TransFormers: Prime Dark Energon Starscream

The whole 'Dark Energon' phenomenon rather passed me by, to be honest. As far as I can tell, the toys never made it to UK shelves, and by the time I discovered them in specialist TransFormers webshops, they were pretty much all sold out. My one encounter with them 'in the wild' was at a London Expo, where they had only Bumblebee and Knockout and, while the former was an interesting homage to G1 Goldbug in its colourscheme, the latter basically worked out as a weird intermediate stage between the original red Knock Out and the Beast Hunters remix.

The one toy that interested me out of the few that got the Dark Energon treatment was Starscream, because his colourscheme was pure Skywarp, only translucent. Facing the fact that Hasbro seemingly had no plans to repaint either the FE Starscream mold or the Voyager version as either Thundercracker or Skywarp (leaving it to Takara Tomy to do the decent thing), getting my hands on Dark Energon Sky-Star-Warp-Scream seemed like a cool way of halving the expensive import costs, and giving me a more interesting take on Skywarp to go along with an eventual Thundercracker.

Of course, you already know how that turned out, because I bought both of the Arms Micron repaints... but let's take a look at the toy that almost became my TFPrime Skywarp...

Vehicle Mode:
So here we have the FE Starscream mold in what would normally be considered Skywarp's colours... albeit translucent smokey grey plastic rather than solid black, and with a comparatively washed-out - though still fairly bold - purple paint on the wings and tailfin. The plastic on his undercarriage is more on the magenta side than usual, a quality somewhat exaggerated by my weird camera and/or the lighting conditions at the time I took the photos below. There are also touches of a very dark, desaturated blue - the nosecone, afterburner, and his rubbery missiles - to bring a bit more of Starscream's traditional colourscheme. At least some of the purple plastic has a fine metallic flake, and the paint on the wings and tailfin are clearly intended to match this, but the colour is far less saturated. The cockpit is painted with an opaque orangy-gold colour, which seems odd given how much of this toy is made up of translucent plastic... but I guess a translucent colour over such dark translucent grey wouldn't have worked.

Probably the strangest unique feature of this version of the mold is the pastel purple cross behind the Decepticon insignia on each wing. This embellishment seems to have been applied to all the Decepticons in the Dark Energon subline, while the Autobots had their insignia backed with what appears to have been a gold shield. Not sure of the purpose or reason behind either, but the insignia on this figure's wings immediately put me in mind of a skull and crossbones.

This figure oddly reminds me the grey version of Energon Starscream in that it's a dark, ghostly version of a Starscream mold, but I like the fact that it could equally well represent a mid-teleport Skywarp similar to the BotCon 2013 Machine Wars version.


Robot Mode:
There's absolutely no reduction in Skywarp-ness in this mode, though the stark, subtly pearlised purple on the lower legs and biceps is a bit of a break with tradition. His paint job is remarkably subtle - likely to avoid covering up too much of the translucent plastic - but effective nonetheless. The central panel on his groin is painted blue, while the chest features only three touches of purple paint - the Y-shape below his collar and two curved armour panels on either side of the chest - thus, the appearance of movie Starscream's face in the chest sculpt is entirely disguised. The metallic orange belly looks really weird because it's lost the context it had in vehicle mode and becomes about the brightest point on this figure apart from his face and the swishes of silver on the tops of his thighs.

Aside from his missiles, the only parts molded in blue plastic/rubber are his feet, his head and the knee-spikes are rubber. The feet, naturally, are unpainted, while the head has a couple of purple stripes running over the top of his head, either side of his silver-painted rubber central crest. The face, obviously, is the same as always, and painted silver here, while his eyes are purple.

I'm not against the idea of translucent TransFormers toys - the BotCon Mirage was pretty cute, if a little plain as it was pretty much all one colour - but I wish they could be a bit more consistently translucent. I get the need for certain structural parts being made from different plastics which have to be opaque, but for this figure to have translucent shoulders, forearms and thighs, but opaque biceps and lower legs looks really weird... although it does still give the impression of a mid-warp Skywarp.



I quite like the FE Starscream mold - as evidenced by the sheer number of iterations of it I now have in my collection - and certainly rate it as one of the best Deluxe class models in the TF Prime line, so it's a real shame it never got a mass release.

This so-called Dark Energon version really does feel like Hasbro's way of providing a Skywarp without actually labelling it 'Skywarp' and thereby leaving those of us with Seeker OCD to feel aggrieved due to the lack of a Western release of any form of Thundercracker figure. Had this not been superseded by Takara Tomy's Arms Micron Skywarp, I would have been reasonably happy with this as a Skywarp, but now it's simply become another one of Starscream's clone experiments.

The whole 'Dark Energon' thing was a strange diversion on Hasbro's part. To this day, the TransFormers: Prime toyline feels like it was small enough to have re-released all the characters as translucent references to other characters, yet they released only three other Deluxes (Bumblebee as a translucent, sparkly Goldbug homage, Wheeljack as a translucent adaptation of Action Master Slicer and a translucent green and purple Knock Out because... why not?) and rather ugly recolourings of Voyager class Megatron and Optimus Prime, all of which initially available only via Big Bad Toy Store, with a version of FE Cliffjumper coming from that year's San Diego Comic Con. It feels as though they missed a trick by not expanding this line - Synthetic Energon Ratchet, anyone? - but, for whatever reason, Hasbro's focus switched to the largely incongruous Beast Hunters. Starscream is the only one of the Dark Energon figures I bought, though a friend of mine picked up Bumblebee at a convention, and the vendor tried really hard to get me to buy Knock Out. To this day, the Dark Energon variants are neither difficult nor even especially expensive to acquire - MISB - by shopping around on the secondary market... The only question being why you'd want to bother considering the small selection on offer.