| SKYFIRE (DIE-CAST
SCALE)
PROJECT #319
CLASSIFICATION: KITBASH
BASE VEHICLE: GUNDAM WING ACCESSORY, SPARE PVC PARTS
MEDIA APPEARANCE: "FIRE IN THE SKY," ET AL.
"The Skyfire exterminator service is on the
way!"
Comments: Skyfire was loosely modeled
after the Jetfire toy sold by Hasbro in 1985. Most of the Transformers
toys were licensed to Hasbro through Takara, but Hasbro had also looked to
other Japanese toy manufacturers to help bolster the Transformers toy assortment.
Hasbro offered several Bandai-designed toys as Transformers, but Bandai
was a major competitor of Takara in Japan, and so none of the Bandai toys
were featured in the G1 cartoon because Takara didn't want to advertise another
toy manufacturer's products in the show. The only exception in this
case was Jetfire, who was heavily redesigned at the last minute to look about
as un-Jetfireish as possible. This means, of course, that the Skyfire
character proved to be a pretty poor advertisement for the Jetfire toy, and
Hasbro opted to write the character out of the show early in the second
season.
I built this project using pieces of a backpack
accessory from a Gundam Wing action figure and the wings and forearms
from a SCF God Jinrai PVC figure. (He only ended up being the same
size as most of my other projects, but in order for this project to be to
scale with the others, I think it would have to be something like two feet
long.) |
