TFSS 5.0 Fracytl & Shattered Glass Starscream

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Transformer Subscription Service 5.0 Fractyl

Botcon 2016 Terrorsaur in green, with gold camo, as Beast Wars Terrorsaur's Botcon 1997 repaint Fractyl. Boom, job done and Subs Service v5 starts, as Botcon 2016 included, with a homage to a previous Botcon product. Lacking a spare Beast Wars Voyager core, Fractyl & Terrorsaur join the other beast Combiner Wars Limbs, Tigatron & Unit-3, as limbs on my Unite Warriors Grand Scourge combiner.

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Transformer Subscription Service 5.0 Starscream

I'm not a Botcon attendee and, before they started doing combiners, didn't have much truck with the Transformers Figure Subscription Service so my direct experience of the Heroic Decepticons/Evil Autobots Shattered Glass concept has been minimal. I thought it was a good idea for a one off for BotCon 2008 but Fun Publications was unable to leave it alone and kept producing more and more Shattered Glass toys, frequently including toys that many fans felt should have had the standard Autobot & Decepticon symbols on, notably Action Master Thundercracker. Since there's a lot of homaging to past Botcon & Club exclusives in the final year of the convention and Subs Service, I'm not 100% surprised to see a Shattered Glass toy in TFSS 5.0. But this one I have multiple problems with.

All along I've thought that the F-16 Air Raid version of the mould would make a better Decepticon Strike Plane than Skydive, but it was Skydive used to create the clear Unite Warriors Ghost Starscream. Given that exists it's only logically that it should get repainted as at least the real Starscream, and probably his 1984 repaints Thundercracker & Skywarp. But no, for whatever reason FunPub decide to resurrect their 2008 Shattered Glass Starscream colours which in turn play on the relationship between Starscream and Jetfire in the cartoon by giving Starscream Jetfire's colours. So I'm feeling deprived of my Skydive in solid Starscream colours, who I'm probably not going to see now thanks to the existence of Power of the Primes Starscream, a Voyager Combiner Core. I still have hopes of Thundercracker and Skywarp CW Skydives to complete that combiner, but that's a different matter!

But it's now that the choice of mould for Unite Warriors Starscream comes back to haunt us! See if the Starscream there had been Air Raid, then the TFSS Starscream would also have been Air Raid. And then slapping the Shattered Glass colours on that would have given us, faction symbols aside, a more than passable CW Jetfire complete with swing wings!

I've got some problems with the deco on the jet too: large areas on unpainted white plastic push the knock off button to me, not helped by the grey cockpit being almost indistinguishable at first glance. The red dual cannon .... doesn't really work and I'm not sure about the clear red hand either: it's unique so won't really go with anything else but I could see it as a sort of powered up fist in combined mode.

The robot mode works better than the jet mode, with more red, plastic & paint, and black, just paint, but there's still a lot of white.

With either a different deco or a different mould this could have been a great toy. A bit of a miss from the TFSS means they go out on a bit of a damp squib.