Hot on the heels of Stege Starscream and his Colonial Viper altmode is... EarthRise Starscream, who's back to being an F-15!  You're like, "hey, didn't we just get a Voyager Class Starscream, and this is a new Voyager Class Starscream?" and the answer is "YUP."

(Though honestly, it's Starscream.  He's popular.  Folks will buy him, even if you or I are not one of those folks.)

The thing about Stege Starscream is that he was surprisingly great.  You know, for a shellformer.  He wadded up his robot mode into a little ball and you close the spaceship mode around him, the end.  And while that in itself may not be what we strictly want out of a transforming toy, it did offer some advantages.  Mostly, like, Stege Starscream's robot mode was incredibly poseable, especially for a Starscream.  It had waist rotation, it had ankle tilts, it had double-jointed elbows, it had shoulders with wide range... you could get the danged thing to fold its arms across its chest, fer cheese's sake.  It could do that BECAUSE it folded up into a ball and the altmode closed around it.  

EarthRise Starscream, meanwhile, is ... a Transformer.  It transforms.  The cockpit becomes the cockpit chest, the wings become the wings, etc.  The robot becomes the jet -- at least as much as most Transformer robots become jets.  And that... means the articulation is scaled back.  It's been noted by everyone (including Hasbro) that ER Starscream is essentially a scaled-up Classics 2006 Starscream.  And it... has slightly more articulation than that toy, which was notoriously stiff.  ER Starscream adds some wider range to Classics Starscream's shallower joints, plus a bicep swivel, and the head turns independently of the nosecone on his back, there's those ankle tilts that are all the range...

But there's no waist rotation, which is a gaddanged FIRST among the Deluxe-and-up toys in this War for Cybertron toyline trilogy.  There's no double-jointed elbows, no extra range in the shoulders for arms-folding (it was required for transformation on the Stege toy).  And so after the absolute bounty of articulation that Stege offered a Starscream for the first time, this new Starscream feels stiff.  Even though, on average, his articulation is more than Starscream toys typically have.  

On the other hand, it actually transforms traditionally without being a Popple.  

So, y'know, pick your poison, I guess.  

I have two.  I bought a second one to paint up in Early Marvel Comics Starscream colors, from back when the interiors colorist was working off early Starscream model sheets where his chest was black instead of red.  I got halfway through that one and realized, yo, if I stop here, I've got a toy colors Starscream, with darker blues instead of the cartoon's brighter blues.  It looked nice, so I kept it there!  I also gave him Classics Starscream's null ray arm cannons, because I like them bulky.  ...and then I painted my back-up ER Starscream toy in the Early Marvel scheme.  Y'know, comics blue-for-black chest, blue head and face with white eyes, inverted colors on the feet...  And I fold the wings back out of view, since Mike Manley didn't draw them in issue 9.  

no i'm not gonna lop off an ear, jose delbo drew him earless only after the color scheme was updated

Transformers Stege is moving on to wave 2, and so here's Starscream.  He's half of the second wave of Voyager Class guys, and gaddangit, I like him.  I hate that I like him.  

First of all, like, dude, he is very Stege.  His legs look like a close-up of the Death Star trench run.  Like he was carved out of a Cheddar Bay Biscuit.  Like he is literally a sponge.  I could go on.  It's not an aesthetic I like.  There's not an art to his leg details, it just looks like detail for detail's sake.  An obsession with lines without understanding how they fit into the whole.  It's like drawing in Photoshop while zoomed in too much.

The silver lining is that the soot and scorch marks they slop all over his legs has a flattening effect!  There's just so much detail on top of detail that your eyes kind of glaze over and can't focus on it!   *uneasy thumbs up*

It's maddening that this is the style they chose for this particular Starscream, because otherwise this particular Starscream is superb.  He is... delightfully poseable.  He's more poseable than the Masterpiece.  (though the Masterpiece is admittedly pretty stiff)  It's not just the amount of articulation points, but the range.  His elbows are double-jointed.  His wrists turn and can hinge down a bit.  His knees aren't double-jointed, but when you fold his legs up, the thighs collapse into the shins, allowing the legs to bend as much as a human's.  (there is a spring-activated piece of plastic back there so that his shins don't look hollow from behind)  And, universal across Stege toys Deluxe and larger, a dedication to giving each figure ankle tilts and waist rotation.  Yeah, that's right.  A Starscream toy has waist rotation.  You'd think that'd be impossible, based on, you know, how his chest canopy window usually has to reach across to his happy trail area, but this toy says LOL and splits that canopy in two so you can twist his torso as you please.  And also, he's got extra hinging at his shoulders for transformation that also allow you to get his arms across his torso into one of the best approximations of folded arms I've seen in a Transformers toy.  

As a result of this, you can give him a lot of personality.  This is what will sell you on owning him once you have him in hand.

He transforms like a Transformers jet.  You know, he's got a robot on the bottom and a jet on the top.  In Starscream's case, you kind of put him in a limbo pose and then fold his backpack around him while twisting his shoulder intakes into the jet's nose.  And by "jet," I mean this guy is a Cybertronian Tetrajet, as seen in the first episode of the original Transformers cartoon.  And by "Cybertronian Tetrajet," I mean this guy is a Colonial Viper.  

I'd love for this guy's face sculpt to have a smirk.  Instead, Thundercracker seems to have the smirk head, if the samples at Toy Fair last month were indicative of the final production run.  Smoove move, guys.  You got Seeker noggins switched.  (i guess they switched the original tech spec numbers around in the 80s, so maybe this is an homage)

To sum up, if you like Starscream and don't mind that his leg texture looks like an Escher print, get your hands on this guy.  He is a great toy in spite of himself.  I originally planned to buy him only because he's so Steged that he looks like the overdetailed art of Underbase-powered Starscream from the Marvel Comics.  But now I just genuinely like him.  It sucks.

Power of the Primes Starscream is probably the toy from this line I was looking forward to the most.  Transformers fiction was giving that a little boost admittedly -- the toy is sculpted to adhere to the same Starscream design that the comics currently use.  And Starscream in the current comics (especially his portrayal in Till All Are One, which ended with an Annual just this week) is friggin' fantastic.  I've been wanting a Starscream to go with a Deluxe Windblade for so long, and the other two designs that have appeared alongside her -- Deluxe Armada Starscream and Leader King Starscream -- were not appropriate sizes for hanging out with a Deluxe Windblade. 

Voyager Class is just about perfect.  It's perfect size for Starscream in general, at least fiction-wise.  (If we were going true vehicle scale we'd probably have to start doing him in Titan Class, and that's.... inconvenient in so many ways.)  If Hasbro wanted to do this Starscream toy in every Seeker variety, I'd be cool with that, and I'd buy them all.  

(mind, they'd have to do, like, several dozen more limbs so they could all be combiners simultaneously, but)

Plus I just like the proportions of the robot mode.  I love big punchy fists and big stompy feet.  It's a great robot mode.  It's dynamic.  

The jet mode is... like 99% of every other jet Transformer.  There's a robot hanging underneath the jet parts.  Just a pair of arms and a chest, unaltered, attached under there.  But that's generally what you expect with a Transformers jet.

There's some to-do about how his robot mode chest cockpit is "faux kibble," but, y'know, the real jet cockpit becomes the torso mode's chest, so I'm okay with it.  As long as one of the modes uses the cockpit for a chest, I count that.  The torso mode clearly is taking some inspiration from Movie Starscream, with the big triangle shape made out of wings (and, again, with the cockpit in the middle), and I love that.  The combiner mode head is just a bigger Starscream head with a TFTM crown on it.  It makes me wish that Grimlock's combiner mode head gave him HIS crown.  They both have canonical crowns!  It could have been a nice pairing!

but, lordy

lordy lordy lordy

For a few years, the larger Transformers have started giving toys these foil stickers.  They're terrible.  They're tacky-looking, they start peeling off pretty quickly, and all-around they're just not great quality.  And they're factory-applied, so you don't even get to have the fun of ruining your toy yourself.  There's no ownership in them.  They're just there to look gross.

And, like, I dunno whose idea it was to use foil stickers to cover the entirety of Starscream's jet mode wings, but I think I hate them.  It looks so amazingly terrible.  The photos here don't really capture it in all its shiny, reflective glory, but the stickers just drive me mad.  

And you can't pull them off, because then his wings lose their red strips and the Decepticon logos.

Sure, yeah, eventually Reprolabels will have replacements, and those stickers will be real stickers made of material that doesn't tear like Kraft singles, and be, like, matte so they mesh with the rest of the jet surface, but... not everybody's gonna want to spend more money to make their toy not look shitty.  

So, like...

why

why would you destroy this toy that i otherwise would have loved unreservedly with such a travesty

I was satisfied enough with Hasbro's "Armada Starscream" toy.  I mean, I've gushed about it a few times here before, most recently for "Super Mode"/Thundercracker, so it's clearly a toy I like.  Takara came out with their own version which was much prettier (fairly objectively, even), but what mattered to me at the time was that my toy matched how Starscream appeared in the then-current IDW comic books.  Their Starscream looked like the Hasbro toy.  So. 

Fast forward to now, when I've got Super Mode Starscream and that kitbashed Sunstorm and the upcoming Skywarp and Ramjet.  Those are all painted pretty damn well, and suddenly my Hasbro Armada Starscream looks like the odd guy out.  Long story short, I got the Takara one to hang out with my other versions of the mold.

The Hasbro one can continue being the IDW guy.  The Takara one can be the Unicron Trilogy version of Starscream.  He can hang out with Thundercracker and Skywarp, and maybe Ramjet will come visit occasionally when he blows through the vacation days he's built up with Unicron.

The main difference between the two Starscreams is that Hasbro's (left) is mostly red plastic and Takara's (right) is mostly white plastic.  And then Takara puts all this red and black paint on top of that, while Hasbro kinda just let their toy be, relatively.  

I love this thing.

Armada Starscream from earlier in the Generations toyline was a pretty damn good Starscream toy.  It was a new version of... well, Armada Starscream, but shorter and with shoulder joints and you didn't need to have a Mini-Con to make his missiles fire.  It was a joy.  I mean it, it's a great little thing.  So much that when Cheetimus painted one up like Sunstorm I was like YOINK and bought that fucker.  

Well, here comes more!

This is Starscream Super Mode, because way back in Armada, when they redecoed everybody, they made them into upgrades of the same guy rather than new characters.  But Starscream's "super mode" was in Thundercracker's colors, and so when he got upgraded in the cartoon the English version dubbed in a little "I look like Thundercracker!" comment and the toy was sold as Thundercracker.  Otherwise, Starscream in this deco is known as the Starscream who goes total Linkin Park angsty and gets himself disintegrated by Unicron to make Megatron so way sorry for the way he's been a stupid jerk, DAD.  I'm serious, there were so many Linkin Park AMVs.  He tried so hard and got so far, yo.  But in the end?  (he came back as a zombie in the next series and then in the series after that he was totally fine, so... no, it didn't really matter)

But hell yeah I'd buy a Starscream Super Mode or Thundercracker or whoever.  I loved the deco on the original toy, which was certainly inspired by Thundercracker, but took a few left turns.  For example, his eyes had to be silver.  They really had to, to keep the rest of his deco silver where it needed to be silver.  And that plastic sprue was nylon, which is unpaintable.  And so instead of having his face be red-eyes-on-silver-face, Armada Thundercracker was red-face-on-silver-eyes.  Which is, you know, striking.  I'm very upset this did not pay forward in later Thundercracker toys.  

I do think the deco loses a little something when his blacks are gunmetal instead of black.  But whatcha gonna do.  It's my only sort of not-really complaint.  I like this toy a lot.  Give me more.

(spoilers: we're getting more)

I was gonna talk about the new Whirl first, but he kind of snapped his leg off at the knee before I could even get stickers on him.  SO HERE'S ARMADA STARSCREAM, COVERED IN MY TEARS

Armada Starscream is, obviously, a new toy of the Starscream design from Transformers: Armada.  Since these toys are being featured in the IDW Transformers comics that come packaged with every Deluxe, Armada Starscream's design is also now a IDW comics continuity G1 Starscream toy!  For those of you keeping track, this is the second time in a row a Starscream toy that represented Starscream from a different continuity family has been used as a G1 Starscream in this comic.  With both Aligned and the Unicron Trilogy out of the way, once this Starscream also repurposes an Animated or Movie-style version of himself, I think this dude will have collected the whole set.  He will become Meta Starscream, the Allscream, Devourer of Alternate Starscreams.

The toy itself is fantastic.  While it is, broadly, a smaller version of the original Armada Starscream toy but with joints, the sum is more than these parts.  He feels solid and dynamic and feels like he has a presence, and he has more weapons than you expect of a toy in these expensive times.  While the original Armada Starscream would pop off his entire wing to make a sword, this new Armada Starscream hides his (now-translucent) swords behind his wings.  They just fold up and plug into the backs.  He also gets two, instead of just the one.  Also, dude's got double missile launchers.  It's been a while since those were the norm!  They're the push-pressure kind, not the spring-loaded kind, and they sit in his maneuverable shoulder intakes.  Starscream's also got Mini-Con hardpoints on both his forearms and on the back of each of his launchers, as is right and good.  

If you're more discerning about your Starscream purchases, I'd check out this guy.  He's one of the best Starscream toys, I feel.   Or you can wait until we get that Jhiaxus retool out of him we seem to be receiving.  New cockpit, new wings, new tailfins, new head.  When I'm at Toy Fair in a few weeks, I hope we get to see him.