“What’s your favourite Transformer, then?” is a question I’m asked often. Usually it is said with faint horror, as some acquaintance scrabbles desperately for a way to break the awkward silence after a glimpse into The Cupboard of Shame to behold the sardine ranks of crumbling vintage plastic within.
I never have an answer, or at least not in the succinct form of a single name that will then give them license to flee my house and never return. This isn’t because I don’t know, or because my grasshopper mind keeps changing - it’s because it’s a question with many different answers depending on context. Favourite character? Favourite comic character? Favourite toy? And by that do I mean ‘best’ or ‘most personally important?’
Today, I’m going to focus on just one of those answers - the best Transformers toy. (In my opinion, which is 100% empirically correct). Even then, it’s a specific interpretation of ‘best’, which I’m going to loosely define as ‘most jaw-dropping one from the ‘Generation One’ original vintage line.’
It’s Jetfire, the magnificent Autobot air guardian. The Transformer who was never actually a Transformer, and never can be again.
Quick bit of history: fellow robo-gonks can skip the next couple of paragraphs as they’ll already know it well, and will otherwise be hovering a finger over ‘Unsubscribe’.
The huge and beautiful toy sold in 1985 American and European toyshops as Jetfire was what we now call a ‘redeco’, or new colour scheme, of a toy know as Macross' VF-1S Super Valkyrie (aka Robotech: it’s a long story). Macross was made and owned by a totally different company, with its own toy range and fiction - which is why lovely old Jetfire looks and feels like no other Transformer. ‘He’ was supposed to the plane/mech suit of a human pilot, not a sentient Autobot.
Hasbro, desperate to cash in further on the 1984/1985 Transformers phenomenon, had licensed a number of ‘rival’ toys to hastily repackage as Autobot and Decepticon reinforcements. The enormous and intricate Jetfire was one of their banner toys of 1985 - and then withdrawn in 1986, never to be rereleased due to some particularly feisty rights-holders. The character looks different in the old cartoon (where he’s instead called Skyfire) and in any rendition since because they simply weren’t allowed to stick a Macross design in there.
Lesson over, please forgive me o hallowed Transformers grognards. The point is that Jetfire is a beautiful toy. Yes it’s still a toy robot, but it’s probably the first one I’d put in someone’s hands if I was genuinely trying to defend my ridiculous hobby. Understand ye now, or what?
Everything about it looks and feels different to its often awkwardly-proportioned and stiff-limbed contemporaries - the weight, the paint, the articulation, even its explosion of optional stickers. The dazzling white, red and black colour scheme screams Hero even more than Optimus Prime’s textbook red jumper/blue trousers combo. (In fact, Jetfire even was briefly advertised as the Autobot leader in several European countries, who had been cruelly starved of Prime due to another fiendish licensing knot).
Meanwhile, the sci-fi jet in turns into looks cool as hell - straight out of some imagined movie, where most other Transformers were gunning for more of a toy car look. Plus, it’s approximately 900 times bigger than any Transformer before it, so a kid who hauled it to the playground immediately looked like a living god. (Which they would summarily demonstrate by using Jetfire’s absurdly powerful, spring-loaded flip-out landing gear to pinch and pummel the fingers of lesser beings).
And that’s before Jetfire has his raft of chunky red armour attached, granting the toy an imposing super mode in bot or jet mode alike. He’s a walking death machine - by far the most deluxe of Transformers in his era. Which, again, is solely because he’s not a Transformer. He’s the equivalent of parachuting a Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine miniature onto a chess board.
Hasbro knew what they were onto with Jetfire. The box they sold him in was laser-targeted to make any young boy go weak at the knees, and his parents to howl in unbridled terror at the spending to come.
They could have neatly layered all those armour pieces on top of the robot, or bundled them into a plastic bag tucked alongside the instructions. Instead, they laid them out, neat and well-spaced like butterflies on an entomologist’s pinboard, in a secondary polystyrene tray placed alongside the main figure’s tray.
Essentially, they needlessly made the box three times wider than it needed to be, which is to say two-to-three times bigger than the largest Transformers packaging to date (Optimus and Megatron). It guaranteed toy shelf dominance, and it guaranteed The Hunger in any kid who beheld it.
And by God, it’s beautiful. Transformers collecting being a hobby that is broadly the preserve of male gonks of a certain age (hello), it won’t surprise you to hear that vintage boxes are a big part of the scene. I share the warm and tingly feeling about seeing that ancient cardboard, but generally decline to tread that particular path, for reasons of space, money and sanity.
Jetfire is a rare exception: the presentation of our accidental Transformer in his outsize original packaging has never been bettered, for my money. Until relatively recently, I never so much as saw it myself, outside a brief appearance in a toyshop exactly 40 years ago. For me as a child, owning a Jetfire was beyond all imagining.
Even as an adult, it’s painfully difficult to lay hands on a decent Jetfire. In most cases, decades of ambient sunlight have added a tobacco sheen to all that bright white plastic, while eBay abounds with fully beige horror shows.
And, because it was beyond madness to give a toy so complex to a six-year-old, they often coming missing an arm, or even most of the torso snapped off at the shoulders. It takes a miracle to find one with the sea of white paint over his metal shins still intact. Then there’s all those easily- lost or snapped armour pieces, including some tiny red clips and horribly fragile pegs: pray or spend big, those are your only options now.
So many other big-name Transformers have been re-released in some form over the years, but never Jetfire. The pool is small, and the vast majority of great condition Jetfires now live in the Forever Collections of middle-aged men like me.
I was very lucky last year. I stumbled across a charity eBaying a boxed Jetfire, unaware of quite what they had. All the pieces, all the cardboard, plastic as white as baby’s teeth. Right time, right place: I had seconds to click Buy before someone else saw. A rare stroke of blind luck. That’s how this game works.
I already owned one, yellowed and battered but at least complete, so buying another felt like a sickly gamble. I then sold it for twice as much as this pristine one cost me. To this day, I still gaze upon the ‘new’ one with awe: seeing Jetfire as he looked in 1985. He won’t stay white forever, I know that. Chemistry is against me there. But I shall revere him while I can. The little god inside my cupboard.
On a personal level, I love other Transformers more, for various reasons. But Jetfire? He’s the best there ever was.
And I’m so sorry, but you can’t have one.
(Photos all my own, except for the Valkyrie and Skyfire images).
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