For this week's The Ark Addendum, I thought I'd come back to the US. Fire in the Sky was an early season 1 adventure. It featured some beautiful arctic landscapes, including the aurora borealis for the final scene. I also rather like the snow-covered Ark. The episode is notable for introducing us to Skyfire, a large white and red Autobot jet. Skyfire was of course a stand-in for Jetfire, a large white and red Autobot jet with a completely different design. While Hasbro licensed out the Valkyrie toy from Bandai in the US, in Japan Takara was a competitor of Bandai's and didn't have the rights to the toy. To avoid giving free advertising to their competitor, Skyfire was born. American kids got the idea that these were the same guy, more or less, and Japanese kids were none the wiser.
Jetfire did have a character model made up, and it actually saw use in a commercial. You can see the model on the Transformers Wiki, or in Transformers: The Complete Ark
(order it today!). Incidentally, The Complete Ark got its first Amazon.com review ... a mere three stars, from someone disappointed by the black and white nature of the book. Sigh. Ah, well, I'm just happy that the models are back in print so no one has to pay $50 or $100 for models contained within.Catch y'all on the flipside.
