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Of all of the initial wave of Transformers Classics, Astrotrain was the one I was anticipating the least. I still wanted to pick it up but it was on the bottom of my want list. Astrotrain is one of the few Transformers I remember actually owning the original version of, though I’m uncertain as to if it was actually my toy or if a friend had simply left it over at my house indefinitely.

Abd then I lost it. I couldn’t tell you where it went. I know I had my G1 Astrotrain when I was getting into collecting as a hobby with Beast Wars but I don’t know where it went after that. Then, last year, I found a new one. Literally. I was with my (then future) wife at Meijer, at like 2 AM, wandering through housewares, and I found a G1 Astrotrain just laying in the middle of the aisle. I have no clue where it came from or why it was laying in the middle of a meijer nearly 20 years after it had any right being in a store, but it was there. And it was in better condition than my old lost version.

The point of this story is, Astrotrain isn’t my favorite character or toy on any level, but it’s sort of like I have some sort of predestined condition to own him.

So it’s appropriate that I really like this classic revamp.

There, that’s out of the way, now you can go about your buisiness knowing that I like this toy. It turned out to be my favorite of the initial deluxe Classics.

Like his predecessor, he is a tripple changer. He turnes into a space shuttle, a train, and a robot. The train however is updated. Instead of an old fasioned steam engine we get a sleek modern bullet train. The size is surprising. He’s nearly as large in train mode as the trains from the RID train team, and those were all 15 dollar “Mega” sized toys. His rear section is kind of ugly though. The wings of the shuttle make a shell around the whuttle nose cone that doesn’t quite seal all the way. This train also redefines “bullet train” by incorperating large jet boosters on it’s rear. This was something the original Astrotrain had though, and it was a lot more rediculous looking on the back of a steam powered locomotive.

Transformation to Shuttle mode essentially involves folding out the rear of the train and folding it over on top of itself to make the wings. The front of the train splits and becomes the sides of the shuttle. The result is a shuttle with large train fronts on the sides but they could be considered to be futuristic extra cargo space pretrty easily. The extra bits blend in pretty well astetically.

The shuttle is decent enough. I’ve complained about scale before but somehow I am more forgiving for Decepticons. Decepticons simply have a history of being “out of scale”. In the movie, Astrotrain is as large as anyone else in Robot mode but as a shuttle he can carry them all. The extra pods on the sides are a bit distracting though and there are no distiguishing logos on this shuttle like his previous incarnation. There are also tiny wheels mounted on thetips of his wings that are used in Train mode. I can’thelp but think that the addition of a hinge to these wheels would have allowed them to function as landing gears for the Shuttle instead of the permenantly fixed existing landing gears the toy has. Still, they are tiny so it’s not a huge issue.

Transformation to robot from shuttle mode is nearly identical to his G1 predecessor. The tail fin even folds open to become the chest. The primary difference is that the previously mentioned “cargo pods” become regular articulated arms instead of the previous stubs that came from the sides of the shuttle. The final result also has more black and less purple coloring. In fact the whole toy has considerably less purple than his previous incarnation. In the original figure the entire train was purple and black, this new version is white. The purple is still present in accent stripes but it’s not as prevailant.

This isn’t an entirely inaccurate color scheme however. The recent Reissue Astrotrain from Takara uses these more accurete colors, pushing the pruple into being an accent color. Still, the animation version of Astrotrain was dark gray and purple all over. Personally I like this darker color set and wish they would have gone with it instead of the “more realistic” colors. He looks a lot more evil and frankly, it’s the way I remember the character. If I recall his spiritual brother Blitzwing used this same purple color dominantly to help make them match.

Anyway, the point is, I’m kind of irritated at the lack of the purple.

The robot has plenty of articulation though it’s somewhat limited to certain poses due to the large feet and the was the train halves slide out to make the fists. Speaking of the fists, the train halves also make it almost seem as if he has no fists. Another slight irritation.

Overall the toy has a fair number of flaws almost all of which are a result of it’s tripple changing nature. Considering the Decepticons are severely out numbered in this line it’s kind of a let down that two out of three Decepticon figures released so far are generally flawed. Still, it’s a decent enough figure of a good character that hasn’t already been done to death for 20 years. This makes his worthwhile all on it’s own. If they decide to release a Classics Blitzwing that would make this guy all that much more worthwhile.