Despite my still huge backlog of first- and second-wave Dark of the Moon toys, I'm talking about a third wave guy I picked up today.  That's just how I roll sometimes.

(You'll note a pretty mundane word is being auto-censored right now.  It's an experiment I'm doing.  Ad revenue from one of my adservers is oddly down this month, and this is also the month that, because of writing the phrase "Dark of the Moon" all the damn time, I'm suddenly classified as an "asssstronomy" site.  I'm usually classified as a film site, because ... I don't know.  But I was wondering if I ditched all the Lunar references and got myself back into the film category revenue would increase, because I'm a curious nerd like that.  (A curious nerd who likes money.)  Also, I changed all of the "dark of the moon" tags to "transformers 3."  Anyway.)

At some point in the past few years, I've started to really enjoy movie Starscream's design.  I don't know if I like it as Starscream, per se, but I enjoy it regardless.  Why these things happen is hard to discern.  Starscream's not from a particular design philosophy that I usually enshrine.  Perhaps it's rooted in how much I really like Leader Class Starscream from the previous movie's toyline.  And so a current attempt at that same design in a smaller size caught my attention, I guess?  But I had force myself to pass up Deluxe Class Starscream himself.  I had the perfect Starscream already.  But this guy, Thundercracker, isn't Starscream!  I don't have a movie Thundercracker.  There've been movie Thundercrackers, but I don't own any of them.  And, woo, such a pretty blue.  Yes.

Yes, I shall buy a Thundercracker.

And he's a pretty great toy, all things considered, once you get past the whole relative scale thing.  He's certainly not clear of robot mode parts on his jet mode underside, but he's no boat, either.  I'd say he has amazingly small amounts of robot mode parts silhouette for being a smaller Deluxe Class toy that looks as much like the movie's design in robot mode.Everything smooshes and folds up and compacts pretty well, even though sometimes that means it's compacting up against the undersides of the wings.

Getting him in and out of both modes isn't a frustration party, either.

Thundercracker comes with a blue version of Roadbuster's okayish chainsaw.  He also comes with a sword which I am guessing is the top half of the MechTech weapon that came with Starscream's Deluxe Class toy.  There's a notch at the bottom of the sword that looks like it connects to something else.  Hmmm.

And nearly most importantly, Thundercracker is a very attractive blue.  I almost picked him off the peg with my mouth instead of my hand.