To kick things off, let me begin with Cloudburst. This particular figure was first available in the late 1980's and was produced by both Hasbro and Takara. The only difference between the 2 versions was in the packaging.
What I have here is the Takara version from the Masterforce line. It was originally MISB, but you can guess the current state from the pictures below. That basically means you can take the 'S' out from the MISB. I did not apply any stickers from the sticker sheet as I was feeling kind of lazy at that time. Unfortunately, I will not provide pictures of any pretender boxes that I have. The boxes are stacked somewhere deep in my cabinets and I have alot of boxes in my cabinets.
After nearly 20 years inside the box, the plastic was kind of sticky. The stickiness can be removed by washing it with lukewarm water and drying it by first patting it down with those disposable kitchen towels and then finally letting it air dry. Some people recommend using lukewarm soapy water, but I do not know how the soap would affect the plastic in any way so I opted to just using lukewarm water. Depending on the stickiness of the plastic, it might take between 1 ~ 2 rinses and drying for it to stop being sticky. It also helps if you let it dry for about a day or two in between rinses.
The main gimmick for the Pretender line was the 'hiding' of the robot inside a human/beast/vehicle shell. Due to this gimmick, the robots were mostly very simple in design and not as chunky as the previous lines. These robots also boasted of a robot mode, which were clearly visible in robot mode and transformation mostly involved the moving of limbs and adding accessories like weapons to achieve a passable alternate mode. You do not even need an instruction manual to figure out how to do the transformation.
Accessories wise, Cloudburst is packaged with a removable helmet, a belt, a whip and a gun.
- Somehow, I think the helmet has shrunk a little over the years, it does not fit as nicely as the other pretender helmets.
- As for the whip, it's one piece of moulded plastic. That means no posing the whip for those dynamic Indiana Jones poses. Furthermore, it can only be held by the shell only unlike in the Masterforce animation series where the inner robots could use the melee weapons. That's the case for most of the melee weapons that came with the earlier pretenders.
- The purpose of the belt is to hold the front and back halves of the shell together.
- As for the gun, it can be held by both the shell and inner robot via 2 different sized pegs.
Articulation wise, most of the pretender shells only boast of 2 points of articulation, that being the up/down movement of the arms. For the inner robot, the major joints are articulated most of the time, pretty good for a toy of it's time. Movement of the joints actually depend on how the inner robot transforms to it's alternate mode.
Cloudburst's alternate mode is that of a fighter jet.
Cloudburst Shell & Inner Robot
Cloudburst Alternate Mode
Tomorrow's featured pretender is an Autobot also from the Masterforce series.
Here is a clue as to who it will be:
This Pretender has an aquatic alternate mode
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