Look, I'll take a billion rehashes of 1984 guys if it means we get one (1) faithful toy of Jhiaxus.  And good news!  There have been, and there is one!  Hot dang.  

This is where I put that "It's been 84 years" meme from Titanic.  Jhiaxus was a villain invented solely for the Marvel Generation 2 comic book, right?  His name is literally "Gee, axe us" because they didn't expect the series to last more than 12 issues, and it didn't!  The Generation 2 book was, of course, about how some Transformers were having sex the Bad Way, and their sin created an off-product vengecloud, and ... wow, okay, this sounds pretty iffy when it's all written out like that.  Jhiaxus was the leader of this actual Bastard Race of Transformers, which was off Cyberforming innocent planets, doing some widescale genocides, plural, while Optimus Prime and Megatron were busy alternately sleeping for 4 million years or playing video games.  Anyway, Jhiaxus's path intersects with Prime and Megatron's, and he's like Hey, I'm New Hotness, Fall In Line, Grandpas, and Prime and Megatron were like LOL no, and then Jhiaxus kicked both their asses, and then the vengecloud ate him.  

That was his original incarnation.  Since then, they've tried to do other things with him in other continuities, usually resulting in him being.... a scientist?  Sure.  "Scientist" is the job they give non-Megatron Decepticon leaders these days when they have to coexist in a story where Megatron must remain the default Decepticon leader.  Shockwave?  Scientist.  Thunderwing?  Scientist.  Jhiaxus?  Scientist.  Ratbat?  ... politician...?  Sure.  

Not sure why it's taken so long to make a toy of this Sex Monster Fascist!

I mean, they've tried a few times, sort of.  Back at the turn of the millennium, they painted a Beast Machines Jetstorm gray and orange and called it Jhiaxus.  Eight years ago they retooled Armada Starscream halfway into Jhiaxus and then colored him like the orange Beast Machines guy.  But this-- THIS Jhiaxus -- this toy is... an actual Jhiaxus!  Properly scaled versus other toys!  Looks like Jhiaxus!  In Jhiaxus colors!  

In robot mode, he makes a great Jhiaxus action figure.  All his joints have a pretty wide range of motion.  Jhiaxus doesn't have double-jointed elbows, but his arms do bend in on themselves more than 90 degrees.  And he's got... articulated hands?  Usually they save those hands for the toys that have to hold a Matrix, but Jhiaxus is one of the few bad guy leaders who never once gave a shit about the Matrix.  Nope, this toy just has articulated hands just to make me happy.  So far as I know.  Maybe he'll get retooled into somebody later who needs opening hands, who knows.  Jhiaxus's scalloped green bat wings are supposed to be folded in for robot mode, but I say keep those babies spread open.  Jhiaxus does not keep himself smaller for anybody.  He manspreads.  

Jhiaxus's design has always been, essentially, Starscream's original toy but beefier.  He's got the cockpit chest, he's got the, uh, vent... pectorals, he's got ONE of Starscream's shoulder intakes, including the toy's sticker detail there.  Jhiaxus's head has Starscream's ear vents AND the jet nosecone Starscream's toy had sticking out the back of the skull.  Wings were on the back, tinier wings were on the legs, the whole deal.  Jhiaxus was a Starscream who didn't skip Any day.  Not Leg Day, not anything.  So, unsurprisingly, Jhiaxus transforms kind of like a Starscream!  Chest becomes cockpit, legs become the rear of the jet, wings flip to where wings go, arms go... somewhere.  (They go underneath.  Don't look too closely.)

And it's a pretty okayish jet mode!  This is definitely the weak point of the toy.  I mean, it's not BAD, it's just not as phenomenal as his robot mode.  And, honestly, this is as good as it was gonna be, if we're rightfully prioritizing the robot mode in this toy's design.  Do you know what his jet mode looked like in the comics?  It looked like his torso with wings.  Absolutely no where for arms or legs to go.  So tucking those arms underneath and putting the legs in the back is probably the best you could do without just yanking parts off.  

He comes with two rifles.  These rifles are not pictured.  The pictured rifles (to the right) are from a Nonnef upgrade set for Siege G2 Sideswipe.

ANYWAY I'm very excited this toy exists.  I've wanted one for literally half my life.  And I'm old!  So that's a long time!!!

Look, I don't know if anybody knows what was going on here.  We finally got a toy named Jhiaxus that's sculpted to look like Jhiaxus but then they tried to color him like the other Jhiaxus and they failed at doing so.  What is even the deal?

I like my orange stuff.  I do!  And I'd be up for an orange Jhaixus, and I certainly was.  But, man, you know why old orange Jhiaxus worked?  There was some color contrast.  He was orange and light gray and black.  New orange Jhiaxus tries to do that but it ends up this entire orange/gray single-value lump.  If you put him in grayscale he'd look all the same color.  That's the problem.  

To be honest, Jhiaxus's "real" colors (white, yellow, teal) don't look great on this mold either -- I've seen people try to paint it up like that and I don't think it really works.  But, at least, it avoids the single-lump-of-the-same-value-everywhere problem.  

Everything else about this guy is great.  He's based on the phenomenal Generations Armada Starscream toy.  He's got heaping amounts of retooling -- new wings, new torso, new head, new weapons.  He's ORANGE.  But orange in THIS way, versus another color that doesn't set apart from the orange at all, is what plummets this toy into the Aw Dammits.  This toy is the result of somebody's Monkey Paw wish.