Alrighty folks, yesterday we checked out Harrier’s jet mode and today we’re having a look at his robot mode. First off, this guy transforms almost exactly like his brother Phantom. The wings on his legs fold up a little differently, but that’s really the only difference. It’s a fairly simple and intuitive process although just like Phantom, clipping and unclipping the tail section still makes me a little nervous every time because it’s a tight fit and the thin arm that it’s attached to. I’ve changed Phantom back and forth dozens of times and haven’t even seen any stress marks appear so at this point I don’t think it’s anything to worry about.

In robot mode, Harrier looks mighty damn good and shares a lot more similarities with Phantom than he does in his aircraft mode. But even here, the similarities are only superficial. If you look closely even the parts that appear to be identical have subtle little changes to the sculpt or paint to make him unique. Obviously, pieces like the shoulders are different because Harrier’s shoulders make up the intakes on his alt mode, but TFC made all sorts of changes to the parts that don’t even show up in his Harrier form. The chest is completely new and features that great boxy look that screams G1 Transformer. Check out the upper legs, pelvis, and forearms. These could all have been reused directly from Phantom, but TFC still took the time to make little changes to the sculpt to set them apart. Sure, we should expect that in a $100 toy, but it’s still not something that I’m going to take for granted.

Obviously, Harrier gets a brand new head, and honestly I’m not terribly keen on it. It’s the two silver pieces on his cheeks that I’m not in love with. The rest of it is Ok. He has yellow light piping in the eyes and a regular mouth instead of a plate. None of these figures heads have been close homages to the G1 characters, but Slingshot had a pretty distinctive looking head and this one is quite far from the original. Anyway, it’s not terrible and it’ll probably grow on me.

Harrier wears the nose and tail of his aircraft mode on his back just like Phantom does. The two sides peg in together and stays together quite well. Sure it’s a lot of aircraft kibble, but it’s wonderfully faithful to the old G1 animated designs where they basically had deformed jets on their backs. I love it!

Also like Phantom, Harrier’s fuel pods can be used as weapons. You can put them into his hands or you can plug them into his arms, which is the way I prefer them. These pieces are sculpted in red plastic and the tips are painted with a little metallic silver.

Of course, Harrier also transforms into one of Uranos’ arms, but I’m still not combining these guys until I get the last one. The first three Uranos figures were one hundred percent originals, so Harrier was the first of the last two, which are reworked versions of the first two. I wasn’t sure how different he’d be, but I’m totally pleased with the outcome. TFC went out of their way to set him apart with a lot of tiny little superficial changes that they could have just as easily not bothered with. I’ve been totally satisfied with these guys each step of the way and Harrier is no exception.  So that’s four down with only Falcon left. I’m still hoping he’s going to show up in August so I can finally put this long journey to bed.

Wow, it’s been a long wait, but the folks at TFC have finally shipped out the next figure in their Project Uranos (aka Not-Aerialbots) line and it is Harrier (aka Not-Slingshot). The delay of the releases since Blackbird had me a little concerned, but I’m glad to see things pushing along once more and I’m still counting on getting the last figure, Eagle sometime later this month. Anyway, today we’ll check out the packaging and the jet mode, as well as do some comparisons with Phantom, and tomorrow we’ll transform him and check out his robot mode.

TFC has kept the packaging on these figures uniform so if you’re like me and have tendencies toward OCD, you’ll be happy to know that they all look great lined up on the shelf. The presentation here is as great as ever. You get a big collector-friendly window box that shows off the figure in his robot mode beside his two fuel pods and his combiner hand piece. The line art is fantastic and the back of the box shows the toy in its different modes. Inside the box, you get a collector card, a poster, and the folded instruction sheet. Harrier is built off the same body as Phantom, so if you’ve become familiar with transforming him, you probably won’t need the instruction sheet. Let’s open him up and as usual, we’re going to start out with his jet mode.

When I was a kid, I used to love Harriers. I can remember first reading about them and the idea of a jet that could take off and land like a helicopter blew my little mind, because I happen to have a big helicopter fetish. Not in the sense that I get sexually aroused by helicopters, but I just think they’re really cool. Wait, what? Oh yeah, Harriers! I loved them as a kid and I can still remember building a bitchin’ Revell model of one. I put an insane amount of work into that thing and I had it kicking around for a long time after until one day my brother got mad at me and threw it at my head. So, yes, I was pretty excited to get Harrier.

First things first… Like Phantom, Harrier comes with a sprue of little plastic plugs you can insert into the screw holes to cover them up. I thought it was an awesome idea originally and I think it still is. Oddly, you still get four plugs and I can only see two holes to plug up on this new mold. Moving on…

I am extremely happy with the look of this jet. It’s impressive how much remolding has been done on the Phantom figure to make it work. You can see all the similarities in overall structure, but the toy still comes away as a very convincing Harrier. The cockpit, nosecone, and tail fins have been completely redesigned to great success. I would have preferred some sculpted vents or something in the intakes near the front, but the grey paint works well enough, I suppose. The wings are ever so slightly down swept, and each has a fuel pod that plugs in underneath. Unlike Phantom, Harrier has enough clearance so that he can rest comfortably on his landing gear with the pods in place.

Speaking of landing gear, one thing worth noting is that one of the tiny landing gear wheels is missing from my Harrier’s left kneecap. Apart from a minor stray paint mark on Blackbird, this is the first QC issue I’ve seen with any of my TFC figures. I’m not going to lose my shit over it because in reality, I don’t even get why these landing gear are there in the first place. Harrier has a set that folds out from his wings that work in conjunction with the one under the cockpit for the jet to rest on when it’s grounded. The set on his kneecaps aren’t even necessary. Yes, a real Harrier has a fourth landing gear, but it’s a big set of two wheels that comes out under the middle of the aircraft, not two little sets like these. For a moment, I thought they were vestigial remnants from the Phantom toy mold, but nope, he doesn’t have them at all. Weird! Anyway, I just popped the wheel out of the other kneecap to keep him symmetrical and I’m fine with that.

The deco of the Harrier mode relies mostly on molded white plastic with some black accents from where the hinges and connecting pieces are. There are red and blue painted stripes on the wings to drive home the homage to the original Slingshot toy, although the striping here is more subtle, which I find to be an overall improvement. The only thing missing is a couple of repro Autobot insignias and you’re good to go! The cockpit is tinted yellow to match the other Uranos jets and he has some registry numbers painted on, which includes the “S5HOT” on the tailfins. What could that mean?

As with the previous Uranos releases, the plastic on this release is very good quality and heft for what is essentially a Voyager sized toy. At this point, four releases in, I expected nothing less, but since it’s a third-party release, it’s still worth commenting on nonetheless. That having been said, the thin connecting rods for the wing landing gear probably demand a careful touch, as I could see them stressing pretty easily. Other than that, I don’t have any concerns over breakage.

The coolest thing about Harrier’s jet mode is how distinctive it turned out. You can park him right next to Phantom and if you haven’t transformed either one, you might not catch on to just how much engineering is shared by the two toys. In fact, it isn’t until you transform them and stand them next to each other in robot mode that you really start to see all the similarities. I’ll be back to do just that tomorrow!

As promised, I’m back to finish up my look at the TFC’s latest release in their Project Uranos, “Not-Aerialbots” line of figures. We already checked out their alt modes, so let’s jump right into transformation and their bot modes.

You might think that since Blackbird is basically just an aircraft with a robot under him that his transformation would be pretty easy. Well, you’d be more or less right. The most difficult thing is digging the tabs out from either side of his head and figuring out the right way to fold up his legs, and that’s going from robot to jet. Going from jet to robot is easy-peasy and totally intuitive. It’s just a matter of folding up the plates on his backpack and positioning his arms and legs. Although it does bring us to the one thing that I really do not like about this figure… ARR MATEYS, THERE BE PARTSFORMING AHEAD!

I really don’t know why I went all pirate there… but yes, there is indeed some partsforming here. The very first step of transforming Blackbird involves pulling the entire front nose and cockpit section out and changing it into his gun. I knew about this going in, so it wasn’t a surprise or anything that gave me buyer’s remorse, but I consider this sort of thing a cheat, because it really is a fairly good sized piece of the jet. The resulting gun mode isn’t all that great either, because… well, it looks a lot like the cockpit section of a jet. It’s also way too big for Blackbird. If you don’t extend the barrel all the way, I guess it works ok, but turning a third of the aircraft into a gun is definitely not a selling point for me. The gun is also used for Uranos’ gestalt mode, but we’re not getting into any of that until I have a complete set.

As for Blackbird’s robot mode, I really dig it, although it definitely has some opportunities. Yes, he’s a robot wearing half of a jet as a backpack, but so were most of the original Aerialbot designs. It never bothered me then, and it doesn’t now. Besides, a lot of Blackbird’s backpack can fold up or be tweaked so that it really doesn’t get in the way. This is by no means the worst kibble I’ve seen. I do wish it pegged together better, and that’s one of those big opportunities I was talking about. The two engines don’t peg into anything and that leaves them to just flop around. It seems like a frighteningly obvious design flaw that could have been easily fixed with a couple of tabs and sockets. It’s not a critical flaw, but certainly one that should have been addressed on a $130 toy.

Another issue, I have are the stubby little wings that protrude off his chest and in front of his shoulders. I like them, as they are one of the more identifiable characteristics of Silverbolt’s design. Unfortunately they get in the way of his shoulder articulation. Yes, they’re hinged, they rotate, and that allows for full arm articulation, but having to fiddle with those when posing him is annoying. The last issue I have is his lack of heel spurs. A robot with a huge backpack needs heel spurs. It’s another one of those little design oversights, which could have been easily fixed by adding a couple of hinged plates.

With all that having been said, I still find a lot to love in this guy. The sculpt is wonderfully detailed and packed with panel lines. The configuration of the chest really evokes the G1 character design, and while I don’t think the head sculpt is a slam dunk, I am still pretty happy with it. Even the backpack looks like a serviceable design as a jetpack. The quality of the plastic is very satisfying and makes for a sturdy figure with tight joints.

The deco carries over from the jet mode with a lot of white, but the addition of the red and yellow help tie the homage together. I really dig the red plastic that TFC uses, it’s a great vibrant shade and the yellow is pretty good too. Unfortunately, the paint on this figure isn’t quite on par with the past two releases. There’s some sloppy silver brushwork on his left shoulder and some brush strokes on the yellow bar on his chest. It’s nothing terrible, but hey… $130 toy… it’s worth mentioning.

Moving on to Phantom Ray… Um… Yeah. I want to say people are either going to love this guy or hate him, but then I’m kind of ambivalent. I can’t hate on him, but he’s just nothing special. Imagine what kind of Minicon you might get with a $130 Transformer and this would be it. That’s really it, he feels like a Minicon on steroids to me. Is that a bad thing? I love Minicons, and yet strangely I don’t love Phantom Ray. But I don’t hate him, and I guess that’s a start.

I was on board for TFC using a separate robot drone for Uranos’ chest plate. I still think it’s a cool idea. Remember, I like when these guys bring some originality to the table. But I think if they were going to sell this idea, they needed to really deliver a great robot design for the drone, and Phantom Ray isn’t it.

Blackbird was $140 with shipping. The higher retail comes through in the impressive size of the figure and the fact that he comes with a little bot-buddy. What’s not reflected in the higher retail are the nagging little QC flubs. It’s ironic that the most expensive of the Project Uranos figures that I have so far is the one to have some paint issues, albeit minor ones, and required me to do a little plastic shaving to make him work right. I’m hoping that I just got a little unlucky with him, because the alternative is that TFC is allowing their QC to slip as the team progresses. I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and I’m still overall pretty happy with the way this guy turned out.

It took me longer than expected to get my Blackbird, the third release in TFC’s Project Uranos series, but it’s finally here and I’ve had some time to play around with him. He’s a bit of a controversial figure because he’s a deviation from the original concept. Despite being a Silverbolt homage, TFC decided to base him off of the famous SR-71 Blackbird spyplane rather than a Concorde. The decision further begged the question, would he be black like the SR-71 should be, or would he remain true to the G1 character’s color scheme? And what’s with that smaller Transformer he comes with? He forms the gestalt’s chest piece? That’s not very GeeWun! It seemed like whatever TFC did they were going to alienate some people, but I tried to keep an open mind.

I’ll gladly concede that I would have preferred TFC stuck with the Concorde design, as it fit the character better. Besides being a jet that was afraid of heights, Silverbolt was a lot more reserved than the other Aerialbots. Quite frankly, most of the Aerialbots were dicks and Silverbolt wasn’t, nor was he as quick to jump into battle. I always thought it was cool that his personality was reflected in him being the only one of the team that wasn’t a military jet. On the other hand, homages or not, I really dig when these third-party releases bring something original to the table. I also enjoy the idea of having a more cohesive team of military jets as my re-imagined Aerialbots. As for the color scheme, I think they made the right decision. But I’ll come back to a lot of that later… for now, let’s check out the packaging and the alt modes.

With two releases under my belt, I’ve come to know what to expect from the Uranos packaging. However, Blackbird is the largest of the figures and he also comes with a companion figure, so I was interested to see if TFC mixed things up at all. Nope. What we have here is the same basic deco and design as the other window boxes. It’s just bigger. That’s a very good thing, because I really love everything about the presentation on these guys and Blackbird’s box raises it to an epic and impressive scale. The package features the same cool artwork and line-drawings on the front and sides, and the photos of Blackbird’s three forms on the back. There’s also an amazing color line-drawing inside the cardboard tray. Blackbird comes packaged in his robot mode and Phantom Ray comes in his little alt mode. Inside the box, you get a collectible card with his character art and stats, a fold out poster, and a color instruction sheet.

Straightaway, I love Blackbird’s alt mode, and a lot of that has to do with my love for the stylings of the real aircraft. It’s certainly an attractive design and TFC did a nice job reproducing it in toy form right down to the little panel lines. There’s a fair amount of seams and hinges, but you’ve got to expect that in Transformers and I don’t think they detract much from the aesthetics. Aircraft purists will scoff at the unconventional white body and yellow trim, but I’m glad they went with the G1 color scheme, because it was clearly needed to drive this homage home. A couple of repro Autobot insignia on the wings and he definitely looks the part.

Blackbird rests nicely on three sets of folding landing gear and he has two cool chainguns situated under his cockpit. From the top down, this is a great looking toy, although mine had one annoying quirk. The two plates that lock together behind the cockpit simply would not stay together, and left a huge and f’ugly gap. This was seriously pissing me off. I must have played around with it for a half-hour trying to see what I was doing wrong, but that gap would not go away. Finally, I shaved a little off one of the pegs inside the plates and now they mesh perfectly. I’m not a fan of having to tinker with a $130 toy to make it right, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

Some may be vexed by the fact that you can see the bulk of Blackbird’s robot form simply by looking under the jet. Honestly, this doesn’t bother me in the slightest. Just as whores will have their trinkets, so Transformer jets will have their kibble. There are two different configurations that his legs can peg into under the wings. One places them more toward the center, the other more toward the back. I prefer to keep them toward the back, since the wings and engines hide them a little more when viewing the jet from the side. But whatever you do there’s going to be a lot of baggage down there. Case in point, after I shot the pictures, I realized I forgot to fold in his feet, but given what all is down there, little tweaks like that don’t even matter all that much. It’s like trying to hide an elephant under a washcloth.

As with Phantom and Eagle, the quality of the plastic here feels really nice. This is a hefty and very solid toy. There’s no noticeable mold flashing and the paint apps are all precise and clean. Let’s move on to Blackbird’s little robot sidekick…

Phantom Ray’s alt mode is an X-47 Drone and he’s a pretty simple little guy. TFC played a little fast and loose with the accuracy on him. He’s a lot more angular than the actual aircraft and while he holds his alt mode fairly well, he doesn’t peg together quite as solid as his larger bot-buddy. He does have some wheels, although they are set so close to the undercarriage that he might as well just be sitting on the ground. There’s a socket underneath him that can peg into the top of Blackbird via the folding peg, and the two look pretty good when joined up. Ever since I was a kid and saw the Space Shuttle being ferried on the back of a 747, I’ve always thought the idea of aircraft riding piggy back on another was pretty damn cool, although you’re mileage may vary.

I’ll be honest, that gap in the back scared the shit out of me, but thankfully it was an easy fix and so far, I’m very pleased with this guy. Blackbird’s jet mode is big, well-constructed, and a great looking toy. I really like how he scales with the other jets. He’s definitely bigger, but he’s not so much bigger as to feel too out of their league. Phantom Ray is… well, he’s not much to write home about, but he is a cool little accessory and I do like the way he looks pegged onto Blackbird’s back.

Tomorrow I’ll be back to transform these guys and check out their robot modes.

TFC’s Eagle impressed with his jet mode, but there’s still a lot more to love about this guy. Let’s start with his transformation…

Alrighty, folks, I’m back with the second half of the F-4 Phantom (“Not-Fireflight”) feature. Actually, this is more like the last third of the feature as I shouldn’t need to get as long winded as yesterday. Let’s get right to it by starting off with transformation…

I managed to hold out for a long time against the tempting in-rush of third-party Transformers. I actually first caved back when Fansproject revealed their “Not-Insecticon” Causality figures. The problem was, I waited to buy all three once they were all out. That turned out to be a stupid move because the first two sold out everywhere and now all I can find are the “Not-Deluxe” “Not-Insecticon” repaints. Re-issue those bitches, Fansproject! Re-issue them and I will buy them!! I pledge you my monies! Nonetheless, my favorite Transformers combiners have always been the Aerialbots and the Stunticons. When TFC showed off the first images of their own versions of the Aerialbots, I simply couldn’t hold out any longer. And so, with some Christmas money in hand, I ordered the first figure in Project Uranos: F-4 Phantom aka“Not-Fireflight.” And since the whole “Not” business is getting on my nerves, for the purposes of the feature, we’ll just call him Phantom.