Against seemingly all odds, he has arrived!
Getting him was a nightmare. I never saw him for pre-order up until a couple of weeks ago on Amazon.ca, and even then it was touch and go, as I went to pre-order it, the option vanished, and then reappeared later. Then the day before he was supposed to arrive, there was a delay notice that it wouldn't arrive until the end of the month, and there was talk that a CS rep for Amazon said the shipment was damaged and we might have orders cancelled and have to reorder...
But here he is! Shipping notice arrived yesterday, and he came in the same day.
And I
love this little guy! Even more than I imagined I would. For one thing, his transformation allows him to form a perfect cat loaf!
My biggest worry was how the transformation would affect the head sculpt, as it's basically two halves coming together in the middle, but when it does, you can't even tell.
For the size, he's great. But even as much as I love him, I don't think I could have justified spending much more on him than I did, so I'm grateful that I managed to get him at retail price, before all the scumsuckers took over with their jacked-up prices.
(I didn't have a quarter handy, so this will have to do for size reference.)
If there's any flaw, it's that his fit in Blaster's cassette door is pretty tight. Like, opening it has more of a popping sound now, and I was worried I might have broken it earlier. (It seems fine, but it turns out there's a very specific way to put him in the cassette door that even the instructions don't tell you about.)
When I had the original as a kid, I didn't have Blaster, so the cassette alt mode was of rather limited utility among my Autobot ranks. So what I did was kludge together a "vehicle" mode that was basically plugging in both of his wings on the same side of the cassette and making a little Cybertronian "jet" out of it that was basically just a flying box with wings (still better than Rewind's similar "tank" mode).
That doesn't really work here. But, I did come up with something else!
So yeah, now he's basically a little hover-tank-thing, too. If he had a handle at the bottom, he'd make a darn fine Targetmaster, or maybe arm-mounted gun for Blaster, but alas.
Speaking of Blaster, I tried the speaker thing with him. That's neat. Don't think I'll be breaking that out often, though, especially since it doesn't seem to attach in boom box mode.
This Steeljaw might not be everyone's cup of tea -- seems YouTube reviewers hate him -- but he's as perfect as can be for me at that size and price!