Sky Lynx! When we were kids, my little brother really really wanted Sky Lynx. Like, he had an incalculable yearning. I mean, think about it: Sky Lynx was a shuttle that split into a lynx and a bird, and the lynx and the bird combined into a dragon. Oh, and it could walk. You put in batteries and the damned thing walked by itself. You can see the appeal, right?
So then I got Sky Lynx for my birthday from our grandparents. I opened the thing up in front of my poor brother. Back then, my grandparents liked to get a smaller present for the Other Sibling (our sister was not born yet or was too young to care) on the other's birthday so they wouldn't feel completely left out because that's the kind of spoiling-riffic stuff you can do as a grandparent, and so there is this amazing photo of my brother limply pointing to his also-ran BraveStarr toy he opened up that day, a very visible inner brokenness deepset within his face.
Decades later, I'd buy him the Japanese reissue. It was the least I could do.
But this Sky Lynx is mine! His shuttle mode no longer splits up into lynx and bird modes, instead going straight to dino-dragon, and obviously he doesn't self-walk anymore. He does, however, become a torso for Combiner Wars limbs to connect to and become Sky Reign. Not a terrible trade-off.
Space shuttles -- at least the ones we sent up into space for years -- aren't a thing anymore, being all retired and whatnot, and so probably relatedly Sky Lynx is a very liberal interpretation of one. He's got little forward-swept wings on his back end. He's got a weird pattern of windows and little tiny wing horns near the cockpit. The crawler-transporter is still there, and since Sky Lynx is no longer a proper real-life shuttle, I guess it's actually now just a part of his generic space shuttle mode. As mentioned above, it does not detach. It's not even all connected down there in the middle, so even if you tried disassembling the toy you'd have a scattering of disjointed blue parts.
Though in dragon mode Sky Lynx no longer walks, he does have a little more articulation than before. His forelegs (not the back) can splay outwards. He's got bicep and thigh swivels, and you can move them yourself without breaking the toy, like you were liable to in the 80s. I swear, that old plastic was made from crusty old cheese. The original toy had a few joints in his neck (necessary for transformation), but I don't think it could look to and fro, so that's new. Out the back, just barely, is a tiny version of his original tailfin-ended tail. It's barely visible from most angles, but I'd say it's vestigial. Attach the two sword weapons to it, and you get a properly-lengthed tail. The original tail is probably there just for purists.
The torso mode is where you find this toy's only real deficiency. Unlike the other torsos in Combiner Wars, Sky Lynx's shoulders do not seem to secure in any way, and so you have to hold them in place while you articulate his arms or else the shoulders move with them. But this mode is where his lynx head ended up, so you kind of forget this annoyance when you behold his splendor.
The two swords combine into a longer sword, because of course they do.
