Many thanks to my good buddy ViceGripX for finding and sending this guy my way.

So, the G1 cartoon pilot episode, "More Than Meets the Eye" part 1, was obviously a way of showcasing the new range of Transformers toys by Hasbro. Prior to the scenes on Earth, though, we get some moments on Cybertron, before the characters have been rebuilt into their Earth configurations, and we see a few characters like Wheeljack, Bumblebee, Soundwave, etc. in their original Cybertronic forms. These moments were never meant to advertise any existing toys, but rather was just a way of explaining where the characters came from, before arriving on Earth and taking on native forms.

However, there's been a push in recent years to finally make toys out of a lot of the characters and iterations from the cartoon show that never got official Hasbro merchandise. I love the fact that we've finally gotten a toy for this early version of Jazz, as he was originally introduced to us some 39 long years ago.

Jazzworthy Jazz comes packaged in usual yellow-colored trade dress for this sub-line, stuck in a honeycomb inner cardboard tray, with his two accessories taped up in a piece of tissue paper.

As a robot, he's five inches in height, the same size as the Studio Series '86 release from 2021. Where the Studio Series toy is required to use his car parts to actually become a car, Hasbro is not asking this of Origin Jazz. This means his chest can be shrunk down to its appropriate cartoon proportions without negatively affecting the vehicle form at all. In fact, the smaller chest helps him a bit. We haven't gotten a version of Jazz proportioned this closely to the cartoon since the Action Master figure.

He's most authentic to his cartoon look, though there are some vehicle shell parts that had to be tucked away and hidden as best as they were able. The vehicle nose is folded up and hidden behind the windshield on his back, which nicely approximates his G1 look even if it does create one whopper of a backpack. The side panels on his lower legs are the only other thing that look a little off, and they unfortunately cut into the lines of his leg armor.

He closely follows the color mapping for G1, black and white with some grey for the feet and midsection, a blue racing stripe and Autobot symbol on his chest, and a silver-painted face with blue eyes. There's a little color missing here and there (he should have some light blue panels on his pelvis) but it's not awful. His entire chest is made of translucent blue plastic, and the whole thing is painted except for the headlights.

He comes with a black gun styled after his original photon rifle, with a large peg protruding from the side. He's also got a two-piece grappling winch assembly, homaging the tool he used a few times in the cartoon pilot. His hand swings into his forearm, allowing you to plug the assembly into his wrist. From there, the actual grappling hook piece can detach, but there's no string connecting the two parts. You just kind of have to pretend it's there. The grappling assembly can also plug into the barrel of his rifle.

To transform him, basically you unfold the vehicle hood to hide the robot head, and collapse the legs and unfold the doors to wrap around the sides. The robot arms fold together and end up as undercarriage supports, lifting the entire vehicle frame slightly above the ground to create the illusion that it's hovering. There are no wheels at all, hidden or otherwise. The gun can mount to his roof in this form. The vehicle measures about 4.5" in length.

The engineering of the toy doesn't match his on-screen transformation, of course (in which the front of the car forms the robot arms, and the spoiler folds up into non-existence) but they still managed to maintain a certain amount of fidelity to both modes. The car mode matches his on-screen appearance almost exactly, which is a pretty impressive feat. (Jazz's original Cybertronic mode is perhaps somewhat more well-known than some of the other characters' given that an image of his pre-Earth design was printed, for some reason, in his Marvel Comics TRANSFORMERS UNIVERSE profile.)

With the recent (leaked) announcement that Wheeljack may be on the way, this effectively gives us every single character whose Cybertronic mode we saw in the 1984 cartoon pilot. Obviously, characters like Trailbreaker, Windcharger, etc. had futuristic vehicle forms as well, but we never saw them, so what they actually looked like remains a mystery. (All we know for sure is that Mirage didn't have "CITANES 26" written on him in his Cybertronic form.) There are a few more characters whose Cybertronic modes we got a glimpse of, but we would have to delve into Marvel Comics for those—we got to see the pre-Earth forms for Blaster, Beachcomber, Seaspray, Powerglide, and Warpath, as well as Dirge and Ramjet and Thrust and the Insecticons. We also got to see Optimus Prime's, not once but twice, and quite different from each other. Whether these would actually be considered marketable by Hasbro, of course, is anyone's guess!

Zob (and Cosmos never got an Earth mode, for some reason, but we have no idea why)

I pre-ordered this on Target's website. They still haven't sent it, with
no estimated delivery date listed. Very irritating.

So I just picked one up in-store. But I was sad to see there was another
Jazz there that somebody had apparently vandalized. His chest-piece
wasn't there. Hasbro's idiotic open packaging initiative has been such a
failure.

I grabbed a Target guy and asked him to take it off the shelf. I always
feel so awkward doing this, trying to explain to people what's wrong
with the product. Feels very nerdy, and I'm always worried they're going
to suspect I'm involved with the crime somehow.