Recently I was very exciting to see G1 characters being released in the CHURG line and almost buy on sight (or buy online or even preorder online) whenever they are out even for sub characters. During the year of 2010 and 2011, HASBRO was kind enough to release certain amount of G1 characters to fill in the drought between two movies to make collectors happy but distribution is the big issue. Windcharger is even the biggest one. Why? Because several months after his initial release, he has been only released at UK and Canada, none of them showed up in US. Many big online retailers were unable to stock him and even Hasbro’s own shop site had it on sale for only few minutes and then gone, and now there is even rumor about this line would be canceled because of the new movie line is coming up. Getting him by the normal way is nearly impossible and can only hope he will be re-released in the future at some random post movie lines. At the time like this, I am so glad and fortunately to have a friend like Chris at UK, he got one for me.

Windcharger’s alternate mode is a Ford Mustang-ish type of muscle car. This little red car with grill back window represents his original G1 form very well. Since he is very light, he doesn’t roll that well but okay enough for a small size toy car. He is also well detailed in car mode. Only problem is his roof where there are two little pieces that are actually his feet and difficult to line up right.

Windcharger’s transformation is pretty generic as a basic car robot transformation, but the legs transformation is nicely done. The way they collapse is really neat and brings the robot mode closer to his G1 design. While many people don’t like his bonnet chest, I feel I’m okay with it. He is quite poseable and well balanced and his head design is really cool. Since I still don’t like his open palms, his guns can flip out from the forearms which is pretty neat. Legs movements are very nice and his feet are on ball joints that can perform slight ankle movement.

Now jump to the problems that he has in both modes. Since he is that treasurable to acquire, I cannot ignore those. First is the coloring/painting. Hasbro did a good job given him different unpainted plastic colors and very little paint to distinguish him but still lacks and some parts are even wrong. The entire backlight is covered in black that looks too plain and I’m not surprised the hubcaps are not painted. The forearms are in dark gray plastic but his hands are in red and that just makes his hands very undistinguishable. They should just make his forearms red like he has in the cartoon or make his hands dark gray. Second problem is the plastic quality. It’s not that he is easily getting stress marks everywhere but the use of entire red plastic just looks and feels very knock-offs. If you look closer, I don’t know how to describe it but you can see the plastic wave lines everywhere. Movie scout Hubcaps is a very similar figure but his red plastic does not have those. It’s really shame these problems are there and hard for me to ignore those. Now Windcharger is making me want to entirely repaint him (and the first).