Bot Reviews: Transformers: Studio Series Voyager Thrust

One thing I like about shopping at Transformers conventions like TFCon is that it gives me a chance to catch up with figures that I missed, especially considering how Transformers at retail these days can be here-then-gone in a matter of months, unless they’re a shelfwarmer. Studio Series Thrust’s one of those bots.

A retooling of Studio Series Starscream, Thrust’s one of the many generic background Decepticon Seekers who showed up during the Bumblebee movie’s memorable Cybertronian prologue. There were definitely multiple Seekers with his colorscheme, but this one (according to the package) is the one that flew with Starscream to help destroy the launchpad. The other point of interest with him is this particular name-and-colors combo: Thrust’s typically a red jet, but the green and grey of this release instead make him a homage to the Transformers: Armada version of Thrust, a Decepticon tactician, who, in the 2002 anime, would later turn traitor in favor of Unicron.

At this point, I’m just going completionist on the cast of the Bumblebee movie, so I figured I’d add him to the shelf, but at the same time, he wasn’t really a priority for me, since he’s a complete backgrounder, albeit an interesting shout-out. Because of that, I waited long enough that he vanished from retail (and online), so I’m belatedly catching up with this green meanie. Here’s my Starscream writeup, I’ll be taking a look at what’s different, and how the tooling holds up with the benefit of hindsight.

Robot Mode

You’re meant to transform Thrust’s wings differently, and flip them into an M-shape, helping make him visually distinct from Starscream. Making him more visually distinct, though, is his new head, and the new cowling around it.

Thrust’s head is now the same Seeker-with-gasmask head as Studio Series Blitzwing, though there’s enough tiny differences that I expect it’s a different tooling off the same CAD files, especially since, like Starscream, there’s no parts shared with Blitzwing, this isn’t a retool.

The other bit of new tooling is a big pyramid-shaped hood around and behind his head, a neat way to suggest the “conehead” type of seeker while still having a non-conehead. It introduces an incredibly obvious problem, though: It limits his head articulation, by getting in the way. That being said, you can sort of lift his head out of the cowling, and jut it forward a bit, to “unlock” better neck articulation, but I’ve got no idea if that’s a feature, or if I’m just hanging it off the balljoint a bit (if I push it too much, his head comes right off).

Outside of that, it’s the same body as Starscream, a curiously odd-looking design, with a kind of hunchbacked posture. It made Starscream look like a vulture, and on Thrust, it gives him good Gooney Henchman energy. He definitely says “boss” a lot. It helps that those bent wings make him look kind of subservient. It’s weird, but it’s the kind of weird I like, and he’s still impressively large and substantial by Voyager standards.

For colors, he’s now a few different shades of green, and light grey, with some black bits, plus a tiny bit of silver, red and yellow, all around the head. Credit where it’s due: The exact layout of these colors is way more different from Starscream than you’d think, it’s not just a basic palette swap, and areas like his wings and lower legs do different things with stripes and such, helping to sell him as a distinct character.

Also helping: There’s more shades of green than I was expecting, a lighter lime one, but also a darker forestry one, which helps me think of him as Armada Thrust, and not just, say, Acid Storm with a fanbait name tacked on. I was worried he’d look plain in person, but there’s some nice contrast here.

Articulation is again, unchanged, outside of his head being kind of blocked. He’s got really solid construction, and bends nicely, and his articulation plays with his sculpt to make him very expressive as an underling. Those tilting wrists of his, in particular, can be rubbed together in a very Igor-esque “yessss, master” way.

One thing that’s disappointing is that his tolerances haven’t been changed. Sure, his joints and general stability are just as good as on Starscream, but they neglected to fix the problem with his black wing-mounted guns, in that they’re still far too loose in their peg holes, and move around way too easily, always feeling on the verge of falling off.

Of course, if you don’t care for screen-accuracy, you can always stick them into their vehicle-mode places on his wings, a little more outwards, lower, and sideways….

…or just have him hold them in his hands, but this is the type of thing HasTak’s usually pretty good about fixing when it comes time for a re-release.

Same goes for his other accessory, his complicated three-barelled arm-gun, which still doesn’t fit onto his forearm as tightly or straightly as it should, with a slight bend in it.

It’s only frustrating because Blitzwing’s nigh-identical arm gun snapped in tight, and straight, and again, this retool would have been the perfect time to fix it on this tooling.

Transformation

The good news is that, after transforming Starscream so many times, I could do this transformation’s broad strokes from memory. If you don’t own Screamer, though, you’re definitely going to want instructions on this one, since his made-up alternate mode doesn’t make it obvious where things go, and the transformation involves a cool-but-complicated torso inversion.

I say I remembered the broad strokes, but I still had to spend a bunch of time adjusting his cockpit, robot legs, and the balled-up arms at the bottom until everything pegged into place, so there’s enough fiddliness and ambiguity here that this is prevented from being a real winner of a transformation, in my books.

Vehicle Mode

This is still a weird-looking Tetrajet of an alternate mode, but, if you check the art, this is what he looked like in the film, with the big exception of the wadded up arms beneath his underslung gun.

You either love or hate this strange vehicle, in all its bulky, un-aerodynamic chunk, but I personally like it, and it feels like a lost Star Wars starfighter, or something from a space-shooter game.

I do find myself wishing the final assembly of the thing was a bit more stable, the top layer of the jet’s roof, behind the clear yellow cockpit, is composed of thin, folded panels that have a tendency to come unpegged and undone, though the body itself is pegged in solidly rough that the whole thing stays together.

Similarly, the lower halves of his wings don’t really lock in, and flutter around pretty freely.

Though, on the positive side, he has one novel feature that I adore: His big chunk of underslung robot-arm-stuff is still the perfect handhold to swoosh him around.

The colors in this mode are largely the same, bringing a clear yellow jet cockpit and purple Decepticon symbols into sharper focus, and again, I appreciate that they didn’t just copy and hue-shift Starscream’s color layout, the gray and two shades of green are all in pretty different configurations.

In fact, there’s little enough recognizable Seeker in here that when you paint him grey and green, he almost looks like he doesn’t belong to the Starscream lineage, and is a totally original design, and that’s something I get a kick out of.

Overall

I’d call Starscream the slightly stronger version of this tooling, if only because his head is unencumbered, but Thrust still inherits all of the strong points of the previous version (a weird-but-compelling design executed well), plus all of the weaknesses (a challenging transformation, stability issues with his accessories). But Thrust represents a more obscure character pull, a rare bone thrown to the Transformers: Armada-liking crowd.

If you’re collecting the Bumblebee movie cast, as I am, he’s hardly essential, as he’s a background generic, and the figure’s good, but not exceptional, but if you want a new version of the squid-headed tactician from 2002, or are just in it for an interesting design that’s not tied to an A-list character, then Thrust might be more your speed.

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