Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I picked up the Transformers Animated Starscream toy as a desk ornament, mostly. With the overall quality of most of the other toys in the series, I figured they would certainly do a good job with one of the most popular characters in the series. I was quite wrong, apparently.
First I will cover the good points, as few as there are. The toy looks decent in robot mode. He stands well and is properly balanced with stable joints in the legs. He has the standard spring loaded rocket launcher type weapons on his arms that seems to work well. Those are pretty much all the positives I can think of.
On the negative side, it's hard to tell where to begin. The toy suffers from the now-common Hasbro paint and mold flaws. The coloration is somewhat ugly with the nasty shade of blue they used for the base plastic, and the bad shade of maroon for the details doesn't help. There are various bad joints with random loose areas in the arms and swivel joints halfway down his thighs that pop out way too easily. The most glaringly awful mold problem is with the hands, which suffer from fingers and thumbs that pop out way too easily and really don't pose into much of anything decent.
The auto-trasform function is a mess. It doesn't work right and you still have to push in or pull out parts that are supposed to move into position on their own, such as the nosecone part. Don't worry, this won't last long. Eventually, the entire mechanism will break and you will have to push and pull all the parts into place. By "eventually", I mean after you transform him back and forth twice, if you are lucky.
For such an overly complicated transformation,you would think the jet mode would look decent. Instead it looks okay at best from above and looks like a horrible mess on the underside. There is a single landing gear wheel that doesn't really do much to support the jet when it's "landed", which results in more of a "crashed into the ground" or "sitting on a clump of garbage" look when it's sitting on the shelf. The launchers that form the arm cannons are a large part of the problem. They are too big and end up shoved under the jet so awkwardly that they don't sit right. On top of this, the show has them on the wings and not on the bottom of the jet. This part of the toy would have worked a lot better if they had just used detachable launchers that attached to his arms in robot mode and wings in jet mode.
All in all, this is a terrible toy that seems like something that was done last-minute without the necessary testing and correction needed. It's definately the dark blot on the first series of Transformers Animated toys.
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