The Energon Pub

[Ramrider]

I'm not sure if this has been covered before (I certainly don't remember seeing anything), but I've been wondering about it for years.

Clearly something about Sideswipe and Sunstreaker is very mixed up.

Sideswipe has always been described as having shoulder-mounted flares, piledrivers and a rocket pack, and Sunstreaker with a rifle and surface-to-air rocket launcher. Yet the toys, and by extension, every version of the characters we've ever seen, have been equipped the other way around - the missiles that Sunstreaker uses look like they could easily be the piledrivers, and the detachable shoulder pieces are pretty undoubtedly flares.

Has it ever been confirmed one way or another where the mix-up occurred, and what the right arrangement should be?

Has Sideswipe been the egotistical, bloodthirsty one all this time?

[Wreckgar]

I believe this has been tackled several times. Essencially, I think you're right. At some point in the design stages, the profiles were swapped. Whether or not it was a mistake or deliberate, I couldn't say though.

[ChromedomeMK2]

I'm not sure if this has been covered before (I certainly don't remember seeing anything), but I've been wondering about it for years.

Clearly something about Sideswipe and Sunstreaker is very mixed up.

Sideswipe has always been described as having shoulder-mounted flares, piledrivers and a rocket pack, and Sunstreaker with a rifle and surface-to-air rocket launcher. Yet the toys, and by extension, every version of the characters we've ever seen, have been equipped the other way around - the missiles that Sunstreaker uses look like they could easily be the piledrivers, and the detachable shoulder pieces are pretty undoubtedly flares.

Has it ever been confirmed one way or another where the mix-up occurred, and what the right arrangement should be?

Has Sideswipe been the egotistical, bloodthirsty one all this time?

I think your riht and there were some other mixed up tech bios as well like Starscram's and Skywarp's.

[Jelze Bunnycat]

Indeed, some Tech Specs were either incorrect or switched by mistake. Sidewswipe and Sunstreaker are one example, while Starscream and Skywarp are another. G1 Scorponok had a Tech Spec line that has mistake written all over it: it wasn't just flipped top to bottom, but it was a few points below where it should be as well.

[ScorpoMax]

I believe that what really happened was that the character designs got switched around early when the series was being planned.

The first design for Sideswipe was actually Sunstreaker colored red and vice versa. I remember back in 1984 when G1 first came out, there were a lot of kids books that seemed to switch the characters around and/or miscolored them.

When Transformers were first coming out, TF artists were going through a lot of trial and error trying to settle on comic designs that would work. The result was a lot of confusing changes in character appearance, for example: in the first two issues of the Marvel series Ironhide and Ratchet looked just like their original diaclone designs, while Cliffjumper and Bumblebee look totally WTF.

The switched designs of the Lambor bros is just another example. #2 of the American Marvel series had Sunstreaker using Sideswipe's design, only he was colored yellow. The following issue had Sunstreaker with the design we're all familiar with (with the hood forming his feet), but now he was colored red.

Here's a more interesting example of the pangs that the TF creators were going through early on: some of the very first commercials for transformers showed an animated Megatron colored exactly like the comic series (black helmet and everything). Scroll through his wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatron,
and you'll see a picture of it.