Quote Originally Posted by KELPIE View Post
If it was a conscious decision I'd be interested to know by who and for why. If it was an accidental mistake, I'd also like to know where/how the mistake came to fruition.
It was a deliberate decision made by Floro Dery to help further differentiate the second year jets from the first year jets. Because if they stuck with toy accuracy then the second year jets would look more like this:

And bear in mind that this looks "wrong" to us because of our personal bias. We're used to seeing the second year jets look like coneheads in the cartoon and comics, so seeing them drawn normally in that style looks strange. Although other G1 media did draw them normally, but the rest of the body was also more toy-accurate so it didn't look out of place.

Dery made the decision to make many 2nd year Transformers who were redecos of first year toys look different rather than just recolouring the same animation model. I guess the funny thing is that he made the Autobot Cars more toy-accurate whereas the Decepticon Jets became less toy-accurate, but both decisions were made to differentiate the first year toys from the second year toys. And it may have been helpful to animators too, because we know that the first year Jets were often hilariously miscoloured because in black and white they all look the same!

Look at Trailbreaker and Hoist for example. Both are based on near-identical Diaclone toys, but Trailbreaker's animation model was drastically changed from the toy whereas Hoist is far more toy accurate.


Because if Dery had decided to make the Autobot Cars toy-accurate in Season 1, then characters like Trailbreaker might've looked more like this...