My TC just arrived from Show.Z :O

 

Had this guy since he came out. Just noticed one of his guns fit loose in one of his arms

 

Coronation Starscream on a F-15E Strike Eagle

Credit to the original post @raptor22 of course. Just bringing some attention to this awesome discovery. Starscream made it onto a real F15. Somehow it feels like a victory for the fans.

 

I just got my Starscream in from Kapow Toys today and man he's quite a handful to transform but overall I'm very happy with him. I think I even managed to get the last one from their October batch as when I looked at the page after ordering it said he was out of stock lol.

I first checked everything to see if there was anything wrong like duplicate faces or large paint problems and thankfully there were none, all the correct faces and the paint on all of them looks good too. Though I did have a mild scare when checking if I ended up with two left or right pieces when it came to the hinges on the front of the wings that are for the underside panel.

The first side looked wrong and didn't like to close properly so I was thinking I'd gotten two one sided hinges, however this same thing was present on the other side. Thankfully I'd not gotten two of the same hinge, the hinges were just on the wrong sides meaning I still had a left and a right. After I transformed him to robot mode and was nearly done transforming him back to jet mode I very gently flexed the wings to help the little indents over the nub which held the hinges in. I swapped the hinges over, put the wings back together and was very pleased to see that it was as simple as that. This might be the case for others who think they have two of the same hinge on theirs, they could just be swapped.

EDIT: I've just done a search and found that another user posted about this exact same thing! looks like the hinges are so similar it's difficult to see which is which and they can end up swapped. Masterpiece V2 Starscream Coming! In fact there seem to be quite a few people who had this happen but unfortunately a few which I guess are the ones I remember seeing where they had two of the same side.

There were a few other minor issues but not much to bother me really. I spotted a hair underneath the paint on his left chest intake where the dark grey paint is but it's only really visible really close up. There's also what looks like paint scratched into the jet mode canopy, I'm going to see if I can clean it but I think it might have actually dug into the plastic a bit. Other than that there were some mild paint issues but nothing I can't easily overlook. There is a little dot of red missing on the left wing fin but that gets folded over in robot mode anyway so I think I'll just leave it and maybe touch in that spot at a later date.

I think I will have to do a tiny bit of shaving on the left wing tab as it absolutely did not want to go in and I gave it more force than I was comfortable with trying to get it to tab in, the right side was almost as bad but did go in so I might shave that one a really tiny amount to help.

The transformation was really tricky and honestly it would be hard to recommend him for someone new to the Masterpiece line. I've had Masterpiece figures since 2006 and have both the G1 colours MP-3 and MP-11 which I got both new in 2008 and 2012 so I'm happy to add MP-52 to that collection. I'd say he's harder to transform than Megatron just with how much you have to keep out of the way and try to prevent flopping around but I reckon I can get used to it.

I did accidentally cause some damage to him on the underside of the cockpit area where you separate it to compress it down, for some reason mine was just not having it and coming away like I saw in videos so the corners there ended up rounded off and damaged which sucks but it's hard to notice. I think I'll clean it up a bit with a blade since it's a bit ragged at the moment, that and some paint chipping was caused while transforming him. I didn't realise the nose cone would go into a hole and it ended up getting rammed into it and chipping a little at the end.

I don't mind that so much though as I'm considering painting his nose cone the same blue as his other parts as my other two are like this. The nose cones on those however were moulded in blue so all I needed to do was remove the paint and expose the blue which was not the case this time, MP-52 has his nose cone moulded in grey plastic which I'm slightly disappointed about since now I need to try and paint match the blue or repaint all the blue if I want to do that.

Speaking of paint I have to say I'm quite shocked that they chose such a dark shade for the red plastic considering they always knew some of it would be painted, it sticks out quite a lot and really should have been planned ahead for. Perhaps they were going to paint all the red plastic but found that the parts rubbed too much to move easily enough, I noticed that the figure shown on the box photos does have the unpainted pieces actually painted to match the rest of the red and not stick out so much.

The inside of the shoulder intakes are even moulded in a brighter shade of red so I suspect the original plan was to paint all the darker red parts but they had already made it so the red paint looked correct when sprayed over the darker red plastic, if they made all the red the lighter shade then perhaps the red paint would no longer be as bright as they wanted.

I'm not sure if anyone else had this happen but the panels you open to flip his hands out don't seem to want to tab in properly after getting the hands out, the left side more than the right which is a bit annoying. That brings me to the biggest let down of the figure which I know I'll just have to accept, that being the angle of the thumbs and the fact you can't rotate them at the base. I don't get why they chose the most unnatural angle to keep his thumb at and didn't even incorporate a rotation at its base. I'd have preferred that and having the last three fingers fused than all individual fingers and a thumb stuck at a really strange angle.

I think that and the fact the stripes are missing on the vertical tail fins are the biggest bother for me but I wanted to get what will likely be the last Starscream to go with my others. I only have MP-36 Megatron and Tracks for other Masterpiece figures but really I'm kind of undecided on whether or not I want to try and gather them all up, especially with how much some of them can cost.

In the end there are more good points about him than bad, I'm really pleased to get him after the journey of seeing the first teasers to the final release.

 

Transform it a few times before you have a go at shaving the wing tabs. Has become much easier on repeated transformations with both my copies of this mould.

 

What little Reflector is that? I really wish Takara included one with MP-52 TC! I'm now looking for one on ebay, and yours looks great in this pic!

 

Thanks for the great write-up. No-one has really mentioned it but the cockpit folding damage has certainly been my experience and I've seen this damage on various Youtube reviews. After slightly deforming the corner on Starscream, I was really careful with my Thundercracker... and I still deformed the plastic a little! It's a design fault where there is not enough clearance for the corners to pass each other.

 

If I remember I’ll post what I did to avoid that, that area was giving me trouble for a while too.

 

Its the FansToys Spotter accessory.

 

Thanks.

 

There we go yep in the exact same place. There seems to be an area carved out for there on the inside of that corner but the lack of roundness being on the top of either corners there ends up with that damage happening. Yours has it less than mine, it ended up buckling the plastic on the main piece corner quite a bit more than that.

I've been able to transform him back to robot mode again without doing any more damage to this area so it definitely does seem like a design flaw. Once that damage has happened it basically creates the curvature that should have been there in the mould.

 

I'm back from the dead!

Sorry I fell off the face of Cybertron again...been a lot going on, some bad, some good. Most important development being the birth of my nephew on October 22nd, so that certainly occupied a few of my weekends!

Right, anyways, so now that Christmas is over, I did what I should've done a long time ago and FINALLY ordered Starscream today. Hoping it ships out tomorrow and can get here before New Year's, but we shall see. If I open the figure and it's pretty solid, has no issues, and I'm happy with it, I'll probably be pretty quick to order Thundercracker. Good thing him and Skywarp are less expensive!

 

You'll enjoy it! It's a great mold! I was one of the fortunate ones that had tight joints across the board for both Starscream and Thundercracker tho

 

I'm going to assume the birth of your nephew is filed in the "good" category and say congratulations!

 

So Takara Tomy is offering their special promotion for Starscream's V2 coronation cape and bonus parts provided you live in Japan and can provide (mail in) proof of purchase UPC barcodes from the boxes of all three V2 Masterpiece figures of Starscream, Skywarp (whom I just picked up from TT Mall earlier today), and Thundercracker (just waiting for him to arrive).

トランスフォーマー　マスターピース　ジェットロンキャンペーン｜トランスフォーマーオフィシャルサイト｜タカラトミー

Just have to mail in the application with the barcodes, and then pay for shipping and handling. I hate to ruin my Masterpiece boxes but I'll be participating in this promotion for sure!

 

  I'll wait for the ko

 

Right? I HATE that they're making it so restrictive. TT is just begging for third-party companies to make KOs. I'm definitely going to get one when it is inevitably done

 

Glad to hear, hope all the joints on mine are tight. Should find out in just a few days!

Thank you! I'd say "wonderful" is the best way to describe it...being an uncle is a true joy. Once the little guy gets old enough, I'll be introducing him to Transformers! Won't tell him how expensive this hobby is though...  

 

Would they accept my firstborn child as a substitute?