Toys like Shockwave, Omega Supreme and this one were licensed for US distribution from companies other than Takara, and who frequently already had some sort of domestic and non-US distribution in place with other companies (ToyCo's Astro Magnum came to the UK as Tandy/Radio Shack's Galactic Man, while Toybox's Mechbot-1 turned up in Grandstand's Converters line as Omegatron). Takara - quite rightly - declined to distribute toys made by others and, even in those days, Hasbro's distribution in the UK was less than optimal.
As far as I can tell, though, the toy that became Sky Lynx wasn't picked up for distribution by anyone else in any other territories, making him that much rarer and harder to find until Takara Tomy's 2008 Encore-branded re-release. This, naturally, has seen its price increased on the secondary market but, right at the start of the year, I found a second-hand Sky Lynx on eBay, priced at a little over half the current average, once shipping from Australia was taken into account
Naturally, I hit the 'Buy It Now' button as soon as I saw it - opportunities like this don't come along very often!
Packaging:
The first thing that struck me, when I picked up the box from the Post Office, was that he's pretty bloody huge - far larger than I'd expected as, at that point, I hadn't looked into comparisons between Sky Lynx and other contemporary toys I might have in my collection. Granted, the postal box was larger than the Encore display box (it was two boxes taped together, in fact, so I'm surprised it hadn't fallen apart in transit from Australia), but Sky Lynx's box comes in at 306mm x 445mm x 118mm (12" x 17.5" x 4.6"), making it the largest official, non-Masterpiece box I've seen since my collecting days began back in the 1980s - certainly larger than the average BotCon boxed set, though not as sturdy.
Encore took a very G1 approach to its box design, replicating the G1 box art almost perfectly - it probably uses the same photographic assets, to be honest - with the only differences being the use of the Japanese logos and text, and (regrettably) the omission of his Tech Specs card. The back of the box features the battle scene from the 1986 US toys - with Metroplex under siege by Trypticon, and the usual duplicates of various characters to showcase their robot and vehicle modes - along with a handful of product shots, loosely describing transformation.
Inside, the toys are packaged in a plastic shell, rather than G1-style polystyrene foam, with the collectors' card, 2-colour instruction sheet and stickers bagged separately. They probably could have reduced the size of the box by packing the two components differently, but I believe they've kept it as close to the original as possible in every respect.
Dino-Bird
Vehicle Mode:
Considering how much I like the Space Shuttle, it may suprise you to learn that this component of the toy was not the main draw for me. It's a perfectly serviceable representation of the shuttle, with a fair amount of surface detail - far more than I'd expected, to be honest - but, accuracy of the overall shape aside, it's not particularly exciting. It's a very basic model.
Molded almost entirely in white plastic, there's no paintwork at all, just some gold chrome for the cockpit windows at the front. The included sticker set adds further gold chrome, printed with a black grid pattern, to the sides and tail fin of the shuttle. Each wing gets a large Autobot insignia, also printed on the gold chrome stock, making them that little bit more striking. The back end of the shuttle has the main boosters attached to a large black plastic panel, while the two manoevring thrusters are separate pieces of black plastic screwed into the main shell of the shuttle, at the back of the bulging sections on either side of the rear fin.
The underside is pretty much devoid of detail apart from the undercarriage housing the robot's legs (which double as a convenient display stand for the shuttle when separate from its carrier), though it looks very much as though the compartment which would normally store landing gear has been indicated by a raised rectangular blob on the underside of the nose.
Probably the most interesting feature of this part of the toy is the fact that the cargo bay doors - truncated though they are - can open to reveal a gold chromed payload. The doors are about half the length they should be, probably less, due to the necessities of Sky Lynx's transformation. Specifically, the shuttle itself is almost entirely hollow, with Sky Lynx's neck stowed in the front half and his tail in the back half, below the shell of the payload. There's a small amount of sculpted detail on the inside faces of each cargo bay door, and the payload itself, while not intricately detailed, certainly resembles a small satellite with its solar panels folded in on each side.
Robot Mode:
Before anything else, I'm going to note the obvious flaw in my photographs. When I started transforming Sky Lynx for the first time I saw that there's a J-shaped internal channel for the tail extension which, in theory, allows it to pull out far enough that the black rear panel can clip back into place above the tail, while the tail itself actually clips onto the underside. However, the amount of force required to do this initially made me uncomfortable, and unclipping the tail to transform him back to shuttle mode is equally troublesome, so I generally prefer not to pull the tail out fully. Hence, in most of the photos below, his tail is nowhere near fully extended, and the booster flap is just hanging off to one side. I've included a handful of close-up shots of the tail for comparison but, for most purposes, I'm reluctant to risk a breakage due to poorly-designed transformation joints. Just to give an idea of this toy's size, from the tip of the nose to the tip of the tail at full extension on both, the dino-bird measures almost 50cm (approx 19.5"), while his wing span is about 30cm (12"), so not fully deploying the tail also made it far easier to fit him into my light tent, which is only 50cm³.
I can imagine that, back in the mid-1980s, a toy like this would have been something really special - it's certainly not as if TransFormers toys were super-articulated at this point, so I doubt anyone would have been expecting flappy wings. The blue sections of wing are nevertheless the toy's weakest point, as the primary sections pull out from the front of the wingtips, leaving about 1.5cm (about 0.6") of the shuttle's wing unaffected, and then the secondary sections are hinged from the frontmost corners of the primary sections. They're about half the size, and don't extend far enough to make them appear to be part of the shuttle wings... It ends up looking as though the blue wing parts are below the shuttle's wings, rather than part of them. Additionally, while there's some bold panel lining sculpted into the blue parts, it doesn't have a great deal of detail or visual interest the way some sort of robo-feathering would have.
Sky Lynx comes with no weapon accessories, but there's a gun - described in the US toy's Tech Specs as an 'Acetylene Blaster' - attached to the roof of his mouth, though it's directed straight forward, and anything it fired would barely clear his teeth. The transformation pegs on the sections of shuttle nose on either side of the neck can be rotated forward so they vaguely resemble guns, but it requires a lot of imagination and they're not easily directable as guns because of the panel of cockpit roof hanging down on the back of the bird's head. Meanwhile the panel that folds up to release the neck extension in the first place has some raised lines on its inside, so it can be left up as a sort of radar dish... but it can't lock into place and consequently tends to flop back down easily.
The main differences between the Encore re-release and the original G1 figure are that the inside of this one's mouth has been partly painted red to match the other robot parts, while the gun has been painted grey to help it stand out. The red paint is substantially more magenta than any of the red plastic, so it's not a great match... and I rather wish they'd done something about the serrated teeth. Gold chrome would have been ideal here - if a little ostentatious, even for Sky Lynx - but the teeth are part of the same white plastic sections as the jaws, and selective chroming is not normally possible.
Lynx
Vehicle Mode:
Visually, the crawler is certainly the less exciting of the pair, but this is where Sky Lynx's battery powered features are housed. Surprisingly, while other reissued toys with battery operated gimmicks were optimised to run with two AA batteries in place of the G1 toys' reliance on 9v bricks, it turns out the original Sky Lynx ran on two AA batteries in the first place. The battery compartment door fastens via a slide clip rather than a screw, making it far more convenient for installing/removing/replacing batteries.
Adjacent to the battery cover on the underside are the two switches governing Sky Lynx's motorised functions. The first, closest to the battery compartment, is the Walk/Roll function switch - Roll being the function to be used in vehicle mode. The second switch, set at the back of the vehicle between the two 'tail' protrusions and just behind the motorised wheels, is the On/Off switch. When running, the motor is very loud, yet surprisingly slow and, for no obvious reason, the crawler refuses to roll in a straight line. Rudimentary steering is accomplished via a manually-adjustable axle in front of the battery compartment, though it requires precise fine-tuning to stop it veering off to one side or the other. Its ability to roll at all does very much depend on the surface it's rolling on. Carpet is not the terrain Sky Lynx was designed to traverse - not only is it too irregular and soft, but I'd worry about loose fibres clogging up the wheels eventually.
What you have here, though, is a large blue slab with wheels on the underside and two folded-up legs poorly disguised on the left and right sides. There's a lot more sculpted surface detail - some of it appearing vaguely functional (raised pipework down the right side of the top), while other parts suggest more significant features (not least a total of five hatches - two at the front, three grouped together and highlighted with panel lining toward the back). At the front of the vehicle, there are raised details which could be headlights, while the heels of the robot's feet each have a group of three inverted-U shaped protrusions which could also represent lights. Alternatively, the lined, red stubs of the Lynx component's twin tails could be taken to be lights... Then again, I'm not sure what sort of lights the average NASA crawler has...
Like the shuttle component, there's no paintwork on this toy, and only the very back of the robot's chromed head is visible at the front of the vehicle. He has a set of metallic red stickers on his back - running down what will become the robot's shoulders and haunches - as well as metallic red and gold chrome stickers on the sides, mostly obscured by the folded-up legs, and all of the stickers feature a grid pattern - the gold matching those of the shuttle component, while the red has a smaller grid. The only other decoration is an Autobot insignia on the front of the vehicle.
As mentioned above, there are no weapon accessories, and the crawler component has no other discernible function, while the TV show suggested it was a transport pod capable of carrying a number of Autobots thanks to Sky Lynx's variable on-screen scale. It is interesting to note the similarity in appearance between the three connecting pegs on the crawler's back and the Powerlinx pegs from TransFormers Armada toys, even down to the sunken centre. Sadly, they're of a 6mm diameter, just that little bit too large for the sockets on Mini-Cons.
Robot Mode:
There's no arguing that Sky Lynx's feline component is rather a chonky boi. More than that, with his enormous, boxy legs and massive, boot-like feet, he looks like one of those cats who has been forced into human-style clothing for a 'cute' Instagram post. Those two-toed feet are possibly the most incongruous aspect of the design, in that they're oddly prescient for a G1 toy - feet like these wouldn't look out of place on a movie toy, albeit perhaps rather curvier.
There's not a great deal to be said for the look of the quadruped component, as the legs are simply the crawler's side-mounted chunks, rotated down and locked into positions dictated by the motorised feature, while the feet hang loose at the ankles to better facilitate a semi-stable walking action. Sculpted detail on the legs is vague and perfunctory, and seems to suggest the actual 'legs' are somewhat slimmer than the red plastic frames used. Each of the blue protrusions on his rear sprouts a curious, rigid red 'tail', and the gold and metallic red stickers on the sides of his chest and belly are revealed. A lot of it feels like colour for the sake of colour - and the choice of 'red, white and blue' feels like a low-effort means of indicating that this is one of the good guys - rather than decisions made based on what would make the toy look impressive, or what would make the two component vehicles/robots compelling enough on their own, while still creating a coherent gestalt.
The head sculpt is probably one of the ugliest, boxiest, supposedly-feline heads ever seen in the TransFormers toyline. It has no discernible ears, the snout is just a raised rectangle running along the centre of the head from the brow, and the 'mouth' pretty much fails to register as open because the whole head is covered with gold chrome. A pair of wide 'fangs' appear as barely raised details between the level of the 'inner' parts of the mouth and the raised line of the 'lips', but that's all the mouth detail there is, which is all the more surprising in comparison with the Dino-Bird, with its articulated jaw and the serrated teeth within. While the head looks reasonably feline in profile, from every other angle, it's just a gold chunk sticking out at the front. The one improvement this Encore version has over the G1 original is that his eyes are painted cyan... but Reprolabels provide 'bonus' stickers to accomplish the same effect on the G1 toy, as well as stickers to black out the majority of the 'mouth'.
The walking action in this form is every bit as loud as the rolling action in crawler mode, but slower and looks very laboured. It's certainly not one of the most elegant motorised features on a TransFormers toy and, just like crawler mode, it seems to favour turning to the left as it progresses. Still, even today, I'm very tickled by a toy that can move under its own steam, especially when it does so on legs rather than wheels. It's not as impressive as Trypticon, perhaps, but he is substantially smaller, at about 26.5cm (about 10.5") from the tip of his nose to the tips of his tails.
Sky Lynx
Combined Vehicle Mode:
This isn't the traditional format for a shuttle on a crawler - normally a real-life shuttle would be already attached to its boosters and their external tank, all arranged standing on end and ready for launch, rather than laying horizontal... Then again, the G1 cartoon tended to cast the crawler as more of a cargo pod or personnel carrier for the shuttle, rather than just a ground-based transport unit.
Nothing special happens when the two vehicles are connected via the three large pegs on the crawler's back and the corresponding sockets on the underside of the shuttle - no suddenly-deploying weaponry or secret features - but it's quite a firm connection. The weight of the carrier is not so great that it falls off when lifted only by the shuttle part alone, nor does the presence of the shuttle's extra weight have any discernible effect on the crawler's ability to roll on a good, smooth surface.
Combined Robot Mode:
One thing I can say in favour of Combiner Wars Sky Lynx - and the upcoming Earthrise Sky Lynx - is that their robot modes are rather more convincing and coherent than this. Whether it's because the Lynx part is too long, the shuttle part is too small, or just that the connections between the two are too far back on the Lynx, this just looks like the Dino-Bird is simply riding the Lynx's decapitated body. There's almost a full 5cm (2") of the walker part exposed in front of the base of Sky Lynx's neck, and it looks rather weird.
Still, it retains all the poseability of the Dino-Bird and the battery-powered, motorised walking action of the feline component... It's also pretty huge. Still not quite rivalling G1 Trypticon, but certainly one of the largest Autobot toys I own from this era - I look forward to being able to compare him to Metroplex, once the opportunity presents itself.
There are a handful of videos on YouTube that compare the walking speeds of Trypticon, Sky Lynx and Omega Supreme, and the Decepticon city-former's longer stride makes him by far the fastest walker on any terrain, with the speed of the other two being very much affected by the surface they're placed on. I'm not sure how the Encore version compares to the original, but this thing has great difficulty walking on my lounge carpet and doesn't do much better on the smoother fabric of my sofa. One of these days, perhaps I'll compare Trypticon's walking speed to Sky Lynx's rolling speed...
Transformation of both components is simplicity itself. For the shuttle, it's just a case of lifting the flap just in front of the bay doors to allow the neck to extend, open the boosters at the back to allow the tail to extend, pull out the wings and swing down the legs. The crawler component just needs the feet unclipped from their vehicle mode position to allow them to swing freely, the legs get swung down till the little red button adjacent to each one pops out to indicate that it's locked into the correct walking position, the tails get pulled out at the back and the head gets flipped up at the front. Combining the two in either form just requires the Dino-Bird's legs and the Lynx's head to be put back into their vehicle mode position, then the Dino-Bird simply plugs onto the Lynx's back.
The articulation in the neck and tail of the Dino-Bird are surprising enough for the time, though what's there is mostly just necessary for transformation. The joints are all simple hinges allowing a section of the neck/tail to move up or down versus the next, and there's no lateral movement - or even rotation - anywhere. The double-hinge at the base of the neck offer a combined range of about 90°, the next is about 180°, then another of about 90°, and the final joint - limited by the position of the jaw and the white shell part on the back of the head - gives about another 90°. All of these are arranged in such a way that Sky Lynx can swing his head just over 90° up/back, or hang his head in shame, between his front legs. The hinge at the base of the tail allows it to swing from almost horizontal to almost straight down (not quite 90°), then there are two joints at the tip. The first has a range of about 150-160°, while the one attached to the shuttle's tail fin only offers about 90°. Comparatively speaking, the legs have only rudimentary articulation, all of which is present for transformation, but the absence of knee joints probably works in the Dino-Bird's favour, since they would probably only weaken his legs. The big surprise is that it's actually quite easy to get him to stand on his comparatively small feet. It's even possible to get him to stand with one leg far enough ahead of the other that the body angles downward but, at that point, he's starting to become substantially less stable. I gather the original G1 toy frequently suffered from weak neck joints, but everything seems sufficiently tight on this Encore version so far.
That basically covers all the available articulation in this toy, since the Lynx component has no real manual articulation unless you count partially transforming the head to give the impression he's looking down. That's still better than I'd expected of a motorised Generation 1 toy and, while it may not be on a par with Combiner Wars Sky Lynx, let alone the Earthrise update, the motorised walking action more than makes up for that in my books. While I wouldn't want motorised gimmicks to make a comeback (even in the light of the Third-Party self-transforming robot trucks already available), I can't deny that they have a certain impact in a collection of Generation 1 toys.
To be honest, Sky Lynx was never one of those US-only TransFormers toys that I coveted back in the day. He didn't seem to quite fit with the rest of the toyline, not least because there were comparatively few beast-formers that weren't minions for either Soundwave or Blaster, and the obvious reason for that is that he was one of several toys Hasbro licensed and slapped TransFormers branding onto. The strange thing about him is that I've never seen either Toybox's own version, or a version of Sky Lynx licensed by any other company. I own a 'Third Party' Shockwave, and I was aware of Grandstand's Omegatron, so it seems strange that there are no obvious records or images of any versions of this toy released outside the TransFormers brand.
Furthermore, according to TFWiki, this Encore re-release only happened because, after the merger between Tomy and Takara, a member of the TransFormers team noticed the development codename "shuttle dinosaur" among Tomy's assets, and it transpired that Sky Lynx had been developed by Tomy based on Toybox's design.
Sky Lynx was effectively a late Christmas present to myself (or perhaps a super-early Birthday present to myself), and an absolute bargain at just over £70 including shipping from the other side of the planet. Since the Encore version sometimes commands about twice that, and the complete G1 version substantially more, I feel very fortunate to have found him at so reasonable a cost... The only drawback is that it has re-awakened my appreciation for motorised toys, and now I really want to get my hands on Omega Supreme as well!
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