However, when a Thundercracker toy was revealed - without any rumours preceding the appearance of photos online - it had been made as a repaint of the awesome Nitro (Zeus) mold from The Last Knight. It's probably already quite apparent that I'm a fan of the mold - not least because I also bought the upscaled, upgraded Black Mamba version - so I was very keen to get my hands on him.
As luck would have it, he was originally released in the US as a Toys'R'Us exclusive, right around the time the toy retail giants were going into administration both in the US and the UK... so, fearing that I might lose out, I took to eBay, and picked him up for not much more than the £35 RRP. At the time, I was perfectly happy to pay over the odds, particularly on import, as I just didn't want to miss him and have to pay a ridiculous sum, tracking him down years later, on the secondary market...
...But of course, that proved not to be a problem, as I've been seeing him on the shelves of The Entertainer for months - not quite plentiful enough to be a shelfwarmer, but easily available... and at the reduced price of about £20.
Ah well, let's have a look at him...
Vehicle Mode:
Naturally, this is exactly the same mold as Nitro, but Thundercracker seems... How can I put it?.. More complete, in terms of its paint job. Sure, a dark blue jet with red and silver stripes on the wings may not be entirely realistic (outside of specialist display teams, perhaps), and in terms of overall paint coverage, there may be less here than there was on Nitro... but it's far more effectively applied.
For starters, one of my bugbears with Nitro - and Ares Nitrogen, bizarrely - was the unpainted cockpit canopy frame. That has been corrected here so that the canopy looks more realistic and the nose of the jet isn't transparent where the canopy piece has been extended to admit a Titan Master figure. Only the very tip of the nose has been painted, but that's nothing out of the ordinary on jet aircraft. The basic colourscheme is a very dark blue (darker than G1, I think, but also more blue than the original's dark sea-blue) with touches of black, and then Thundercracker's traditional red and silver linework. Grey has been painted onto small sections on the front of each wing, as a direct homage to the silver-painted die-cast core of the G1 Seeker, though this strikes me as taking to homage rather too far - he would have been recognisable without these grey parts, and they're not even really directly equivalent - the paint would more properly have been applied to the slimline intakes on either side of the nose, or even the robot's kneecaps.
Aside from the sharply-painted, sweeping lines of red and silver on the wings, and the 'lightning bolts' on the tail fins, there are labels painted on the robot's kneecaps that basically make it canon that they - not the small, open ended protrusions from the nose - are the jet's intakes. Silly, really... but it kind of works from some angles.
Thundercracker comes packaged with the same missile rack accessories as Nitro, only this time molded in black plastic and without any paintwork. They plug into the wings just as well as on the original, but don't stand out quite so well (hence me not noticing that I'd neglected to attach them for any of my photos...). Decent, as before, but not exactly exciting.
Robot Mode:
I've noted many times that a simple change in paint job can work wonders for a TransFormers toy, and Thundercracker is certainly pretty distinct from Nitro despite sharing the same overall shape. Hasbro have tried (a little too hard, perhaps) to introduce traditional 'Seeker' elements to his appearance, even though the sculpted detail really wasn't designed to accommodate that. Thus, the chest plate is largely grey, despite the fact that the only grey visible on the jet are those small sections on the wings. Within the grey, there are a couple of small blobs of yellow representing the cockpit canopy on the G1 version... despite the face that the entire nose of the jet, including the cockpit, is on his right arm (OK, perhaps that's not the case in the CGI, but then the cockpit disappears entirely in the movie).
Most of the pipework on the torso is black, just like on Nitro, and then the arms are largely black plastic with only a few touches of blue paint on the forearms. The legs are a more even split, with the upper legs and feet being black while the lower legs are molded in blue plastic with bands of black paint on the shins (one of the many paint applications missing from Nitro) and black plastic kneecaps with the 'INTAKE' graphic stamped on in red. Given the amount of sculpted 'internal' detail on the lower legs - and the fact that some of it was painted, albeit only in black, on the original - it's a shame to see how little paint there is on the legs... and I'd have thought a few touches of red and silver, to give the impression that his tailfins are actually involved, would have been worthwhile even if the mechanical detail was left unpainted.
Still, the overall look is pretty good, even if the paintjob ends up being surprisingly sparse and doesn't make a great deal of sense, since the grey springs out of nowhere and occupies a significant portion of his armour. Personally, I would have been perfectly happy with a paint job that paid more attention to the sculpted details at the expense of so heavy-handed a G1 homage.
He's obviously decked out with the same weapons as Nitro - the curious jet nose crossbow-thing on his right arm and the extending cannon on the left. While it's no surprise, it's nevertheless a little disappointing that the details, at least, weren't altered for this release - compare and contrast with the Poweriser weapons supplied with TFPrime Skyquake and Dreadwing, for example. The missile racks, as before, peg in to the turbine chunks sitting on his back but, again, the use of black plastic with no paintwork means they're pretty underwhelming.
If you thought Alternity Starscream's head was weird, and if you thought movie Starscream's head was too monstrous even for Megatron's treacherous air commander, then nothing can possibly prepare you for the insectoid nightmare fuel that is Thundercracker's head sculpt... It's like someone dropped some acid and tried to draw movie Starscream, but then just couldn't stop adding eyes... Weird, bulbous eyes that pretty much encircle his head. Then there's the terrifying mandibles that look like a twisted interpretation of Beast Wars Tarantulas - perhaps what he'd have looked like if he'd got a TransMetals 2 form. While it kind of fits within the movie aesthetic, I do feel the design has been taken to an extreme that would never have appeared in any of the movies. It feels like it was designed with Mandelbrot sets in mind in that, the closer you get, the more detail you see... and you could zoom in infinitely and just keep finding more, deeper levels of nightmarish, insectoid weirdness. It almost looks as if there's a grey lobster bursting out of his mouth, as the mandibles that make up his chin look like claws, and then the 'mouth' (such as it is) looks like a separate creature living within Thundercracker's face. Perhaps it's even based on a rejected design, who knows? Within its overall oddity, one difference between this sculpt and Starscream's is that the overall shape seems quite square-ish from the front (aside from the domed crown of the head and the pointy chin), but looks very much the same shape as Starscream's head from the side - the 'collar' is there, but doesn't protrude to the sides from behind his jawline in same the way that it sticks out at the back. Naturally, it's painted like G1 Seekers - a grey face inside a black helmet - but the grey paint really seems to bring out all the hideous detail of the interlocking parts of his fearsome visage. The metallic red paint of his many eyes adds another dimension, making them look glassy and utterly inhuman, where other movie 'bots have at least exhibited signs of robotic eyeballs sunk within their heads. I like the head sculpt, I really do... I just don't think it entirely fits within the movie aesthetic, and certainly not within Studio Series.
It does retain the HeadMaster gimmick, though, so it's perfectly possible to replace the stock head with any Titan Master you might happen to have going spare. Titans Return Overboard is very nearly the right shade of blue, for example.
Studio Series Thundercracker uses a great mold with a fun and unusual transformation to reasonable effect. The choice of character was surprising considering Studio Series had, until this point, focused on creating updated and improved toys of characters who actually appeared in the live action movies. The idea of the line developing a subset of toys of non-movie characters probably never occurred to anyone as a serious possibility, and other repaints have been more directly tied to specific elements of background CGI (for example, the KSI Drone and Boss figures, or Shadow Raider). Sure, the packaging tries to imply Thundercracker was involved in the battle over Chicago in Dark of the Moon, but we all know he wasn't.
Being a fan of this mold, obtaining Thundercracker was just a no-brainer for me, quite apart from my Seeker OCD. Given that it's not unprecedented for Skywarp and Thundercracker to take a form different a particular continuity's Starscream, I fully support the idea of each of the G1 Seekers appearing in the likes of Studio Series in a wholly different form, though that's probably unlikely. Given that I own the Leader class Starscream from the extended Revenge of the Fallen toyline, the only thing that would compel me to buy the Studio Series mold would be a repaint as Skywarp, to sit alongside this Thundercracker... but I'd definitely prefer a different jet, if possible.
I am feeling a little sour that I paid more than his RRP on import but, since there seemed to be no guarantee that a figure released as a Toys'R'Us exclusive would even appear on these shores, I feel I made the right decision at the time... and if his eventual appearance at a knock-down price is any indication of improvements to Hasbro's European distribution model, that can only be a good thing.
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