Sunday 25 July 2010

Leader Class Starscream Stop Press #1 - GERWALK mode

Saw a couple of photos of this fan mode for Leader Class Starscream turn up in the forums, and thought I'd give it a go...

The term 'GERWALK' comes from the Macross, and is possibly the most awkward acronym in the history of anime: Ground Effective Reinforcement of Winged Armament with Locomotive Knee-joint. I mean, come on... there's acronyms and there's trying to shoehorn an explanation onto a cool-sounding name.

The original Jetfire, back in the days of G1, was actually a Macross toy: a VF-1 Valkyrie, to be precise. His inclusion in G1 is curious, to say the least... the model is licensed from Bandai, the company involved in merchandising for the Macross series at the time, in a similar way to the third party models which became Omega Supreme, Roadbuster, Whirl and Shockwave.

In any event, this gave the TransFormers line it's very first GERWALK... and fans have been trying to adapt planes into GERWALKs ever since. Most don't work... but this one is actually quite effective, and it's only a few steps removed from his robot mode.

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