Skydive [Age of the Primes/Deluxe Class]

In our ongoing quest to complete the Transformers Age of the Primes Aerialbot team of five buttheads, today we’re looking at Skydive! Skydive is the bookworm of the squad — well-versed in aerial tactics, strategy, and history. He's also the most visually distinct member of the team thanks to his mostly black color scheme, compared to the primarily white look the rest of the Aerialbots have going on.

This figure is a remold of the Air Raid toy we looked at a little while back. Honestly, I probably wouldn't have noticed if it hadn’t been pointed out, but side-by-side the shared engineering is clear. Still, the sculpting and new parts are handled so well that it doesn’t feel like the same toy with a new coat of paint. And really, it makes sense to stretch the tooling budget when the original characters themselves shared similar silhouettes in the first place. Skydive and Air Raid have usually been “same shape, different guy,” so this is just accurate to life.

As I’ve been saying with these current Transformers Generations figures — Skydive looks like he stepped right out of the cartoon. Which would be terrifying if he did that while I’m napping during G1 reruns on the Transformers channel. Damn.

Skydive is nicely articulated and comes with two blasters. They work well in robot mode and can also peg under his wings in jet mode. Transformation is quick and easy: legs compress, arms fold in, the backpack settles into place — your standard modern jet-transforming-guy routine. In jet mode, Skydive’s unique colors stand out even more. The darker gray body and lightning pattern on the wings look great, and now that I’m thinking about it, that kind of flashy detail seems to originate back to his G1 toy. I don't remember similar patterns before him, but plenty after. Neat!

Like his teammates, Skydive forms part of Superion — and we’ll take a full look at that combined mode once Fireflight finally joins the squad. These Age of the Primes combiners are a big improvement over the Combiner Wars versions from ten years ago (which I actually liked a lot at the time), so I’m excited to see Superion come together here on Zone Base.