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Zob's Retro Review: Decepticon Targetmaster Slugslinger (1987)
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Zobovor
Mar 4, 2021, 3:32:48 PM3/4/21
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Okay, get ready for some anecdotes. I've got lots to say about this guy.
As y'all know, I've been trying to build a complete G1 collection worthy of display, which means acquiring toys I haven't owned or replacing older toys I've had since I was a kid and actually (shudder) played with. I do own a Slugslinger already, but my old one, that I got when I was like 11, badly needed replacing. Funny story about him. Slugslinger was my first Targetmaster toy, but he wasn't my first choice. I had originally picked out Triggerhappy at the Kay-Bee Toys in the mall, and but somebody had stolen parts out of his box so I picked out Slugslinger instead. The shopkeepers had to deliberate for a long while, mulling over his box, to try to figure out whether it would be an even exchange or not. I was just itching to get my new toy and leave. In the end, the fact that both boxes said "Decepticon Targetmaster" seemed good enough for them. When I got home, though, I saw that the sales receipt was for an Autobot Targetmaster, toys that were smaller and less expensive! They'd rung me up for the wrong toy to begin with!
But, I ended up liking Slugslinger a great deal. I have a strong memory of going to Ruby Tuesday at the end of the mall shopping trip and opening him right there in the restaurant booth. I remember marveling at his head sculpt and how much it was in synch with Transformer designs from the cartoon. It was like they'd finally started designing toys to match that aesthetic. Unfortunately, his leg popped off and I had to effect repairs when I got home.
Anybody familiar with this toy can already probably guess why he ended up needing to be replaced. The gold chrome on his chest started wearing off almost immediately, first to silver and then to the color of the teal green plastic underneath. That was disappointing considering how new he was when it started happening (and other toys with vac-metal, like Rumble or Rewind, didn't seem to have this problem). Also, the designs for the Decepticon Targetmaster guns were just horrible. Instead of the robust hinges the Autobot partners got, the Decepticon partners were held together with the strength of a plastic C-clip, and plastics in the 1980's weren't resilient enough for this. Poor Caliburst broke after a short while, and there wasn't much I could do about it.
So. Flash forward to the modern era. Slugslinger is a G1 toy that is rather infamously hard to find in good condition these days. Besides the tendency for his Targetmaster to break and it being very hard to find one without worn-off chrome, the jet mode is almost entirely grey and has an alarming tendency to yellow badly. (Do a search for the words "Slugslinger" and "chrome" some time and the first Google result will be an article written by Maz, collector extraordinaire, who talks of this at length.) In my pricing research I've seen a good-condition, unbroken Slugslinger sell for as much as $230, so I knew he wasn't going to be cheap. I had resigned myself to trying to spruce up my old one with new stickers, and maybe replace the broken Caliburst piece, and call it good.
So, I don't typically have a specific G1 toy I go after every month. There are toys I frequently hunt for (Monsterbots, various Pretenders, etc.) and if I see a halfway decent price, and a toy that's in reasonably good shape, I'll put it on my eBay watch list to see if the price comes down (which it does from time to time). Just for fun, I punched in Slugslinger and I saw one for $145. He was GORGEOUS. Unbroken Targetmaster. No yellowing of the plastic. I swiped through the eBay photos like an excited Tinder prospect, wondering what the chrome was going to look like. That was the kicker. And it was perfect. Gold and beautiful. For one hundred and forty-five dollars. You'd beter believe I mashed that "Buy It Now" button so hard on my phone that I almost cracked my screen protector.
(What really scared me was that the eBay seller had photos of Caliburst in both robot and gun modes, with a note to the effect of "the legs are kind of tight and hard to move, maybe don't transform him much." And I was thinking to myself, "No, don't transform him AT ALL! Seriously, stop doing that!" He's staying in gun mode for the rest of his life, or at least for the rest of MY life.)
Okay, now that the anecdotes are all out of the way, let's look at the toy itself. Slugslinger is a fantasy jet about seven inches long, with a six-inch wingspan. He's got dual cockpits and canted winglets at the tips of his main wings and a turbine mounted to the back of each wing. The entire jet fuselage is essentially one chunk of plastic, which is unusual for Transformers toys, whose wings are usually separate parts so they can fold up or detach or whatever. So, he's really solid and durable in vehicle form. He's got deep blue translucent cockpits and is accented with teal as a secondary color, which includes the rather chunky real stabilizer fins and the robot shoudlers, which are disguised as air intakes. They are pretty obviously a pair of folded-up robot legs. (All the Titans Return versions of the Decepticon Targetmasters were designed with legs like this, but Slugslinger comes by it honestly.)
The toy has three landing gears that deploy, two underneath his wings and one more in the center of his body. The wheels roll freely. His rub symbol is in a recessed spot near the center of the left wing. There's a peg-hole behind the twin canopies to mount his Targetmaster gun.
Caliburst, his Nebulan partner, is a machine gun made from blue and silvery plastic whose colors are not shared with Slugslinger (though he shares colors with Blowpipe and Aimless, the partners for Triggerhappy and Misfire, and was probably gang-molded with them). His gun mode is about three inches long. To transform him, you have to remove the blaster gun barrel from the front and then unfold the legs while praying they don't break. Snap! Oops, there goes his resale value. I am speaking hypothetically here, as I am never, ever transforming him out of gun mode. (The blaster itself has a five-millimeter peg, so I suppose Slugslinger could equip just that piece, but then it leaves Caliburst having no gun barrel and no functional transformation.)
To transform him, you unfold the stabilizer fins to form the legs. The arms are already tucked under the wings, so you just have to flip out the robot fists (and strictly speaking, you're not even required to fold up the fists for jet mode). The twin cockpits are conjointed together, so the entire piece moves back on a strut and folds up on his back. The head is spring-loaded, like Crosshairs or Triggerhappy, so you press it down to unlock the hook holding it in place and it just pops up.
As a robot, he's about six and a half inches tall. (I love how the normal height for Transformers increased dramatically during 1986/87. Larger toys are always more satisfying for some reason.) Teal becomes his dominant color in this form, with the grey wings on his back as well as the grey of his biceps, fists, midriff, thighs, and feet serving as a secondary color. His stickers add a bit of purple to the ensemble. His wings jut out majestically, making for an imposing robot form. Visually, he's an incredibly attractive toy (and I love his white painted face and bright red eyes). That's one of the reasons it's always miffed me when he was painted such a dark color in "The Rebirth" that you couldn't see the pen lines. He might as well have been jet black.
His articulation is better than average for G1 as a whole. Because of the way he transforms, his legs have joints at the hip, knees, and ankles, and unlike a lot of toys from the era, his feet can move independently of each other. The hips move with a spring-loaded ratcheting "click" sound. His arms can swing out to the sides on a soft-ratchet, his elbows can bend on another soft-ratchet, and his wrists have a little bit of useful up-and-down motion, but he cannot swing his shoulders forwards. To aim his gun, he's stuck pointing his weapon with only his elbows bent, like the sentry robots from The Black Hole.
The design of the hips deserves closer examination here. On each hip, there's a screw holding in place a plastic cap which pushes the internal spring and forces the beveled gears to mesh. The problem is that the strength of the spring pushes on the caps and, with no washers to mitigate the movement of the screws, over time unscrews them and forces the caps to finally pop off (especially the one for the right leg). It's the same thing that happens to the arms on G1 Jetfire (especially the left arm). There's no way that I'm aware of to prevent this from happening, short of never transforming the toy or posing his legs at all.
So. I was not expecting to come into possession of such an amazing quality Slugslinger without spending close to $230. When this whole endeavor began at the beginning of last year, I knew it was going to be tough to acquire all three of the original Decepticon Targetmasters, given their inherent fragility. Shockingly, I think I got all three of them for well below standard aftermarket prices. Maybe the fact that I started collecting G1 so late in the game is a blessing in disguise?
Zob (I think I'm deliberately avoiding shopping for Ultra Pretender Skyhammer, because I think that will only bring me pain and suffering)
As y'all know, I've been trying to build a complete G1 collection worthy of display, which means acquiring toys I haven't owned or replacing older toys I've had since I was a kid and actually (shudder) played with. I do own a Slugslinger already, but my old one, that I got when I was like 11, badly needed replacing. Funny story about him. Slugslinger was my first Targetmaster toy, but he wasn't my first choice. I had originally picked out Triggerhappy at the Kay-Bee Toys in the mall, and but somebody had stolen parts out of his box so I picked out Slugslinger instead. The shopkeepers had to deliberate for a long while, mulling over his box, to try to figure out whether it would be an even exchange or not. I was just itching to get my new toy and leave. In the end, the fact that both boxes said "Decepticon Targetmaster" seemed good enough for them. When I got home, though, I saw that the sales receipt was for an Autobot Targetmaster, toys that were smaller and less expensive! They'd rung me up for the wrong toy to begin with!
But, I ended up liking Slugslinger a great deal. I have a strong memory of going to Ruby Tuesday at the end of the mall shopping trip and opening him right there in the restaurant booth. I remember marveling at his head sculpt and how much it was in synch with Transformer designs from the cartoon. It was like they'd finally started designing toys to match that aesthetic. Unfortunately, his leg popped off and I had to effect repairs when I got home.
Anybody familiar with this toy can already probably guess why he ended up needing to be replaced. The gold chrome on his chest started wearing off almost immediately, first to silver and then to the color of the teal green plastic underneath. That was disappointing considering how new he was when it started happening (and other toys with vac-metal, like Rumble or Rewind, didn't seem to have this problem). Also, the designs for the Decepticon Targetmaster guns were just horrible. Instead of the robust hinges the Autobot partners got, the Decepticon partners were held together with the strength of a plastic C-clip, and plastics in the 1980's weren't resilient enough for this. Poor Caliburst broke after a short while, and there wasn't much I could do about it.
So. Flash forward to the modern era. Slugslinger is a G1 toy that is rather infamously hard to find in good condition these days. Besides the tendency for his Targetmaster to break and it being very hard to find one without worn-off chrome, the jet mode is almost entirely grey and has an alarming tendency to yellow badly. (Do a search for the words "Slugslinger" and "chrome" some time and the first Google result will be an article written by Maz, collector extraordinaire, who talks of this at length.) In my pricing research I've seen a good-condition, unbroken Slugslinger sell for as much as $230, so I knew he wasn't going to be cheap. I had resigned myself to trying to spruce up my old one with new stickers, and maybe replace the broken Caliburst piece, and call it good.
So, I don't typically have a specific G1 toy I go after every month. There are toys I frequently hunt for (Monsterbots, various Pretenders, etc.) and if I see a halfway decent price, and a toy that's in reasonably good shape, I'll put it on my eBay watch list to see if the price comes down (which it does from time to time). Just for fun, I punched in Slugslinger and I saw one for $145. He was GORGEOUS. Unbroken Targetmaster. No yellowing of the plastic. I swiped through the eBay photos like an excited Tinder prospect, wondering what the chrome was going to look like. That was the kicker. And it was perfect. Gold and beautiful. For one hundred and forty-five dollars. You'd beter believe I mashed that "Buy It Now" button so hard on my phone that I almost cracked my screen protector.
(What really scared me was that the eBay seller had photos of Caliburst in both robot and gun modes, with a note to the effect of "the legs are kind of tight and hard to move, maybe don't transform him much." And I was thinking to myself, "No, don't transform him AT ALL! Seriously, stop doing that!" He's staying in gun mode for the rest of his life, or at least for the rest of MY life.)
Okay, now that the anecdotes are all out of the way, let's look at the toy itself. Slugslinger is a fantasy jet about seven inches long, with a six-inch wingspan. He's got dual cockpits and canted winglets at the tips of his main wings and a turbine mounted to the back of each wing. The entire jet fuselage is essentially one chunk of plastic, which is unusual for Transformers toys, whose wings are usually separate parts so they can fold up or detach or whatever. So, he's really solid and durable in vehicle form. He's got deep blue translucent cockpits and is accented with teal as a secondary color, which includes the rather chunky real stabilizer fins and the robot shoudlers, which are disguised as air intakes. They are pretty obviously a pair of folded-up robot legs. (All the Titans Return versions of the Decepticon Targetmasters were designed with legs like this, but Slugslinger comes by it honestly.)
The toy has three landing gears that deploy, two underneath his wings and one more in the center of his body. The wheels roll freely. His rub symbol is in a recessed spot near the center of the left wing. There's a peg-hole behind the twin canopies to mount his Targetmaster gun.
Caliburst, his Nebulan partner, is a machine gun made from blue and silvery plastic whose colors are not shared with Slugslinger (though he shares colors with Blowpipe and Aimless, the partners for Triggerhappy and Misfire, and was probably gang-molded with them). His gun mode is about three inches long. To transform him, you have to remove the blaster gun barrel from the front and then unfold the legs while praying they don't break. Snap! Oops, there goes his resale value. I am speaking hypothetically here, as I am never, ever transforming him out of gun mode. (The blaster itself has a five-millimeter peg, so I suppose Slugslinger could equip just that piece, but then it leaves Caliburst having no gun barrel and no functional transformation.)
To transform him, you unfold the stabilizer fins to form the legs. The arms are already tucked under the wings, so you just have to flip out the robot fists (and strictly speaking, you're not even required to fold up the fists for jet mode). The twin cockpits are conjointed together, so the entire piece moves back on a strut and folds up on his back. The head is spring-loaded, like Crosshairs or Triggerhappy, so you press it down to unlock the hook holding it in place and it just pops up.
As a robot, he's about six and a half inches tall. (I love how the normal height for Transformers increased dramatically during 1986/87. Larger toys are always more satisfying for some reason.) Teal becomes his dominant color in this form, with the grey wings on his back as well as the grey of his biceps, fists, midriff, thighs, and feet serving as a secondary color. His stickers add a bit of purple to the ensemble. His wings jut out majestically, making for an imposing robot form. Visually, he's an incredibly attractive toy (and I love his white painted face and bright red eyes). That's one of the reasons it's always miffed me when he was painted such a dark color in "The Rebirth" that you couldn't see the pen lines. He might as well have been jet black.
His articulation is better than average for G1 as a whole. Because of the way he transforms, his legs have joints at the hip, knees, and ankles, and unlike a lot of toys from the era, his feet can move independently of each other. The hips move with a spring-loaded ratcheting "click" sound. His arms can swing out to the sides on a soft-ratchet, his elbows can bend on another soft-ratchet, and his wrists have a little bit of useful up-and-down motion, but he cannot swing his shoulders forwards. To aim his gun, he's stuck pointing his weapon with only his elbows bent, like the sentry robots from The Black Hole.
The design of the hips deserves closer examination here. On each hip, there's a screw holding in place a plastic cap which pushes the internal spring and forces the beveled gears to mesh. The problem is that the strength of the spring pushes on the caps and, with no washers to mitigate the movement of the screws, over time unscrews them and forces the caps to finally pop off (especially the one for the right leg). It's the same thing that happens to the arms on G1 Jetfire (especially the left arm). There's no way that I'm aware of to prevent this from happening, short of never transforming the toy or posing his legs at all.
So. I was not expecting to come into possession of such an amazing quality Slugslinger without spending close to $230. When this whole endeavor began at the beginning of last year, I knew it was going to be tough to acquire all three of the original Decepticon Targetmasters, given their inherent fragility. Shockingly, I think I got all three of them for well below standard aftermarket prices. Maybe the fact that I started collecting G1 so late in the game is a blessing in disguise?
Zob (I think I'm deliberately avoiding shopping for Ultra Pretender Skyhammer, because I think that will only bring me pain and suffering)
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