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Zob's Retro Review: Autobot Pretender Sky High (1988)
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Zobovor
Feb 25, 2023, 5:01:11 PM2/25/23
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For those of you who may be concerned that I've been positively flooding the newsgroup with these reviews of old-timey toys—this is my last one! At least for this month.
Sky High is from the second batch of Autobot Pretenders. Where the first batch was arguably experimental, the second batch released in 1988 made a few improvements to the sculpt of the Pretender shells (entire heads instead of just the tops of the faces visible) as well as adding some diversity to the vehicle mode styling. But, at the end of the day, there are still a ton of design decisions that will always identify a Pretender as a Pretender.
As a robot, Sky High is about five inches tall. Without accessories, he's a very plain-looking robot, with no overt hints as to what he might transform into. His body is a brownish grey, what I'd call concrete grey, with black legs and arm connectors, and red arms and toes. Visually, he's not unlike Powermaster Optimus Prime, who had the same brownish-grey coloring. He has a blue-painted face and eyes, so he's clearly an Autobot.
He carries a stun gun, also brownish-grey, and it's a very large, wide, flat weapon with wings on the sides and a peg-hole on the top. There's both a large and a small peg to grip; the inner robot uses the smaller peg. He's supposed to equip a scythe/rotor accessory on his back, and it's equipment that, like Battletrap, now clearly identifies him as a helicopter. His robot parts can swivel at the hips and shoulders, but that's about it for useful articulation—unlike other Pretender inner robots, he has no knees and his head does not move at all.
Like most of his cousins, he transforms by folding him in half. Unburdened by accessories, it's not really obvious yet what he's supposed to be—he has a blue painted rounded cockpit on his back, so he's clearly a vehicle of some sort. His stun gun mounts to the top of the vehicle, facing backwards so that the gun barrel is pointing behind him. The black scythe/rotor piece, in turn, plugs into the top of the stun gun. Just as the motorcycle wheels for Iguanus are the single most important part of his vehicle mode, the helicopter blades are absolutely vital for Sky High. There is a fairly long and esteemed history of Transformers helicopters up to this point (Whirl, Blades, Vortex, Springer, Highbrow, etc.) but Sky High is the first of them whose rotor blades cannot spin freely. The cost-cutting by 1988 was in full force, it seems.
The Pretender shell for Sky High, meanwhile, is a large, armored human, about 6.5" at the head without his helmet and close to 7.5" tall with the helmet. His costume is mostly red with that same brownish-grey, some dark grey and silver, and a black belt and helmet. Where Landmine and Cloudburst and Waverider are all peeking out of their armor like Killroy graffiti, Sky High and his brethren have fully-realized faces, albeit ones that are still ensconced in armor. He looks good with his helmet affixed, but he looks strange with the helmet removed, since his visible face makes it clear his arms are positioned much too high on his body—his shoulders are on the same axis as where his ears would be.
One of the things that disginguishes the early 1988 Autobot Pretenders from the later releases is that the second batch all had animal-themed armor. Sky High's armor is clearly meant to evoke a hawk or similar bird of prey, with large, yellow painted eyes and a prominent silver beak on his chest. His belt and helmet are made of the same semi-flexible black plastic as his rotor blades, and both help to keep the front and back halves of his Pretender shell locked together.
You need to fold Sky High's arms behind his back in order to fit his inner robot into the outer shell. The Pretender shell can carry the stun gun in one hand (using the larger peg-handle) and the scythe/rotor piece in the other.
It's worth mentioning that Sky High's on-package biography is positively bizarre and contradictory, as he is described as "all brawn and no brains" and yet his personal quote depicts him as being imaginative, and his tech specs provide an Intelligence rating of 8. Sky High also shares a name with a Micromaster jet plane, the grey-colored member of the Autobot Air Patrol, released in 1990. It was unusual for two different Transformer characters to share the same name, but it happened once more within the G1 toy line (with Barrage) and then again twice more during Generation 2 (with Eagle Eye and Afterburner).
Sky High was never sold in Japan by Takara, which might be one of the reasons he's more difficult to find complete than more common Pretenders like Landmine or Cloudburst or Waverider. I priced him at around $80 complete back in 2020, during the "everything must sell" pandemic market, but I think he's gone up since then. I can't even find a loose, complete copy on eBay at the moment, though it looks like one sold on February 3rd for $199.95. That's crazy sauce.
Well, I don't think I've acquired this many vintage G1 toys in a single month before, and I'm not likely to again any time very soon. But, it's been a fun ride, and from this point forward I'll have to be content with picking up about one per month again until I have the entire U.S. set. Only about 60 toys to go, depending on how you count them...
Zob (not sure yet if I want every style of Minispy in every color, but it will give me something to do in a few years when there are no more Pretenders to buy, I guess...)
Sky High is from the second batch of Autobot Pretenders. Where the first batch was arguably experimental, the second batch released in 1988 made a few improvements to the sculpt of the Pretender shells (entire heads instead of just the tops of the faces visible) as well as adding some diversity to the vehicle mode styling. But, at the end of the day, there are still a ton of design decisions that will always identify a Pretender as a Pretender.
As a robot, Sky High is about five inches tall. Without accessories, he's a very plain-looking robot, with no overt hints as to what he might transform into. His body is a brownish grey, what I'd call concrete grey, with black legs and arm connectors, and red arms and toes. Visually, he's not unlike Powermaster Optimus Prime, who had the same brownish-grey coloring. He has a blue-painted face and eyes, so he's clearly an Autobot.
He carries a stun gun, also brownish-grey, and it's a very large, wide, flat weapon with wings on the sides and a peg-hole on the top. There's both a large and a small peg to grip; the inner robot uses the smaller peg. He's supposed to equip a scythe/rotor accessory on his back, and it's equipment that, like Battletrap, now clearly identifies him as a helicopter. His robot parts can swivel at the hips and shoulders, but that's about it for useful articulation—unlike other Pretender inner robots, he has no knees and his head does not move at all.
Like most of his cousins, he transforms by folding him in half. Unburdened by accessories, it's not really obvious yet what he's supposed to be—he has a blue painted rounded cockpit on his back, so he's clearly a vehicle of some sort. His stun gun mounts to the top of the vehicle, facing backwards so that the gun barrel is pointing behind him. The black scythe/rotor piece, in turn, plugs into the top of the stun gun. Just as the motorcycle wheels for Iguanus are the single most important part of his vehicle mode, the helicopter blades are absolutely vital for Sky High. There is a fairly long and esteemed history of Transformers helicopters up to this point (Whirl, Blades, Vortex, Springer, Highbrow, etc.) but Sky High is the first of them whose rotor blades cannot spin freely. The cost-cutting by 1988 was in full force, it seems.
The Pretender shell for Sky High, meanwhile, is a large, armored human, about 6.5" at the head without his helmet and close to 7.5" tall with the helmet. His costume is mostly red with that same brownish-grey, some dark grey and silver, and a black belt and helmet. Where Landmine and Cloudburst and Waverider are all peeking out of their armor like Killroy graffiti, Sky High and his brethren have fully-realized faces, albeit ones that are still ensconced in armor. He looks good with his helmet affixed, but he looks strange with the helmet removed, since his visible face makes it clear his arms are positioned much too high on his body—his shoulders are on the same axis as where his ears would be.
One of the things that disginguishes the early 1988 Autobot Pretenders from the later releases is that the second batch all had animal-themed armor. Sky High's armor is clearly meant to evoke a hawk or similar bird of prey, with large, yellow painted eyes and a prominent silver beak on his chest. His belt and helmet are made of the same semi-flexible black plastic as his rotor blades, and both help to keep the front and back halves of his Pretender shell locked together.
You need to fold Sky High's arms behind his back in order to fit his inner robot into the outer shell. The Pretender shell can carry the stun gun in one hand (using the larger peg-handle) and the scythe/rotor piece in the other.
It's worth mentioning that Sky High's on-package biography is positively bizarre and contradictory, as he is described as "all brawn and no brains" and yet his personal quote depicts him as being imaginative, and his tech specs provide an Intelligence rating of 8. Sky High also shares a name with a Micromaster jet plane, the grey-colored member of the Autobot Air Patrol, released in 1990. It was unusual for two different Transformer characters to share the same name, but it happened once more within the G1 toy line (with Barrage) and then again twice more during Generation 2 (with Eagle Eye and Afterburner).
Sky High was never sold in Japan by Takara, which might be one of the reasons he's more difficult to find complete than more common Pretenders like Landmine or Cloudburst or Waverider. I priced him at around $80 complete back in 2020, during the "everything must sell" pandemic market, but I think he's gone up since then. I can't even find a loose, complete copy on eBay at the moment, though it looks like one sold on February 3rd for $199.95. That's crazy sauce.
Well, I don't think I've acquired this many vintage G1 toys in a single month before, and I'm not likely to again any time very soon. But, it's been a fun ride, and from this point forward I'll have to be content with picking up about one per month again until I have the entire U.S. set. Only about 60 toys to go, depending on how you count them...
Zob (not sure yet if I want every style of Minispy in every color, but it will give me something to do in a few years when there are no more Pretenders to buy, I guess...)
Codigo Postal
Feb 26, 2023, 10:29:08 AM2/26/23
to
On Saturday, February 25, 2023 at 5:01:11 PM UTC-5, Zobovor wrote:
> For those of you who may be concerned that I've been positively flooding the newsgroup with these reviews of old-timey toys—this is my last one! At least for this month.
Still waiting on your review of Pretender Gunrunner, unless I missed it. Probably a name that will have to be changed if he ever gets an update...
> For those of you who may be concerned that I've been positively flooding the newsgroup with these reviews of old-timey toys—this is my last one! At least for this month.
> Like most of his cousins, he transforms by folding him in half. Unburdened by accessories, it's not really obvious yet what he's supposed to be—he has a blue painted rounded cockpit on his back, so he's clearly a vehicle of some sort. His stun gun mounts to the top of the vehicle, facing backwards so that the gun barrel is pointing behind him. The black scythe/rotor piece, in turn, plugs into the top of the stun gun. Just as the motorcycle wheels for Iguanus are the single most important part of his vehicle mode, the helicopter blades are absolutely vital for Sky High. There is a fairly long and esteemed history of Transformers helicopters up to this point (Whirl, Blades, Vortex, Springer, Highbrow, etc.) but Sky High is the first of them whose rotor blades cannot spin freely. The cost-cutting by 1988 was in full force, it seems.
> It's worth mentioning that Sky High's on-package biography is positively bizarre and contradictory, as he is described as "all brawn and no brains" and yet his personal quote depicts him as being imaginative, and his tech specs provide an Intelligence rating of 8.
> Sky High was never sold in Japan by Takara, which might be one of the reasons he's more difficult to find complete than more common Pretenders like Landmine or Cloudburst or Waverider. I priced him at around $80 complete back in 2020, during the "everything must sell" pandemic market, but I think he's gone up since then. I can't even find a loose, complete copy on eBay at the moment, though it looks like one sold on February 3rd for $199.95. That's crazy sauce.
Zobovor
Feb 27, 2023, 10:21:28 PM2/27/23
to
On Sunday, February 26, 2023 at 8:29:08 AM UTC-7, Codigo Postal wrote:
> Still waiting on your review of Pretender Gunrunner, unless I missed it.
I don't think I ever wrote up a text review. That was back when I was doing those terrible YouTube videos. But, I will write one up. I said I wouldn't do any more in February, but if I wait a couple of days...
> Still waiting on your review of Pretender Gunrunner, unless I missed it.
> I'm surprised prices and demand haven't dropped. During the pandemic, folks were stuck at home with a stimulus check and fewer options for entertainment. Now that's over, and there's a recessionary environment.
I do see a lot of collectors complaining now about how expensive toys have gotten, and how they've been priced out of buying Marvel Legends or Star Wars Black Series or Transformers at retail. But, there is still some fierce competition on eBay. I get outbid on vintage Transformers stuff over half the time. Same with vintage Star Wars (I've been shopping for ViceGripX—shh, don't tell). I'm at a loss to fully explain it. Maybe it's the next logical step for collectors who are approximately my age. I'm guessing collectors go through phases where you grow up on stuff as a kid, outgrow it as a teen, and then rediscover it as a young adult. The difference between me as a twentysomething fan and me, now, as a fortysomething fan, is that I have a lot more disposable income to play with. Two decades ago, raising two small kids in a single-income household, I would play the "Now How Am I Gonna Afford THIS?" game pretty much any time any new toy came out. Nowadays, I pre-order everything that tickles my fancy, and the only time the wife raises an eyebrow is if it's, like, an entire wave of Super7 TMNT toys for $294 or something like that.
My point is that middle-aged collectors can probably afford more expensive toys. It's also likely that if some of us have been collecting for literal decades and own hundreds or thousands of toys, a ten-dollar or twenty-dollar purchase just doesn't deliver the same dopamine hit that it used to. Anybody addicted to plastic crack will tell you that you need bigger and more expensive toys to get that same rush. So, I almost wonder if that's what's going on with the vintage Transformers market. Veteran collectors who are buying up $179 Masterpiece toys and spending $200 on Pretenders from 1988 because it still feels like "real" collecting in a way that buying a handful of Core-class toys at Walmart doesn't quite deliver any longer.
Zob (also spent $80 on cat litter today... okay, that still stung a little bit)
Codigo Postal
Feb 28, 2023, 12:30:06 AM2/28/23
to
On Monday, February 27, 2023 at 10:21:28 PM UTC-5, Zobovor wrote:
> On Sunday, February 26, 2023 at 8:29:08 AM UTC-7, Codigo Postal wrote:
>
> > Still waiting on your review of Pretender Gunrunner, unless I missed it.
> I don't think I ever wrote up a text review. That was back when I was doing those terrible YouTube videos. But, I will write one up. I said I wouldn't do any more in February, but if I wait a couple of days...
Looking forward to it. As for the videos, I remember liking the Seinfeldian Countdown to Extinction and the TV-scored TFTM.
> On Sunday, February 26, 2023 at 8:29:08 AM UTC-7, Codigo Postal wrote:
>
> > Still waiting on your review of Pretender Gunrunner, unless I missed it.
> I don't think I ever wrote up a text review. That was back when I was doing those terrible YouTube videos. But, I will write one up. I said I wouldn't do any more in February, but if I wait a couple of days...
>
> My point is that middle-aged collectors can probably afford more expensive toys.
> It's also likely that if some of us have been collecting for literal decades and own hundreds or thousands of toys, a ten-dollar or twenty-dollar purchase just doesn't deliver the same dopamine hit that it used to. Anybody addicted to plastic crack will tell you that you need bigger and more expensive toys to get that same rush. So, I almost wonder if that's what's going on with the vintage Transformers market. Veteran collectors who are buying up $179 Masterpiece toys and spending $200 on Pretenders from 1988 because it still feels like "real" collecting in a way that buying a handful of Core-class toys at Walmart doesn't quite deliver any longer.
I've mostly held off on 3P, but they're starting to look better and better all the time. I may just have my paycheck directly deposited with various online retailers at this point.
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