| STARSCREAM
(PRETENDER)
PROJECT 9.1
CLASSIFICATION: KITBASH
MATERIALS USED: SUPER GLUE, MODELING PUTTY, ENAMEL PAINTS
FIRST APPEARANCE: TRANSFORMERS #1 (AS STARSCREAM); TRANSFORMERS #58
(AS PRETENDER)
"Hear me, Autobots Decepticons—it has been
decreed by my master that you are all to die!"
Preamble: The Pretender Classics
were, as far as I was concerned, one of the best things that could have happened
to the dying Transformers toy line. We finally got to see some familiar
faces again, and at least two of them were much closer to their cartoon
depictions than their original toys were. Bumblebee was pretty much
an improvement across the board, but the other three suffered somewhat because
of their small size, oversimplified transformations, and particularly their
color schemes.
This was a project that I worked on in stages.
I had made some minor structural improvements to him around 1995, so
in a sense this could be considered my first true custom project. I
went back later several years later and finished the job, making a handful
of other changes and giving him a much-needed new coat of paint in order
to more closely resemble his animation
model from the cartoon.
Construction: Pretender Starscream's
rear stabilizer wings detach for use as hand-held weapons in robot mode,
but I wanted them to be arm-mounted, so I drilled some holes into the sides
of his arms. Also, the cockpit on this version of the toy actually
splits in half when he transforms, leaving half of it on the back of his
head and a rather unsightly gap in the center of his chest. I cut that
piece of the cockpit off the back of his head and hollowed it out a bit,
gluing it to the other half of the cockpit so that the entire thing was on
his chest in robot mode.
Pretender Starscream has 14 screws holding him
together, and every single one of them is visible in robot mode (though some
of them are supposed to be covered with consumer-applied stickers). I
really wanted to do something about this unsightly mess. He didn't
actually need all of these screws to stay together, so I sliced off
the plastic surrounding the screws in the air intakes on his shoulders.
For the rest of the screw holes in his body and legs, I covered
each of the screw holes with contour putty, which basically dries like plaster.
I also chopped off the connector holding his lower legs together.
All that remained was to repaint Starscream in
the correct colors. I honestly don't know why they gave him blue arms
and blue legs; I suppose it adds more color to him in robot mode, but it
makes his jet mode look completely ridiculous. Anyway, I used a lighter
shade of sky blue for the forearms and stabilizer fins, making him look more
like he does in the cartoon, and I painted the upper arms and lower legs
grey. The cockpit became orange, and I fixed his head so that it has
a black helmet and grey face instead of the other way around. I also
painted the tops of his air intakes red, which hadn't been painted at all
originally. I also got rid of the wing decals and replaced them with
painted red and white stripes.
Comments: About a year after
I finished this project, Takara came out with the very nice Super
Collection Figure PVC version of Starscream, whose guns are too big for
the actual PVC figure, but nicely in scale with the Pretender version.
This project is also just the right size to carry my die-cast scale
Megatron repaint, so he's usually the
one who's holding it on my display shelf. |
