#snowflake seekers

[sternerstufftoys]

Star’s Cream

Unf, this lad.

So lately I've been having a bit of a crisis of conscience over the gushing everyone's been doing over the Siege seekers - should I upgrade and go voyager? It would certainly be possible, even keeping my plan of having all three of the main trio in different moulds. POTP Starscream, SS Thundercracker (with a new head), Siege Skywarp... but then of course all my other Decepticon jets are deluxes. They wouldn't match.

So I got out Legends Starscream for a fiddle and my oh my did it reaffirm that I made the right choice to keep my seekers deluxe. This is one of the single sexiest deluxes in my collection and it irks me no end he's been sitting idle in my detolf for so long. Despite his diminutive stature he has a commanding, imposing presence with those wide shoulders and stompy boots. He's one of a select few that look natural just standing up straight, so well proportioned is he.

The original Armada design was a fantastic concept, and looked lush in the animated series all those years ago (well, in stills from the series. Quality animation was never its strong suit) but was hampered by a simplified toy that was designed to hook new young'uns in rather than cater to the neckbearded collector or the teens who had grown up with Beast Wars and RID. So it's a joy that this T30/Legends version not only manages to achieve the promise laid down by the Armada Starscream's design, but even improves on it in some ways. Not just the articulation, that's a given, but the ability to do something about the heinous kibble katastrophe formed of those shoulder launchers. Flipping them round and onto the back not only makes for a more practically-minded seeker who won't brain anyone by turning around too quickly, but also manages to evoke the classic seeker shoulder vents. Or you could put the launchers forward again for an old-fashioned Armada look. If you're boring.

Downside is the size of course. Deluxes had noticeably shrunk the year before for TFP, and lingering effects carried on in T30. Starscream isn't the worst-hit by any means, but he's still smaller than the average, sadly. It might seem strange to bemoan this after just lauding my own decision to stick with deluxe seekers, but Screamer here could have stood to have been a smidge larger. The other downside is that minicons just look absurdly big on him. In fact, minicon cars actually end up almost in-scale, so attaching one to a minicon port in vehicle mode just looks like someone strapped a car to the roof of a fighter jet. A shame, but not a deal-breaker, unless you want to put him next to CW Armada Megatron, where the size difference is... more noticeable. But I reckon Megs can take some of the blame there.

[sternerstufftoys]

This is what I’m reduced to

(If I fuck up the focus maybe they won't notice the awful paint job I did? hm)

Two out of three. The RID mould got to be two out of the three seekers. And then they just moved on. Starscream, Skywarp and no-one else? That's hardly fair. It's hardly kind. Come on now. Leaving me to smear great big globs of paint over a cheapo Starscream just so I could have him in blue? Come. On. Now.

And to be honest, Thundercracker has become a surprise favourite for me. Not the overexposed schemery of Starscream, nor the minimum-effort cool guy status of Skywarp, Thundercracker is the layered, interesting character. The one who has his doubts about the Decepticons, but doesn't want to leap into bed with the Autobots (Drift!). The one who's addicted to cheesy earth TV and writes self-insert fanfic about beating up Santa. The one with a cute little doggy. In a nutshell, the fun one.

Not that any of that counted 10 years ago. T-Cracks was practically a non-entity until Mike Costa and John Barber got their hands on him. In both the Marvel comic and the G1 Cartoon Thundercracker was just there to fill the ranks, to back up Starscream and not even get a cool superpower like Skywarp. The potential was always there, with his original 1984 bio already having the seeds for his anti-Decepticon doubt laid out, but never realised. I'm sure there were plenty of kids owning the original toy that deep down knew, just knew that he was always better than Starscream. So I feel bad for overlooking him for so many years, and just wish there was a better toy of him out there for me.

The RID seeker mould is great, don't get me wrong. Slender, sinister, and with a killer sexy space jet alt mode, it's probably the best of the line. But it was never made into a Thundercracker, and for that Hasbro have managed to leave me to do a rather chunky custom job of my own. I'm satisfied that I got him looking as good as I was ever going to manage, but even so, I'm no @Rotorstorm. Oh well.

[sternerstufftoys]

"When you're a Jet you're a Jet all the way, from your first cigarette to your last dying day..." *click... click... click...*

Oh look, there he is.

So onto the Seeker B-squad and I'm afraid their only representative in my collection goes to Revenge Of The Fallen Dirge, who stands in good company as one of a handful of movie toys that have graduated to main collection status, along with Mindwipe, TLK Barricade and DOTM Darksteel. And unlike Bayverse Starscream and his multicoloured clones Dirge actually takes some design cues from his G1 namesake. So G1 Dirge he is, to me at least.

Not that Dirge ever had much of a presence in the G1 cartoon. He usually just acted as a bit of extra Decepticon muscle, ready to show up and snarl angrily at whichever Autobot was actually going to carry the plot that week, something that he shared in the Marvel comics. Aside from being repeatedly blown up and then inexplicably returning alive and well next episode, there really wasn't much to say about Dirge, other than him being a gloomy old sod, and that was hardly enough to stand out in the slowly expanding Deceptiroster of 1985. If you'd asked me about him back when I was a kid, you'd get nothing more than a confused shrug. Dirge who?

So what's so important about Dirge that warrants adding him to the Snowflake Seekers? We-ell, like many people, I do have a streak of completionism in me that I sometimes fail to control, and that urge to have a 'complete set' of Seekers is a real one. But then, I don't have a Ramjet or a G1 Thrust, since there's no more moulds out there that do them justice (though I might cave and get a Classics Ramjet if I come across one at a decent price). And I have to admit after seeing pictures of ROTF Dirge I was hella intrigued.

All the classic Seeker hallmarks are there, albeit in homage form only. The shoulder intakes and chest cockpit are purely decorative, as the real things end up as his feet and right arm respectively. His face has that disappointing crinkly tinfoil look to it if you get too close, something that a few ROTF deluxes were saddled with, and is the only thing that really distances him from G1 aesthetics. He has the conehead on his bonce, but it doesn't quite have that bulky bullet feel to it this time around, since again, it's just decoration and not part of the alt mode. In fact, with the head tapering inwards at the neck, the cone feels more like a hat than a helmet, giving the unmistakable feel that Dirge has straight up joined the space clergy. Dirge for Pope!

Annoyingly though he has something that tends to pop up now and then in various robot moulds - sideways elbows. I'm convinced there's someone at Takara who honestly believes that the natural curl of the elbow is inwards. This means to have a more natural resting arm (and to put the missile launchers in their correct place) his hands need to be at right-angles to where they normally would be, so he's constantly snapping his fingers like he's in West Side Story. Well, he's always been one of the Jets. Haw!

Transformation is a faff, all told, and essentially amounts to wrapping a jet around his body; aside from his feet and right arm there's no real correlation between robot body and jet mode. But still, it's not the worst shellformer, and manages to be pretty kibble-free in his astonishingly great alt mode. Yeah, it's pretty well known that movie bots put the vehicle modes at the forefront as that was where the car sponsorship that funded the damn things came from... but this is a jet, and didn't even appear in the film, so it's just luxury. The jet nerd in me goes a bit doolally for this approximation of the old British Harrier jump-jet, and in sumptuous navy blue and gold he has a tremendously regal presence in the Seeker fleet.

So, British, dancing gangster, and religious. He's got a lot going on, old Dirge. I feel bad for overlooking him now. Dirge for cockney dancing space-Pope!

[sternerstufftoys]

Cool guys wear black. And purple.

Okay but for reals though I want to talk about this Fall Of Cybertron Skywarp here.

I guess out of all my deluxe seekers he's probably the most ordinary. He's not a radical take on the character, he's not that stylised, he's just a good, solid chunky space jet. And what's so special about that? Like 40% of all Transformers is cool guys that turn into space jets.

But then, ordinary doesn't mean bad, and neither should it. As with everything Fall of Cybertron related, this seeker mould was an attempt to have another crack at a concept that would have otherwise stagnated with a design from 2006 (Classics seeker mould, I will get to you later). It doesn't have to replace the tried-and-tested F15 body type, but it does give a rather tempting alternative if you're an idiot like me that insists that every one of these otherwise-identical characters should be their own special snowflake with a different mould each.

I picked up Skywarp from Kapow around 2015/16 in my "oh god I've been out of collecting for ages and missed out on all this shit" phase of hoovering up everything I could get my hands on, and being pretty inexpensive it seemed like a no-brainer. He wears the mould well, the mean-spirited jerk face being probably a better fit than it is on Starscream, despite Starscream being the only one in the games to get any real close-up screen time. There's considerably more grey and less black than you might expect on a Skywarp, and in jet mode it does have a slightly incomplete feel to the deco. But in robot mode the colours compliment each other a lot better, thanks to the black thighs, forearms and shoulder straps being more prominent and giving a better impression of classic Skywarpery.

Only problem is them arms. They've got enough joints to pose well, but the shoulders don't tab in properly and the ports to attach weapons (massive Gatling guns that can alternatively be linked together) are on the underside of the forearm rather than the outside, so their natural position is to dangle gracelessly underneath, though a swivelling wrist makes this far less of a problem than it is on certain others - Dirge, looking in your direction.

As for Skywarp himself, it's only relatively recently that I've come to terms with his 'sneaky but dumb' characterisation. Sneaky suited him well, obviously (cool guys wear black, duh) but dumb? No-one wants their awesome roboninja to be a dummy, right? Well, that's the same line of thinking that gets you dorks in black leather trench coats because they saw it in the Matrix in 1999 and decided it was the coolest that cool would ever be. Dressing in black is like a cheat code for cool, requiring the minimum amount of effort. And that, that is Skywarp. Skywarp's definitely the lazy bugger that takes the shortest possible route to success, and stuck between earning his cool-cred and dressing in the robot equivalent of a black leather trench coat... it's easy to see what he'd pick.

[sternerstufftoys]

The Snowflake Seekers

Just wanted to thank everyone for the likes, comments and reblogs on these reviews so far. You’re all great and I love you.

I originally started posting these in the forums on TFW2005, and am archiving them here because, well, finding stuff in the UK Toy Discussion Thread is a nightmare (260,000 posts and counting). I post a new review there every day except Friday, then repost them to the appropriate line appreciation thread the day after, then finally copy them onto here to go into the queue. They get posted every evening at 8.00 pm UK time, so are slowly catching up with the forum posts.

Mostly these reviews are themed, so the first bunch were my deluxe Snowflake Seekers, my doomed attempt to get every seeker in deluxe size without owning a mould more than once (still need a Ramjet and Thrust!). Drift just snuck in there because I’d just got the toy and was hella excited about it. Drift is great. Tomorrow the next theme will start, the principal Autobot cast from season 3 of the 1980s cartoon. After that are all of the Decepticon leaders I own, and after that... I don’t know. 

I’m open to suggestions for the next theme! Any type of character you want to see in a write-up, please let me know, and we’ll see what comes next.

[sternerstufftoys]

Acid Reflex

It almost feels surplus to requirements to talk about the Classics seeker mould. Ever since its first release back in 2006 it became a mainstay of almost every collection, repeated and redeco'd a dozen times until most of us could transform it in our sleep. Still, to further hoik up my hipster-cred I can say that Acid Storm is the one and only version of the Classics seeker I've ever owned.

I suppose I was a little resistant at the time. I'd sort of bought in on the Robot Masters seekers, having picked up the Skywarp/Thundercracker double pack a couple of years previously, and at the time I seemed to think that the new version was comparatively blocky and unwieldy. I mean, I wasn't wrong, but considering how utterly ugly and immobile the Robot Masters version was, this was still an improvement. Sure, the limited possibility of Acid Storm and his brethren is an issue, especially a good decade later, but the Robot Masters seekers could barely move at all.

On paper, Acid Storm's articulation is fine. Head, shoulders, elbows, hips, knees, all the hits. But each one is hampered in some way, stopping him from taking anything more than a few very basic poses. It's pretty lucky then that he looks plenty intimidating just stood up straight.

Transformation is a doddle, and let's be honest, most of us can do this one with our eyes closed. The resulting F-15 is... well, it's fine. Not great, just fine. There's no cheating and faux-parts at least, the chest cockpit is the real cockpit, the intakes are the same bits as the robot shoulders, but all in all there's something unexciting about the jet mode.

Except. Oh, except except except. Y'see, the young'uns hereabouts won't remember just how much furore there was when Acid Storm hit the shelves... and Thundercracker didn't. In their infinite lack of wisdom, the higher-ups at Hasbro didn't put much stock in people wanting to complete the original seeker trio, and were happy to throw Thundercracks out as a convention exclusive. If you weren't one of the 1500 people to have bought one at Botcon 2007, you'd have to make do with C-lister Acid Storm instead. Oh, the wailing and gnashing of teeth was palpable my friends.

(for a couple of years, before Thundercracker was included in Generations)

Thing is, Acid Storm looks great. I'd argue that he's never looked as good since this toy, with his muted camo deco with cheery buttery-yellow highlights. Every other version has played up his colours to an eye-searing brightness, and it just comes off as trying too hard. Here Acid Storm looks smart, combat ready and easy to fit in alongside a team of his peers. Hipster it might have been to sniff at the mainstream seekers in favour of "I was into him before he was cool" Acid Storm, I can't ever regret my purchase, because in all honesty this is one of the best decos this mould has seen in its long and illustrious life. Now that the Siege seekers have well and truly put this venerable mould out to pasture, it's nice to reflect on what has been a reliable old workhorse for a good 12 years by celebrating it at it's best.

[sternerstufftoys]

SINO: Seeker In Name Only

Ransack here comes from that awkward period when Hasbro had finally discovered the fan term 'seeker' and decided to make it into something other than simply 'F-15 Jet Man'. ROTF decided that any old sod could be a seeker, including Jetfire, and indeed Ransack. And hoo boy, if you thought Movie Jetfire was an doddery old codger, wait 'til you see Ransack! He's even older! You can tell because he turns into an old-fashioned WW1 biplane.

Which makes no real sense for robots that live for millions of years, but since that entire film was bobbins, we'll just move past it.

You know what wasn't bobbins though? The toys. Still clinging to the idea that the movieverse was going to eclipse all other Transformers franchises before it, Hasbro put everything into the ROTF line and came out with what is still one of the most exciting, inventive (and occasionally batshit crazy) lines in all TF history. And like all good TF lines, it quickly outgrew the movie it was based on to give us weird tertiary characters like Ransack.

Yeah, he doesn't have the canopy-chest, or the null rays, or the wings pointing the right way, or the shoulder intakes, or the classic seeker head design, or anything that the others have for that matter. He's only included as a seeker because his bio says so. But why not? I love the idea of transformers hiding out on earth for hundreds of years, with historic alt modes. I'd love it if the blue recolour had actually been made. I'd also like it if the head sculpt wasn't such a weird, crinkly mess as well. Yeah, curse of the movie bots strikes again, although being smaller even than Dirge's head, it more or less gets away with it.

I mean, the problems with this toy are exactly what you'd think. He's weak and flimsy, arms and wing tips popping off all the time, chest kibble getting in the way, and as a wee bugger he's not got a lot to offer outside of 'can transform'. No spring-loaded cannons, no automorph, no mechalive, just a fun and unique robo man that can sit at the back of your seeker squad complaining about how biplanes are more elegant and refined than modern day jet fighters. And trying to ignore the fact he's got bombs literally strapped to his arm.

Now, where's my Spitfire transformer?

[sternerstufftoys]

Thrusting in the direction of the problem

Armada Thrust isn't really a seeker, but just about scrapes through by virtue of the name he shares. He's a funny one, too, released as one of Takara's 'every-combiner-has-to-be-a-complete-team-no-creativity-allowed' initiative that insisted that he hung around as part of the Galvatronus Gang due to vague inter-dimensional bullshittery. And looking close at his noggin, it does seem like this wasn't originally intended to be Armada Thrust, since the patch of cockpit-blue paint on his helmet doesn't match to the sculpting at all, and there's nary a minicon port to be found on his body. Could the intent have once been one of the G1 coneheads? It's an intriguing thought, and one with no clear answer since the head sculpt was never reused.

And indeed, it doesn't really look much like the original Armada Thrust, who had a mouth plate instead of the UW version's handsome, chiselled features, and essentially flobbed around in the cartoon like a massive dork. Not so here, which takes the absolutely gorgeous hunkiness of the Air Raid body and runs with it, like some alternate universe Thrust where he was a dashing space-Casanova instead of the utter toolbag that we were left with in 2003.

Although, lest we forget, Thrust's original toy felt like an absolute godsend to collectors at the time. After the hard reboot of Armada's original wave threw articulation out of the window in favour of simplicity, Thrust was a considerable step up. Ball-jointed legs, double-hinged shoulders, people threw their hands up and rejoiced that they could still enjoy their little plastic babies now that the Beast era was a distant memory.

So why bother with an update at all? Well, as nice as it was to have articulation of any kind in 2003, it looks laughably limited today. Chump doesn't even have any hands, and can just about manage a stiff standing position with arms awkwardly sticking out. Not so for his UW update, who dances and prances with the best of them. The chunky square shoulder armour and swept-upwards swing wings of the Air Raid mould are beautifully realised in dark silver and green. It's all far too sexy for an idiot who perished being squeezed to death stuck in one of Unicron's joints.

But here's the thing. Late in Armada's run two repaints for Thrust showed up, one like his G1 namesake and another like Dirge (and the original standing in for Ramjet if you don't mind red being swapped out for green), implying a great big expanded universe where the trio could team up and compete for Megatron's attention against Starscream, Thundercracker and Skywarp... but it was never to be. Neither would we see any other coneheads in CW or UW, and the only nod to the seekers at all being in a translucent Ghost Starscream and an overpriced, unobtainable Shattered Glass redeco, again teasing possibilities that would never come to pass. I don't particularly mourn the loss of combining seekers - they'd never look the part properly anyway - but the unrealised possibility will forever chafe.