Name: Fireflight
Series: Classics
Allegiance: Autobot
Alternate Mode: Military Transport Plane
PLANE MODE
Height: 3.5cm Length: 11cm Width: 10.5cm
A terracotta transport plane with a dark matte grey around the fuselage and along the front of the wings. Fireflight is a repaint of Legend Jetfire and only bears a passing similarity to his G1 namesake. There are some beige aspects, namely the four engines underwing and the belly of the plane itself. The cabin windows are painted silver, an improvement over Jetfire. There's a stamped Autobot logo on top of the cockpit which is easy to miss amongst all the terracotta. The head is rather visible behind the allegiance symbol - and since the area around it is now painted grey this really stands out - more than it did on Jetfire.
As you might expect the key gimmicks of this mould are no longer functional - but then the gimmicks of the full sized Jetfire relied on large blocks of plastic. I guess it would have been nice had he retained the missile launchers, but that would have been asking a _lot_ at this scale. The red robot fists are visible on the beige engines - there's no room for them to retract on this smaller toy.
While this is a simplified version of the large toy, it doesn't really make too many compromises at this size. The gimmicks are gone and of course on this repaint the colours very different, but Fireflight is still quite similar to the original large toy. Some aspects of the new colour scheme work well, others work poorly. The colours used are quite nice, even if they don't really have much in common with the G1 toy of the same name (who was a fighter jet anyway).
TRANSFORMATION TO ROBOT MODE
Amazingly similar to the ultra sized toy. Fold up the tail, drag down the bottom of the fuselage to form his boots and rotate through 90°. Fold down the nose to form his chestplate. The back sits at an angle of about 60°, the chestplate clips into the waist, the wingtips fold up. Lift out his head, unfold the engines to become his arms - the outer pair become his forearms and inner pair his upper arms. Hasbro actually mistransformed the robot mode in their promo photos of Jetfire - the plane tail hangs between his legs in their pictures.
ROBOT MODE
Height: 8.5cm Width: 7cm
A terracotta robot with beige arms and thighs, Fireflight has some grey on his chest and knees and beige on the outsides of his boots. and silver head while his eyes and wrists are painted metallic red. The front of the plane is now his chest, meaning that he has an Autobot symbol in the middle of his chest. The colour scheme doesn't fit this mode as well as it did the plane mode - there's more beige than I'd like, but the colours work well enough together that this isn't a huge problem.
There are no gimmicks here, but the poseability is okay for a figure this small. The shoulders swing out to the sides while the elbows bend. The hips and knees are ball jointed, although the latter can't bend, only rotate. I would have liked some more leg motion here, although it this might have asked too much of the small thighs and made the toy too fragile.
A decent little robot mode for the most part. The colours are reasonable and the poseability is pretty good. More knee movement would have been nice, and the wingtips have an annoying tendency to pop off - although they're easy enough to reattach. I can't say this repaint inspires me that much - but then I don't have Jetfire so I'm happy enough with this robot mode.
VARIATIONS
None that I'm aware of. FortMax tells me that this toy was originally meant to be called Powerglide, but Hasbro couldn't get the name. I'm not so sure about the beige, but the darker red makes sense for Powerglide.
OVERALL
While the Classics line has many toys that are strongly reminiscent of particular G1 characters, Fireflight represents a rather weak tribute. Granted, he does share his colours with a TF:Universe MiniCon of the same name - and the terracotta and beige work together - but tributes to TFU characters seems rather out of place here. It's a decent mould all the same, and this is a nice colour scheme, so I do like Fireflight. A more focused effort could have turned a decent Transformer into a really nice one - 7/10
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