This one, perhaps, had the dubious benefit of being a fairly blatant G1 Jetfire homage, as well as seeming to complement the Energon version of Jetfire. But is a colourscheme that's as nostalgic as it is complementary to a contemporary enough to make a toy interesting in and of itself?
Vehicle Mode:
So, yes, it's pretty clear that this thing is intended to homage G1 Jetfire - or, perhaps more accurately, Skyfire, the version of the character from the TV show - due to his bulky sci-fi aircraft aesthetic and the largely white-and-red colourscheme. Of course, the Macross holdover FAST Pack and armour are lost... but they're also, to a degree, built into the design of the jet. The red protrusions from either side of the nose section - wrapped as they are in the bulky grey and white booster sections from which the wings protrude - could easily be the remnants of formerly separate parts. Normally, a jet would have intakes in these positions, but these features on Skyblast are not open at the front.
The booster sections are a little unsightly, overall, but they do feature the appearance of semi-functional components - on the underside, there are protruding nubs that seem to be the closest this thing gets to 'landing gear', while on the top, he appears to have a couple of guns on each side. The wings themselves are tipped with cylindrical chunks which could also be guns.
While the jet's nose - and particularly the choice to mold it in translucent red plastic - seems to belie any connection to Jetfire/Skyfire, the cyan panel in the raised rear section of the jet's main body is a clear homage the the G1 character's animation model, whose remodelled FAST Pack-analogue featured a section which was occasionally - but certainly not consistently - coloured blue to resemble a secondary cockpit canopy. That whole section on this toy consequently looks like a smaller, separate aircraft (like a stylised Lockheed Martin X-33) due to its angled fins.
Paintwork is surprisingly plentiful... Though I guess I'm now looking at this figure from sixteen years ago through the lens of Hasbro's more recent output, so perhaps I shouldn't be surprised - it's actually fairly average by Energon/Superlink standards. The upper surface of the nose is painted white, with black and gold surrounding the cockpit canopy and - weirdly - small applications of white paint on what appear to be recessed guns in front of the cockpit. The main body has applications of a gorgeous deep red paint - with, again, some overpainted white - on the front, lining up with red stripes on the leading edges of the wings, and covering the wingtips. A good proportion of the upper surface of the rear section, surrounding the Energon chip port, is also painted with the same red. There are smaller applications of gold paint applied to the wings, on raised, ridged trapezoids near their hinges, and at the back of the raised section at the rear. The afterburners are molded in grey plastic, so they don't really need paintwork, but the transformation joint inside them is fixed together with a large, flat-headed pin, which gives the afterburners an interesting-looking, reflective metal centre. The two chunky sections on each side have a raised, vented detail which is painted over with a very dark, metallic brownish-grey paint which isn't used elsewhere. Oddly, the raised Autobot insignia on each wing is painted red... but it's a much brighter, almost pinkish red, rather than the darker, bolder red used elsewhere.
Like the other Omnicons, Skyblast comes with an Energon chip and components of an Energon weapon - in this case, a spear - all molded in a deep translucent red. The plastic is gorgeous, but reminds me a little of boiled sweets, such as Fox's Glacier Fruits or Jolly Ranchers. It genuinely gets to the point where I start getting hungry just looking at these parts, and it makes me wonder why Hasbro never did TransFormers-branded, Energon Chip-shaped sweets as a tie-in... But I digress. The two halves of the spear's tip can be plugged onto his wingtips in this mode, while the shaft only seems to attach below the nose, making for a super-long gun with a couple of shorter guns either side of it.
Additionally - and somewhat like Energon Jetfire - Skyblast has a sort of claw arrangement on his underside, though I'm not entirely sure of its purpose as I've not seen much of the Energon TV show. However, since he only has two landing 'wheels' near the midsection of the underside, the claw also doubles as additional landing feet.
Robot Mode:
There's certainly no denying the Jetfire influence in robot mode, though admittedly a good amount of that seems to have been focussed on the head... on which more later. The paintwork on the 'X-33' section of the jet mode strives to echo the nose section of G1 Jetfire, both in terms of the Macross-derived toy and the terrible, blocky animation model, albeit with far more red paint in evidence here than on either of the source models.
The core robot here is small and quite stocky-looking, fairly traditional in his overall appearance, but with the vehicle mode's trappings leaving rather too much extra baggage in places. The nosecone on the back is nothing new - it's been a fairly common feature (if indicative of lazy design) since the G1 Seekers and Aerialbots - while the design and paintwork on the chest and torso is clearly intended to evoke the idea of an aircraft's nose and cockpit sections running down the length of the body. However, the wings on his arms pretty much double his width even when he's standing with his arms by his sides, and this looks absurd. Probably the craziest part is that, while the red paint on the leading
edge of each wing is still (barely) visible in this mode, the sculpted
Autobot insignia on the underside of the wings is not painted,
and the cylindrical parts on the wingtips are now presenting their
hollow side, which is barely disguised by the red paint. Posing him for display means they're not only getting in the way of anything else Skyblast might share a shelf with, but occupying vastly more space than he needs to. This could have been mitigated if they'd been hinged to fold back, but they're designed only to rotate 180° around their base for transformation. The arms themselves are pretty boxy, with the barest minimum of sculpted detail, including a raised section at the cuff that seems to represent a sort of clip holding the white armour/wing sections in place.
The legs are similarly clumsy, though their vehicle mode panels - the claws from the underside of the jet - are folded neatly onto the outsides of the lower legs, thereby providing an extra touch of colour for the otherwise very drab lower half. These red forks cover over sculpted detail on the outer face of the leg, and there's matching detail on the inside, below where the afterburners end up, but the only paintwork on the legs is the dark brownish-grey metallic paint on the main raised detail running down the shin.
Skyblast's accessories can be attached separately - the wing parts remaining in place and the gun wielded as an unfeasibly long handgun - or combined into an excellent Energon spear. This latter option is by far the preferable one, since the former increases his width still further, and the handgun is just insanely long for a figure this size. The spear, meanwhile, has three 5mm pegs, any of which can be plugged into his fists for a variety of effects. Admittedly, the one used for holding the shaft as a gun isn't especially useful, but the one set parallel to the shaft can be used either to have him holding the spear ready at his side, or as if he's preparing to throw it. Alternatively, the base of the shaft can be pegged into one fist and the spear arranged as if he's holding it two-handed, as a jabbing weapon. Sadly, the very basic articulation of the arms prevents the other fist from connecting to either of the other 5mm pegs, but it can be arranged to rest the shaft on. There's also a Mini-Con/Powerlinx socket at the top of the shaft, though Skyblast doesn't have the corresponding peg, so it's more for use on other figures. However he's holding it, though, I usually just end up wondering what flavour the spear would be...
The head sculpt has very clearly taken design cues from the G1 animation model of Skyfire in terms of its shape and colourscheme. It has the weird, flat 'aerial' on the left side but - perhaps as an nod to the Macross-derived G1 Jetfire toy - a cylindrical, grey-painted antenna on the right. The flat central crest is painted blue, but the detail within it is a gold dome rather than Skyfire's white square. The face fairly bland, with a neutral expression on a smooth, humanoid face, painted a dark, glossy grey, and with his beady little eyes painted blue. It's certainly not one of the greatest heads in the Energon line, or even in the small selection of Omnicons, not least because it has the vehicle mode's nose section hanging off it via a hinged arm embedded in the middle of the head.
Naturally, being an Omnicon, his transformation is very simple, albeit not without some unexpectedly cool features. Once the nosecone is swung forward to connect with the back of Skyblast's head, the entire chest section can be rotated 180°, which automatically twists the nose section around. None of the other Omnicons had similar Automorph-style features, but the Signal Flare mold had a feature whereby moving his gun turret/arm around caused the gun barrel to rotate. Once the nose section is transformed, Skyblast's arms need to be first straightened out and swung out to the sides to allow the lower legs to swing out and round, plugging into the torso just below the armpit. The arms can then be swung back to occupy the voids and the feet closed up around the shoulders. Rotate the wings 180°, and Skyblast is all done. There are a couple of glitches with the process on mine: the heel spurs don't fold flush against the shoulders due to some obscure alignment issue where they're pinned to the legs, and the nose section never quite sits at the right angle in jet mode due to the way the gears align between it and the rotating chest section. Nothing out of the ordinary for plastic toys, though, and I've certainly had worse problems.
There's nothing special about Skyblast's articulation, though. If anything, he's pretty sub-standard, even for an Omnicon. The only ball joints on the figure are the hips, and the only other vaguely useful joints on the legs are rotation joints just above knee-level. The transformation joints on the legs could, technically, be considered knees due to their position... but they only bend in one direction, and that's perpendicular to the feet. The toe and heel parts are hinged for transformation but, with no useful posing articulation below the hip, these are of precious little use. The arms, meanwhile, offer the bare minimum - unrestricted rotation around the shoulder, 90° swing out to the sides, and a touch over 90° bend at the elbow. Due to the internal gearing and its attachment to the jet's nose section on his back, the head cannot move at all.
Skyblast is not a terribly interesting toy beyond the G1 homage of his colourscheme and headsculpt. The geared gimmick makes for a fun transformation, but he feels very basic, even for an Energon/Superlink toy in this size class. For me, though, the only really good Omnicon was Arcee.
All things considered, I'm surprised this figure has never been repainted as a pre-Beast Wars Terrorsaur, though it has come close. In the Timelines animation 'Theft of the Golden Disk', which acted as a prequel/introduction to the BotCon set Dawn of Futures Past, the CGI model used for Terrorsaur was based on Skyblast.
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