There are a lot of toys - a lot made for collectors every year, and some fall under a familiar banner. "It's good, but it's not what I expected." Cyberverse Universe Slipstream is a good figure but not what fans expected - which was a taller, Voyager-class mold which Hasbro would hopefully redecorate several times. Instead this figure is a new head on the Windblade [FOTD #2,710] body, which is what Takara-Tomy did with their Legends figure a few years ago. With other changes, of course. Each one is something of a compromise - Takara-Tomy's was the Animated Starscream clone made out of a G1 Generations body - so not quite a match for the source material. Similarly, this is a Windblade repaint and not quite as angular or chunky as the cartoon Cyberverse animation model. As its own thing, though, this is a good toy - so I'm going to recommend that you take her on her own terms.
Hey! Listen! The black dot on her right eye is excess paint from the factory. On my sample, it was easy to scrape off after I did the shoot with no obvious damage to the face.
If anything, this toy is really good at being Hasbro's take on Takara-Tomy's previous Windblade-derived Slipstream. You can see the wheels turning in the designers' heads, and in some cases taking clear inspiration from Japan's releae. The metallic teal paint on the wings and legs, for example, seems to be a pretty good example of making use of a good idea.
Hasbro has done a few versions of this character, and very few repaints of her. I didn't love Takara-Tomy's version, but it existed, and existing is often a good reason to pick up a character you liked - the clear colorless back-of-head wasn't great, but the new torso and arm blasters were good. I skipped the Fan Club version. This 2024 figure is clearly Windblade first, with very few concessions made for the Slipstream toy. And it works pretty well, if you accept the changes and don't need something to perfectly match a cartoon you probably didn't watch.
Her head is new, and it's a little wide. The concept drawing on Instagram looks a tiny bit better, if only because her face proportions aren't quite as stretched. It's still pretty good, with a glossy painted front half of the helmet and a molded-in-black back of the helmet. The final head is very much the original art, but everything is a different size, or things seem translated strangely. The toy seems to have a tiny chin beard, but the drawing looks like a chinstrap. The jewel in the toy head is narrow and red, but the wider design in the artwork actually looks a little more subtle.
While not perfect, it's fun - a new Decepticon jet is nice to have, and this one uses a good mold with fans you can tilt, nice colors, and 5mm holes under the arms for blasters. They don't quite go where you would want, but at least they can go on the arms. Moving the 5mm peg lower on the barrel might help fudge it, but that would have other side effects. They can fit in the wings or the arms, and if you don't like it, I have got to assume someone at Hasbro is planning to do a G1 version of the character at some point down the road. But here we are waiting for a decent Sunstorm, so maybe not.
What's pretty nifty about her torso is that it manages to recall the Takara-Tomy toy, while being the exact same mold as the newish Windblade. A subtle faux canopy was painted blue, and that very same element is painted gray on Windblade - blending right in. It isn't a convincing conversion of the Cyberverse design but it's a great adaptation of that Legends Japanese version.
Transformation is easy. Instructions help, there are handy gap-covers for the legs, and you might not even need the instructions. She's not a pain in the neck. Her cannons are molded in clear blue - as can be seen in the 5mm and 3mm pegs - and you have to mount those on her wings in jet mode.
The jet mode is exactly like Windblade, except colors and accessories. You can pick her up and swoosh her around, or tilt the fans - but that's about it. It's not going to tick the box for an Animated or Cyberverse Slipstream, leaving the door open for another attempt if anyone felt like it. I like her as is, because for now, she's more or less her own character and this is a pretty nifty take on the concept from Japan, more widely available elsewhere in the world. Also I really love that metallic teal paint, they did a nice job with it.
Comparing her to the original, there's a lot to like about each - I kept the old one around because she looked cool standing around on a shelf, but felt a little fragile so I didn't transform her much. I do like the colors a lot though, they did a great job with the resources of the time and I don't feel a need to sell her off now that I have this new, different one.
I've been a fan of this line since the beginning (off and on when I was a kid) and in the last 15 years it seems increasingly apparent that Hasbro and Mattel and everybody else will, eventually, get around to redoing a number of characters as things age and secondary market prices drive demand. I say this assuming we'll get another better version later: I like this toy. I'm probably going to keep fussing with her as she's fun to pose and breaking from the Starscream paradigm means you actually have to fidget with her arms to get the cannons to look sort of like how you want, and you have to pose the wings to get her to look right. So many figures seem to be "open, pose, call it a day" but Slipstream and her wave cohort Optimus Prime have lent themselves to actually posing, playing, and (gasp) enjoying much more than a lot of other toys. It's more fun to play with these guys than get through a harried transformation, pose them, and call it a day. From where I stand, that makes this the superior toy. If you can make something I want to keep playing with at my age, you've achieved something great.
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