunkleosteus. (The beady, almost insane eyes he's got in his box art further cement this idea in my mind—and he was drawn in Marvel Comics in exactly the same way.) His head and upper row of teeth are made of the same flexible grey plastic as his accessories.

He wears a belt codpiece, which needs to be removed to get inside of the shell. He also carries a harpoon gun, a bizarre-looking weapon that fits better in his left hand, and he can also equip the stun rifle using the large peg instead of the small one (the flipper arm does have a peg-hole for accessories, but it's on the inside of the flipper, so he holds things kind of weirdly). The accesories that came with my copy of Finback suffers from a few bruised banana spots on the belt and harpoon gun, which I saw happening a lot with Waverider back when I was shopping for him. I think some of these toys just start to break down chemically after existing for 35 years.

After you open Finback's outer shell, you can see the inner workings of the connector they used to secure the fish-monster's upper head to the front of the Pretender shell. Stuff the inner robot inside, and there's no remaining evidence that Finback is even a Transformer at all. (By 1989, a lot of the Pretender shells started wearing Autobot or Decepticon symbols, but in 1988 when they were first introduced, they were truly robots in disguise, and had no such identifying marks.)

The second wave of 1988 Pretenders were never sold in Japan, making Finback a market exclusive. Maybe that's why he's a bit harder to find on the secondary market nowadays. (There's one on eBay right now for $175, and it's not even complete!) It's funny how some toys like the Pretenders have gone from being some of the most maligned concepts among the fandom to becoming some of the most highly-coveted and most expensive toys from the G1 assortment.

Zob (got an unused sticker sheet for Iguanus on eBay for $30, which means I only spent $30 on Iguanus)