Starscream's vehicle mode is as it's always been-- a jet, though done up in the slightly exaggerated Animated style. The nosecone is longer than on most other TF jets we've gotten, and the main and tail wings are slanted forward, an interesting design differentiation from most jets. From a top-down view, Starscream looks pretty good, with the red and black paint apps helping to break up the dull blue. I'm not sure WHY dull blue is Starscream's main color, though, as his main color on the show is clearly more greyish, but all of his toys are roughly this same shade of blue. Odd, and I think it leads to a color scheme that just looks rather boring, truth be told. Granted, I never thought his traditional gray/red color scheme was all that exciting, but it was still more eye-catching than this. Like most Animated toys, his mold detailing is relatively sparse, being only where needed for the most part. The inside of the cockpit has some pretty intricate detailing, though, which is pretty nice. From a side view, Starscream looks considerably less impressive in this mode. Like many jet Transformers, he's got some pretty noticeable undercarriage junk, mostly consisting of his upper legs and his arms in between them-- the hands are particularly noticeable from a rear view. His robot feet are also blatantly folded up at the back end. However, he does have a few features to partially make up for this-- his two missile launchers can also be rotated backwards to look like jet thrusters, and he has three retractable landing gear.
    Starscream's robot mode is more impressive than his vehicle mode, that's for sure. For one, is overal proportions are great-- I really like how his form shows both litheness and strength at the same time, what with being generally skinny while still having fairly wide upper arms. His claw-like curled fingers also look pretty cool, as well. In addition, he has a pretty cool "automorph" gimmick during transformation-- as you rotate his waist into its proper robot mode position, the front part of his nosecone retracts automatically into his cockpit to form a better-proportioned chest and his arms partially fold out. (It also works in reverse when you're transforming him back to vehicle mode.) His wings hook onto his upper back like a backpack, though they don't hook in very well-- they come undone far too easily. Also, a small portion of his rear backpack splits and forms two smaller wings that turn at a perpendicular angle from the two main wings. I'm not sure why this is, as not only is this not show-accurate, but it leaves too dangly little fragile parts just hanging out there that also tend to fall off fairly easily. Other QA issues have also seen pretty widespread reports with this mold, such as loose arms and loose ankles. He also has overly tight missile launchers on his lower arms, which are supposed to be able to slide up and down on his lower arms when you push in a certain button, but this doesn't work very well. Some other, more aesthetic quibbles I have are that his arm-mounted missile launchers really aren't at all show-accurate (they'd need to be considerably skinnier), and his face sculpt is stretching it even for an Animated figure-- I mean, that is one HUGE chin, there. His articulation quite good-- he can move at the neck, shoulders (at two points), elbows (at two points), thumbs, four fingers on each hand on one joint, and he can also move at the hips (at two points), knees (at three points), and his ankles are on ball joints.
    Overall, the Voyager class Animated Starscream mold is probably one of the weakest of the more recent Starscream molds. He certainly has his pluses, like a nice top-down view of his jet form, his "automorph" gimmick, and his general robot proportions, but he has some pretty noticeable downsides as well, including some very noticable undercarriage junk in vehicle mode and some QA issues in robot mode. So I wouldn't say he's terrible, he's but not great, either.

Review by Beastbot

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