This has naturally led me, later in life, to seek out some of the figures I missed out on. Just as naturally, original G1 toys from those days are frequently in a poor state due to having been extensively played with - chipped paint and worn stickers, at the very least - and several were notorious for breaking, not least Mirage with his fragile waist joint. While some original figures have been re-released in Takara's TransFormers Collection/Encore or Hasbro's Commemorative Series and Platinum Edition, several molds are long known to have either gone missing, or become degraded beyond repair, meaning several key figures will never see a re-release.
However, Knockoffs have been springing up, including some of those supposedly missing or irretrievable molds. This one appeared on eBay mid-2019, listed as a genuine G1 toy but, since Sunstreaker is one of those that cannot be given an official re-release, and the chances of finding one still sealed in his box are beyond slim, the simple fact that this existed, and was priced at a mere £30 was enough to prove, sight unseen, that this was a knockoff. Since I already have a KO G1 Mirage, and its quality is impressive, I figured I may as well give this a spin...
Packaging:
As with Mirage, this is a pretty decent reproduction of the G1, Diaclone-derived Autobot car boxes, even down to the awesome battle scene on the back (though it looks rather faded compared to the real thing - perhaps intended to enhance the impression of authenticity, given it's supposed age), the Tech Specs, and even the Robot Points to cut out and save for special offers that rarely carried over to the UK.
Just like the other KO, the most obvious indications that this is not genuine - other than the virtually pristine condition of the box - is the inconsistency of virtually all of the text, including the weight and alignment of characters. It reminds me a lot of what would happen when I tried to get Adobe Illustrator to auto-trace scanned text if a matching font wasn't available - not too bad from a distance, but a closer examination reveals that it's very poorly done. Still, you have to applaud the attempt at matching the distinctive style of Generation 1 packaging.
One rather curious feature of this Knockoff is that the instruction leaflet is bilingual - English and French - and the copyright information portrays it as a Canadian release, from Hasbro's Quebec branch.
Vehicle Mode:
Sunstreaker's distinctive modified Countach is definitely not as elegant as Sideswipe's stock model. The supercharger and spoiler sitting on the back, as well as the widened rear and squared-off sides, take a beautifully angled car and cover half of it with gaudy, superfluous features. Much as I dislike the cartoon aesthetic of the Masterpiece version, I feel Takara Tomy's designers were wise to include a stock configuration for Sunstreaker's vehicle mode, making the supercharger optional.
The bulk of the vehicle is yellow - painted die-cast metal making up the front of the vehicle - with black paint across its minimalist grille and in the scoop details on the sides, while a series of black stickers run across the front bumper round to the front wheel wells, then back along the bottom of the 'doors'. None of these stick especially well - evidently the glue and the paint don't mix well - so I may peel them off and just paint in the black at some point. Red stickers - holdovers from the original, red Diaclone toy - cover the black plastic making up half of the rear wheel well section, then additional pipework details are added to the supercharger by way of a sticker.
Aside from the Autobot insignias, the only other vehicle-specific sticker is the Countach name on the spoiler. This sticker, being text-based, suffers from much the same problems as the box art - none of the letters on either side appear to be set at quite the same angle and, while the characters U, N and T are merged, the letters C and O on the left side, and A, C and H on the right have their full, individual borders, albeit overlapping in places.
As was traditional with all the Diaclone-derived cars, the hubcaps are chromed, and the cockpit can be opened to accommodate a driver mini-figure. I do rather wish that some of these Knockoff figures included Diaclone drivers as an extra... though I guess that would rather detract from the attempted authenticity of the G1 package.
Some of Sunstreaker's accessories can be plugged into vehicle mode via the small (approx. 4mm) ports at the back of the vehicle, though they're all inclined to clash with the forearm that sticks out below the spoiler.
There are two main issues with this vehicle mode, aside from the dodgy aesthetics of its customisation. First and foremost, the front of the vehicle doesn't fasten together, or even into its vehicle mode position, so it's very easy to knock the two halves out of alignment. Secondly - and this may be an issue with the KO more than the original mold - there's a large, black plate on the underside which clips around an internal hinge for stability... but the hinge section seems marginally wider than the gap in the plate, so it's very tricky to get it to clip on. Once it's there, it holds almost perfectly, but the plastic has to be bent slightly to fit it in place. Aside from that, there's a small tolerance issue on mine whereby the cockpit canopy doesn't seem to fold down properly, but it's not as if it has any tabs and sockets to hold it in place. One of the biggest drawbacks of G1 toys, generally, which has adversely affected their longevity, was that they seldom used substantial tabs for anything, relying on friction to hold things together.
Robot Mode:
I'm pretty certain I would have eventually bought Sunstreaker if I'd had the chance but, of the 1984 Autobot selection, I only bought Ratchet, with Jazz picked up much later, thanks to the 1990 European re-release in Classic Heroes packaging, Hound from the 2004 TF Collection re-release, while Sideswipe and Prowl entered my collection thanks to Hasbro's Toys'R'Us exclusive Commemorative Series, likely the same year. Thanks to his unique transformation, he looks nothing like his brother, nor any of the other 1984 toys - he's comparatively tall (maybe a head taller than Sideswipe) and, while very wide-looking from the front or back, he's surprisingly slender compared to those characters whose entire car bonnet stuck out from their torso. His spoiler looks a little awkward, sticking quite a distance out of his back, but that's a comparatively minor problem in a G1 toy.
The main things that work against Sunstreaker are the T-shaped plate that acts as a heel spur, but actually joins his legs and the back of the ankles, and the low shoulders coupled with long arms, which leave his hands hanging well below knee level. The former is pretty much the only thing keeping him upright in robot mode, while the latter is merely a symptom of his rather basic construction and, in the grand scheme of things, doesn't look too bad.
What I find quite bizarre about Sunstreaker's stickers is that so many of them are positioned in such a way that they're obscured in both modes. The groin sticker is clear enough as it's almost entirely behind the transparent front windscreen, with only the outer edges covered by the painted frame... but the two stickers placed either side of the Diaclone cockpit feature striping details that are almost perfectly in line with the angles of the window frames, with only the red vent details being easily visible at the bottom. He also has a pair of internal structure detail stickers on the insides of his legs, seemingly to complement the sculpted details of his shins, but not particularly visible due to his boxy construction.
Paint budgets on G1 toys were normally spent covering the die-cast metal and transparent plastic parts with whatever colour was needed, while striping and details tended to be stickers which would either be factory applied or appear on the included sticker sheets. The sum total of Sunstreaker's metal is in his feet, while the canopy's requirements aren't that extensive but, overall, it's probably comparable to some recent figures in the extent of the paint coverage. He has additional applications of black paint on his shins - thankfully glossy enough that the raised details there actually catch the light a little. As with any other TransFormers toy from that period, the only other paintwork is on the head, but the chrome parts are still quite prominent in robot mode, and liven things up a bit.
Unlike a lot of G1 toys, Sunstreaker's weapons are basically built-in to the robot - his forearms house spring-loaded launchers of very authentic G1 strength - make sure they're pointed away from your face! These can accommodate his fists, one of the three included chromed missles, or the yellow 'piledriver' attachments which are normally seen on his shoulders. Something I hadn't realised about these last parts is that they are actually two-part accessories: the trapezoid block surrounds a loose central pin, which has the clip for plugging them into his wrists. I get the feeling that the idea was that the spring-loaded launcher would fire off the central pin within the trapezoid block but, since the block itself doesn't attach anywhere, the whole thing fires off, meaning they're not especially effective piledrivers. I may well be entirely wrong, though, as the instructions refer to these as 'Rocket Boosters', solely for installation on his shoulders. It just strikes me that, had the trapezoid blocks clipped around the wrists, the spring-loaded mechanism would make the pins function like pneumatic drills...
Sunstreaker's head is probably one of the most contentious in G1, as far as I'm concerned. In both the comics and the TV show, he was depicted as having a humanoid head with large, angled, Elephant ear-like protrusions from the sides. This look has carried over into more recent interpretations, from Classics and Binaltech/Alternators, to Combiner Wars, Masterpiece and even the upcoming War for Cybertron: Earthrise figure. It's my humble opinion that this is entirely wrong, and Sunstreaker's humanoid-shaped head sits within a large, vented collar and should have been depicted as moving independently of it. This Knockoff appears to have a fairly well-reproduced version of the original sculpt - the vents are sharp, the angles of his face are pretty cleanly defined - but the paint job is pretty sloppy, with yellow overspray on both eyes and on the collar. Looking at the finer details of the face, he appears to have a small indentation on the left side of the bridge of his nose, and the area between his bottom lip and chin block seems to be a bit scratched up but, to be honest, it's nowhere near as bad as the official reworking of Jazz's head sculpt that left him with a weird, droopy-lipped smirk.
As with all G1 toys, transformation is very simplistic - extend the legs, open the flap on the underside then swing the arms out, swing the canopy back/up the body, flip the head up, close up the flap on the back, then attach the accessories. I've only seen a few videos of original G1 Sunstreaker toys but, based on them, there appears to be a flaw in the Knockoff that makes bringing his arms out a rather unpleasant experience. Basically, there's quite a bit of upper arm plastic above the hinge joint, and that catches on the front section of the rear wheel well on both sides. It does eventually pop past, and changing the angle of the upper arm can help, but it appears to be putting some stress on the hinge that swings the black shoulder mass out to the sides. Also - again, probably due to this being a KO - there's nothing to actually hold the black plate in place on his back - it clips in (reluctantly) in vehicle mode, but not in robot mode. Sometimes, friction alone is enough to hold it in place... but other times, it'll just flop back and turn into a butt-cape, somewhat reminiscent of the Binaltech/Alternators version.
Articulation is very much on a par with most G1 toys - the legs do nothing, but the arms have a decent range, most of which due to transformation. The main shoulder joint swings the arm back and forward, butterfly-style, then the arms can be raised only out/up to the sides (the full range being a little over 135°). The elbow, meanwhile has a full 180° range of bend, since either arm can be made to occupy either position in vehicle mode - much like the arms-under-the-bonnet arrangement of the likes of Jazz and Prowl, etc. The wrists are technically articulated, as the pegs on the hands, missiles and piledrivers are all round, rather than the cross-shaped style adopted in more recent lines. It could also be argued that the feet are articulated but, since the legs are immobile, the ability to fold the feet up and down independently ain't much use to anyone...
Since I knew I was buying a Knockoff, and even though my KO Mirage is excellent, I wasn't expecting much, quality-wise, from this... but I've actually been pleasantly surprised again. I gather he's missing a couple of stickers (headlights - though I'm not sure if these were factory-applied or paintwork on the real thing, or even if they were actually exclusive to the Diaclone toy), and the paint on the feet started chipping almost instantly, but he's still a decent quality toy, given that he's based on something almost 40 years old now. I'm concerned that the arms are going to break off eventually but almost all my concerns and complaints are outweighed by the simple fact that I now have a decent facsimilie of G1 Sunstreaker in my collection, and it only cost me £30.
No comments:
Post a Comment