CLASSIFICATION: REPAINT/CUSTOM
PARTS USED: HEROES OF CYBERTRON STARSCREAM (GUNS); ROBO LINKS BUILDING SET (WINGS)
MATERIALS USED: SUPER GLUE, ENAMEL PAINTS
MEDIA APPEARANCE: N/A

"Very handsome, if I do say so myself!"

Preamble:  I've always been a big fan of Starscream from the original Transformer series.  The popularity of the character has kind of been a mixed blessing, though.  On one hand, Hasbro recognized that the demand for the character was so great that they brought him back twice for the toy line, once as a Classic Pretender and again as an Action Master.  On the other hand, each new toy incarnation ended up looking less and less like the original character, something that has always bothered me.

While some of the Action Masters were based on the original toys (like Blaster, Soundwave, and Grimlock), others were designed to resemble the appearance of the characters in the cartoon (among them were Bumblebee, Jazz, and Starscream here).  Typically, though, the Action Master toys were colored like the previous toy version of the character, where applicable (the reason Action Master Optimus Prime has blue forearms and upper legs was because the Powermaster toy was designed this way).  This means that Action Master Starscream's color scheme was based on the Pretender toy, which suffered from an inaccurate color scheme due to the oversimplified nature of the toy's transformation.

This was my third Starscream project, since I had previously done some work on the original toy as well as Pretender Starscream.  Unlike the other two, this project was pretty much a straight repaint, though I did modify some accessories for him.

Construction:  Starscream came with an Air Chariot vehicle that included some very fragile missiles, which were designed to mount under the chariot's wings in jet mode.  It didn't take long for the pegs on the missiles to break off, so I had previously built some new, thicker pegs for them.  I whittled down the bottom half of the posts so that they could still attach to the chariot's wings or be held by Starscream, but the new pegs were also thick enough that they could be mounted on the sides of Starscream's arms.

Robo Links, another robot toy line by Takara, was a building playset that consisted of small, identical robot figures that combined together with accessories, and each other, to form vehicles and larger robots and things (sort of like Centurions, only at a smaller scale).  Takara designed the pegs on the accessories to be compatible with the Diaclone toys, which in turn were compatible with most of the later Transformers toys, including the Action Masters.  I discovered that I could use one of the little robots as a backpack for Starscream (after I cut off its legs and head), using two Robo Links wings to serve as stand-ins for the ones Starscream apparently lost after his revival with the Nucleon.

Starscream's new color scheme was, of course, based on his colors from the cartoon series.  I painted the entire action figure except for the upper legs, which were the only parts that were the correct colors to begin with.  (They don't quite match the grey paint I used on the rest of him, though.  I had been trying to match the existing grey paint on his body, which apparently never matched the legs to begin with.  Go figure.)