JETSTORM
BEAST MACHINES (McDONALD’S)
In this site’s 14 year run, there have been only two McDonald’s Happy Meal toy reviews, and only one of them was actually written by me. These days, they don’t tend to be anything all that impressive, but back in the day, back in the ‘90s? Well, also then they were frequently not that impressive, let’s all be honest. But every so often you got some that went above the grade. Offered something at the very least close to the level of quality you might actually even intentionally pay money for. Today’s one of those. Let’s talk about Beast Machines. After a successful three season run with Beast Wars, Hasbro decided they wanted a sequel show, with the remaining cast of Wars returning to Cybertron after leaving prehistoric Earth, and facing Megatron and his army of Vehicons. While Beast Wars was certainly no stranger to some pathos and serializing of the story, Machines took it even further, and the results were…well, they were mixed to say the least. Between the two shows, two of the surviving Maximals, Silverbolt and Rhinox, found their sparks reformatted and transferred over to the bodies of two of the Vehicon generals, Jetstorm and Tankor. Intrigue! Silverbolt’s kinda my guy when it comes to Beast Wars, so keeping with that theme, I do also kinda like Jetstorm, and I’m looking at his Happy Meal toy today!
THE FIGURE ITSELF
Jetstorm was released as one of the 9 available toys in McDonald’s Beast Machines promotion, which ran in August of 2000, alongside the show’s second season’s debut. They covered pretty much the whole core cast of the show, with figures that could transform into both modes for the characters, at least to some degree. In his robot mode, Jetstorm is about 3 1/2 inches tall (I won’t say “stands” for reasons I’ll get to shortly) and he has 7 workable points of articulation. So, why not “stands?” Because he really doesn’t. In the show, Jetstorm would simply hover around when in his robot mode, and as such doesn’t *really* have legs. The Hasbro figures (which were all quite off model) just gave him legs. This one, on the other hand…well, you can split the nose of his jet mode in two and make it sort of sit flat, so there’s I guess sort of a way to make him stand like that. It’s not really very stable, though, and obviously not accurate. For most of the photos, as you can see, I’ve got him on a flight stand I personally provided, but he’s otherwise not great with 
remaining upright. How’s that sculpt, though? Honestly? Not terrible. Sure, he’s kind of chunky and clunky and all the other “unkies,” but compared to what Hasbro put out in the main line, it’s probably the closest any Jetstorm figure gets to actually being show accurate. He’s even kind of posable, and also pretty decently painted, again, given the market here. He transforms into his jet-mode, as you would expect, and it’s obviously gonna be pretty simple, but it works well, and the mode is sufficiently different from the robot one, as well as being decently accurate to the show model.
THE ME HALF OF THE EQUATION
I watched a *little* Beast Wars when it was on, but not much. Beast Machines, on the other hand, I actually saw a lot of in its first run. Fox Kids was also running Avengers: United They Stand and Digimon in ’99, so I got into pretty much watching the whole block, Machines included. I didn’t *love* it, but I dug the Jetstorm stuff, and then some re-runs of Wars caught me up to speed on Silverbolt, and I really liked him, so that kind of stuck. Back in 2000, my cousin Rusty got this guy, and he didn’t really care about it, so I ultimately got to keep it, and I always rather liked it. I couldn’t tell you what happened to it over the years, but I missed it. Seven years working at a toy store gives you a lot of access to pretty much everything, so I did eventually see this guy come through, and Max pretty much forced me to take him home. He really had to twist my arm on that one, I swear. He’s fun. He’s basic and clunky, and definitely a toy that came packaged with some food, but within the confines of what he is, he’s really cool.
