Hi. Will someone explain it to me? I'm kinda new so be gentle... Why does the Jetfire in the cartoon look like a giant space plane, bu the old toy look like a Macross figure? And also one is called Jetfire and one is Skyfire? I'm confused! And now we have a new toy coming out that is supposed to represent them both????
Hmm. I'll give it a whirl. Hasbro wanted to get as many transforming robot toys into their line as possible, so in addition to Takara's Diaclone and Microchange lines, they also went to Takatoku Toys and got permission to bring over their Macross Valkyrie toy. Neither Takara nor Takatoku had a presence in the United States, so this wasn't a problem. But Takara and Takatoku were direct competitors in Japan, so when Takara imported the Transformers line, they couldn't sell a toy made by their competition. Since Hasbro wanted to promote sales of Jetfire in the U.S., they insisted that he be included in the cartoon. But since Takara wouldn't be selling Jetfire in Japan, they insisted that he be heavily altered from his toy design and his appearances kept to a minimum. As for why Hasbro took the extra step of changing his name to Skyfire in the show, it's generally assumed that they made up a new name because he didn't look like his toy anymore. It could be that they came up with the title of his intro episode, "Fire in the Sky," and changed it to better complement the title. "Fire in the Jet" makes much less sense.
