Finally got the last of the four Micromaster Stations on eBay. Let's take a deep dive into the world of tiny airports and even tinier airplanes!

As an aside, I knew I'd be hunting this toy down at some point. A while ago, perhaps as long as two years ago, I spotted an auction for two Airwave missiles for like four bucks. I jumped all over that. My reasoning was that if I had the missiles already, I could widen my search when it came time to buy Airwave, and hunt for not just complete toys but incomplete toys as well, and maybe even save some money in the process. Well, the set I ordered was, indeed, missing one of the missiles, and I feel like I might have saved myself a few bucks. So, go me.

Airwave, himself, is a diabolical little robot who is a redeco of Nightflight of the Decepticon Air Strike Patrol. He's maroon with an off-white body and head, and a purple-painted face. His transformation is the same, of course, and in jet mode he's predominantly a dark red with a gold-painted cockpit. He does have two consumer-applied stickers on his stabilizer fins, a deep blue with a yellow lightning bolt design, which helps distinguish him a bit from his mold-mate. (In Japan, this toy was sold, in the same colors, as an Autobot named Overair.)

His airport is a fairly simple design, with a runway that can either form a single, unbroken landing strip about seven inches long, or two independent runways which are each only about three and a half inches long. The included grey ramp can connect either to one end of the runway(s), or to the side of the airport when the runways are swung out to their forward positions. There is a tiny flip-out orange control tower, much too small for any Micromasters themselves to operate. There is also a hangar where Airwave can park, with an orange hangar door that can open and close. He just barely fits in the hangar if you fold his wings down. The hangar door is also really difficult for me to reach with my fingertips and close... I need a hook-shaped tool to grasp the lip of the door for me (I used Broadside's axe because I have it handy).

In this mode, his missiles aren't used, but can be tucked away underneath the airport for storage. He's one of the most versatile Micromaster bases, with potentially four spots to connect a ramp (and thus link up to other Micromaster bases).

To transform the airport into a missile launch station, you basically flip it upside-down. The now-inverted hangar becomes a control station of sorts for Airwave, as evidenced by the way he's hiding inside of it in his Hasbro box art illustration. The dual landing strips look like Metroplex's kneecap armor when they're upside-down, and they form the main missile launcher.. The launcher is supported by a couple of struts, so it is perpetually pointed at an upward angle. Either the missiles are meant to travel long-range, or they're made specifically to target Autobots in the sky with aerial capability. (His tech specs say his missiles have a 300 mile range, which supports this idea. He has a Firepower rating of 8, so they would seem to be quite powerful. No idea what kind of missiles they are, though. The 'splody kind, evidently.)

There are pegs for the missiles to plug into, but in lieu of proper peg-holes, the missiles just have a recessed undercarriage strip, and the pegs can theoretically hold the missiles at any point. However, unlike Ironworks, there is a slightly peg hole shaped area within the recessed channel for each missile, obviously where the pegs are "really" meant to plug into.

So, the new Modulator versions of the Micromaster Stations that we got during Earthrise in 2020 caused an increased interest in the vintage versions for a while, and thus resulted in the secondary market pricing to jump. The Micromaster Stations were selling for closer to $40-$50 in early 2020, but pricing for complete toys jumped to $60-$75 and has been hovering there for a few years now. I got mine for $30 plus shipping, but as I said, it was missing one missile and the ramp. The missiles weren't a problem, as I already had a set. I anticipate the ramp costing me about $10, so when all is said and done, I still feel like I managed to beat the market average this time. (I will not do so well when it comes to finding an unbroken Horri-Bull, I suspect.)

Honestly, the Micromaster Stations are fairly silly toys. If you were already collecting Micromasters in 1989, you likely had some or most of these Micromaster vehicle designs. Recycling them was good for Hasbro from a cost-cutting standpoint, but it made collecting them kind of redundant. Also, there were much better Micromaster bases out there to collect (Skyhopper for the win), and these tiny little gas stations and things just weren't especially exciting in and of themselves. I think their true appeal comes as add-ons for the larger Micromaster bases, because Hasbro was rather blatantly copying the Micro Machines play pattern established by Galoob, and so once you got yourself a bunch of Micromaster playsets, you could link them all together into a big city and dress up in a mechanic's jumpsuit and pretend you're John Moschitta on a caffiene high.

So, there's a reason I wasn't gobbling these up in 1989. They were easily attainable, as I remember them retailing for around $5.99 or so, but for that same price I could have gotten an entire Micromaster Patrol, which always seemed like the better choice in my mind. And, it worked out rather nicely for me, I guess, since now, even this far down the road, I still have some delightful G1 toys left to discover for the first time, some 34 years after the fact.

Zob (about 62 more toys to go, depending on how you want to count)