Jetfire

Quick, go back in time and ask 1985 me who my favorite Autobot was. I'll wait. Back? Did I answer with Omega Supreme or Jetfire, or both? More than likely I answered with Skyfire, who is Jetfire. But he totally isn't.

Living in California in 1985 and having a dad who was in the Navy, I was already a little familiar with Macross. My older friends whose day's were also in the Navy introduced me to the concept. As they described it, it was awesome. Awesome and violent. The main draw, of course were the veritech fighters. Who could forget Roy Fokker's skull emblazoned fighter? Magnificent.

Then when I got Inferno and looked at the catalogue, what did I see? A veritech fighter working with the Autobots! Jetfire was his name and he looked beautiful, with the whites and reds. My friend Bobby pointed out to me that Jetfire was in the cartoon as well. Score. I tuned into the cartoon and was met with this:

Picture from TFWiki

What? That's not Jetfire. This was some guy named Skyfire. Who the heck is he? My eight-year old mind didn't understand things like the Jetfire mold belonging to a different company and the whole Takara deal. These things didn't matter to me. To further confuse matters, the Marvel Comic used the animation model for Skyfire.

Delbo goodness from TFWiki

Ugh. I'm not even going to go into the whole Dutch thing.

What?  Again, from TFWiki

Regardless of certain confusing aspects to the Jetfire/Skyfire ordeal, I still wanted Jetfire. I begged and begged, but to no avail. Jetfire would never be in my collection. Four years later, I got one! Minus the armor and gun. For some reason, I painted him blue with some Testors paint. Luckily, I lost him a very long time ago.


I've been on the hunt for a Jetfire for a few years, but have been reluctant to pull the trigger. Being a mainly white figure, it was hard to find one in good shape without spending an arm and a leg. Same goes with the armor and that clip for the gun. Finding a yellowed, dirty Jetfire with missing pieces is pretty easy and cheap. Finding a perfect condition Jetfire is easy too, but expensive. What I wanted was something in the middle. Complete, but maybe a little dirty and yellowed. Thanks to the Internet, I've discovered ways of cleaning and whitening yellowed figures, so I didn't mind taking on a project.

This is what I found:

Not too shabby. He's pretty clean, but there are some yellowed parts, but he was a great deal. His armor is compete as well. My only complaint would be the stress mark on one of the pieces of armor for the arm as it doesn't want to stay on, but I can buy another one fairly cheap.

The first transformation for Jetfire was into the "Gerwalk" mode. That brought back some Robotech memories.

Trying to remember how the armor went on, I looked up Jetfire's instructions on the great Botch's website. I gotta say, I forgot how brief the instructions were back then. The instructions show the "Gerwalk" mode with the title "Alternate Transformation", but there aren't any instructions on how to get to that mode. Funny.

The yellowing really isn't that bad. It's mainly on the left arm, but that isn't a hard fix. Nothing like a quick soak in some peroxide and OxyClean.

That's how you know it's authentic!

My favorite mode, really, is the jet mode. For all of the updates, Hasbro really hasn't captured this look or feel, for obvious reasons. All of the updated versions seem to take their cues from the Skyfire model, which is cool, but it doesn't do this justice:

I'm very glad to finally get a complete version of this figure, even if he needs a little work. That's half the fun, right?