Quote Originally Posted by griffin View Post
Nah, if they were not originally planning to always have Slingshot released somewhere by Hasbro, they would have designed Firefly/Fireflight to look like the Gen1 (F4 Phantom) toy instead of as a Harrier-styled jet.

If it was a late kneejerk reaction to release Slingshot, Firefly would have looked like a F4 Phantom and Slingshot would have just been a white F4 Phantom redeco of Firefly.


The puzzling thing is why go to the trouble of creating this Alpha Bravo character/toy to replace Slingshot in this set of Aerialbot toys (and be coloured to homage Slingshot).
Was it just done simply to reuse the mould (which should be done as Blades)... and if so, that's kinda weak, and spoils the feel of this whole release of Combiners as a concept to homage the original Combiners.
I see what you're saying there, there's another couple of scenarios that might have come into play here;

1 - Mould budget - I remember reading about the earlier ROTF combiners, where there'd be two pairs of the same limb design due to budget restraints - I wonder if that's what happened here (though over a longer planned period) - They had to pick one mould for both Fireflight and Slingshot, and threw in a Vortex/Blades repaint so the first couple of waves were all different designs.

2 - Copyright issues. Iirc, the FOC Air Raid was originally supposed to be Fireflight - looking at his colours and head sculpt, but they couldn't get his name past copyright, perhaps that's what happened here - the mould was designed for Slingshot, there were legal thingies, and they made him Firefly (after pulling a Trailcutter on the name)

3 - a combination of the above?

Or maybe it's 2:37 am and I'm reading waaay to much into this