| BROADSIDE
(DIE-CAST)
PROJECTS #158, #398
CLASSIFICATION: REPAINT
BASE VEHICLES: TONKA TAILWINDS F-18 JET; SOUVENIER PENCIL
SHARPENER
FIRST APPEARANCE: "FIVE FACES OF DARKNESS" PART 3
"Look at the dents on me! I'll be in the
body shop for a week!"
Comments: After I finished an oversized
space shuttle version of Astrotrain,
I wanted to make an Autobot counterpart project. Broadside made a likely
candidate, since his jet mode was shown to be positively immense, at least
during "Five Faces of Darkness." This jet measures over five inches
in length, so it's a lot bigger than most of my other die-cast projects.
(I actually don't know what kind of jet Broadside is supposed to be.
The Hasbro toy is just an aircraft carrier shaped brick with wings,
and the animation model doesn't match
any jets I'm familiar with. I figure anything with two vertical stabilizers
has got to be pretty close, though.)
It took me a very, very long time to find a suitable
base vehicle for his aircraft carrier mode, until I came across a die-cast
miniature pencil sharpener souvenier. (The aircraft carrier is five
inches long, so while it's to scale with Broadside's giant jet mode, it's
obviously not to scale with any of my other projects.) It was originally
sculpted with about 15 tiny little jet planes on its flight deck; I removed
most of them with my rotary tool, but in a moment of whimsy I left six of
them in place to represent the five Aerialbots and Powerglide. (They
are very tiny, measuring about an eighth of an inch in length. The
Autobot symbols on their wings are about the size of the period at the end
of this sentence.) This made the project a little more visually
interesting, helping to make up for the fact that unlike the Hasbro toy,
Broadside does not have any
red undercarriage parts
in the cartoon. (I would not be doing my job if I didn't point out
that Broadside is colored this way in the Japanese Headmasters cartoon.
Of course, in this show his aircraft carrier mode can also
fly through space.)
You might have assumed that Broadside was decorated
with the numeral 86
on his flight deck, which rather nicely coincides with the year the toy was
released. The correct orientation of the hull number, however, is so
that pilots can read that number as they're landing on the flight deck.
(Since this was a consumer applied sticker, though, it wasn't uncommon
for kids to apply the sticker upside-down.) Broadside is actually number
98, probably because his aircraft carrier mode was modeled after the
U.S.S. Nimitz, whose hull number was CVN-68. (This wouldn't
be the first time Hasbro/Takara did a tricky number-swap. The Diaclone
toy that would later become Smokescreen had a racing number 38, based on
the real-life race car of Don Devendorf, which was number
83.) |
Autobots on the flight deck, clockwise from
top:
Air Raid; Slingshot; Skydive; Fireflight; Powerglide; and
Silverbolt |
