As a child of the 80s, I lived and breathed Transformers for the first decade or so of my life. The show was in constant syndication and my butt was glued to the carpet daily, watching the silly antics and poor animation of what was quite literally a half-hour toy commercial. Of course I had the toys, too, or at least a few of them – the $10-12 that the bigger ones cost at the time was a lot for our household.
Nearly forty years later, that old show (and movie) sticks with me, in a wholesome nostalgic way, and to indulge it a little, I decided last year to build up a Monogram 1/48 F-15 and paint it up like Starscream. I quickly decided that the pain of building that old kit, plus its ginormous completed display size, wasn’t worth it, and it got shelved for a long time.
When I revisited it recently, I decided that a 1/72 scale version of the project was the more prudent choice, and a quick search found that these old Hasegawa C-model kits can be had for around $15 a pop, and the idea of a tryptich display lodged itself in my head.
In the original 1984 Transformers show, the “Seekers” were these flying Decepticons of various colors, many of whom were nameless cannon fodder. But three were actual characters, with Starscream in red, white, and blue, being the duplicitous and cunning, if deeply cowardly, leader; Thundercracker in blue, ever thoughtful and supremely confident; and lastly Skywarp, in purple and black, who was able to teleport around the battlefield but was a few electrons short in the intelligence department. These guys were mainstays of the show through the 1986 theatrical movie, in which they were mercilessley killed off, along with most of my childhood favorites.
Just in case anyone wants a much deeper dive into the lore and real-life story of the Seekers:
Now, this isn’t exactly an original idea. There’s this really nicely executed Starscream, done up from a different boxing of this same kit, which will make for excellent inspiration. But I’ve not seen a display with all three of the original “Seekers” in it.
I’m really looking forward to building these kits up rather slapdash, not worrying about missing details or fiddly PE sets, and eventually getting to play with these bold, bright colors.
A quick peek at the plastic here. It’s quite glossy, so a good washing and a quality primer will be important. For a 1974 tooling (how can that be right?!), the detail is quite nice! The panel lines are raised, but very fine, and there doesn’t seem to be any major warpage of the larger panels. There is some flash, but nothing not scrape-able with the back of an Xacto.
You guys know me: expect slow updates. Thanks for checking in.
