william-james88 wrote:Caelus wrote:I'm now glad that Amazon wouldn't let me cancel the order. I would have been unhappy to overpay for him, but for $25 I'm quite satisfied just with his torso-mode alone. Surprisingly clever transformation, nice ankle tilt feet that can be used with any of the combiners, and Starscream just looks really powerful combined with the Aerialbots. His proportions have sort of an anime-esque exaggeration to them with the ridiculously broad shoulders, but he is not so top-heavy as movie Starscream.
Yes, his torso mode is definitely the best part. How do you feel about his other modes?
What are other people's thoughts on Starscream now that they have him in hand?
I've barely had him out of torso mode, because I like him so much that way - he has that some build as Liokaiser/Sky Reign that's really pleasing, and I didn't mention it before, but his back armor is remarkably 'clean' and filled in - that makes it even clearer his combiner mode was the designer's #1 priority.
That said, the jet mode has its faults, but it's... I don't know... cute? I don't know how to describe how I feel about it. It's not good, that's for sure, but I have a couple of Starscreams with very nice jet modes, so I don't feel like there was a void in my life that I needed to fill. It has a pointy nose, it has wings, it accomplishes the task of being a jet. I guess more than anything my complaints would be:
(1) I wish the cockpit were longer and used translucent plastic, because it would look better on the combiner's chest.
(2) I wish the feet folded away differently. As is, he doesn't really rest on a table top normally. Although on the other hand, you can prop him up on his thrusters like a space shuttle, or like the UNSC Sabre from Halo: Reach.
(3) I wish his feet things/guns attached differently. No matter what I do, in jet mode they look goofy and/or they don't stay on.
As far as the robot mode, it kind of grew on me. In the comics, Starscream is a pretty flamboyant, showy bot, who gets his body altered pretty much every time he needs a pick me up, like when Sally and Jane take Susan to get a make over after Steve... Yeah, no one's going to know what I'm talking about. The point is, Screamer changes his design a lot, and I can completely see him deciding one day, "You know what's in? Manga boots. And if they're not in, I'm going to make them in." And then of course that leads down the rabbit hole, because you can't have big stompy boots, without big gauntlets - otherwise Starscream would look like a Weeble, am I right? So his strangely proportioned body looks less to me like a distorted, playskool Starscream, and more like a completely normal Starscream ready to hit the red carpet, up-armored in an outfit that's more outrageous than a Bob Mackie design, but less outrageous than whatever Lady Gaga's going to show up in.
I think the big miss for his robot mode is the combiner feet. In black, they look tacked on and pointless if you attach him to his arms, but I immediately noticed something about it still appealed to me. I eventually realized that with the combiner feet attached to his arms, his profile ends up looking a lot like Cybertron/Galaxy Force Starscream.
I always liked that design, and this achieves the same, imposing silhouette, with more articulation. Plus swords that can be slotted into the nullrays' 5mm holes are easy to come by, too. The big problem, though, is that they are plain, unadorned, black plastic. If they'd been painted to match the figure, they'd look a lot more fun, and if the whole thing had been painted in his Cybertron colors, it would have made a nice non-G1 homage.
Posted: Thu Dec 21, 2017 11:32 am
, but as stated previously, I would like to see it from 
as part of the continuation of the UW line...
