Stargazer

I'm gonna try something fun, here: knowing that the plagiarists in Super7's packaging department love to plagiarize content for the back of the box, I'm going to go to the page I know they will have stolen from, and see if I can guess the bio before I even open the box! Commander Stargazer is a professional detective and officer of the law. His expanded life span has given him a depth of knowledge and experience that truly makes him a formidable opponent. He has an arsenal of weapons and equipment gathered over the centuries to deal with most threats. Stargazer is an older model of Silverhawk cyborg, with no wings or built in weapons. He still possesses enhanced physical abilities and the increase in longevity of the other Silverhawks. In addition, his telescoping, camera lens like eye gives him advanced vision. However, he lacks any means of built in transportation or weapons to defend himself. He compensates with being an excellent shot with a hand gun and a skilled rider on top of his space cycle, which has a built in blaster. Okay, and now what the box says: Commander Stargazer is a detective and officer of the law. Stargazer is an older model of Silverhawks [sic] cyborg, with no wings or built in weapons. He still possesses enhanced physical abilities and the increase in longevity of the other Silverhawks. His expanded life span has given him a depth of knowledge and experience that truly makes him a formidable opponent. He has an arsenal of weapons and equipment gathered over the centuries to deal with most threats. His telescoping, camera lens-like eye gives him advanced vision. So they deleted two sentences, and changed the order of two others. Damn I'm good. And they're not. Plagiarism, baby: catch the wave! Despite the fact that they have mechanical bodies, apparently Silverhawks can still change over time - after all, here we've got Stargazer in the same "old people wear more clothes" club as Gargoyles' Hudson. If his body still looked the way it did when he was cyborgized 400 years ago, he wouldn't need to be self-conscious. Heck, if old guys at the gym are any indication, he'd only get more comfortable as time went by. But instead, he wears a white dress shirt, blue pants with yellow stripes down the outside of the legs, plain black boots, red suspenders, and a loosened brown tie, and he wears them all over his golden metal chassis. The cartoon never really showed exactly how much of Stargazer was partly metal, and how much was partly real, but if he's been alive for centuries he really can't have too many organic parts left, right? In addition to not having any wings for flight, Stargazer's cybernetic implants don't even cover his entire head. He's like the stylistic opposite of Cyborg Superman, with 75% of his head still being skin and only one quadrant being metal. He has a skull cap covering the left side of his head, and a wing-shaped earpiece that connects to the lens over his left eye. His head is totally bald - you have to wonder if he'd have been given metal hair like the rest of the team if his head was more encased. The figure includes three heads: one stern, one jovial, and one merely happy. The vintage Kenner figure (allegedly LJN, who made the vintage Thundercats line, was supposed to handle Silverhawks as well, but backed out) had a play feature, but it obviously couldn't be the "pop-up wings" of all the others, so in his case you could look into the back of his head and see through his mechanical eye. That clearly didn't make the cut today, but no one's going to miss it. The fact Stargazer's wearing clothes means he has slightly different articulation than the rest of this line - sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less. Like, his boots give him shin swivels that no one else has gotten, but his shirt means he only has a waist, not a chest joint. It's kind of fitting, since it would make sense that the team of young heroes would be more lithe and flexible than their gruff old mentor, but the waist barely serves any purpose, since his suspenders are separate things over the torso, and are plugged into both the waist of his trousers and the upper part of his chest. Enjoy those millimeters worth of movement, everybody! The joints are all much tighter than the early figures' were, however. The figure includes eight hands: an open pair, a holding pair, a pair of sists, and then flat and pointing right hands. [a fist and a pointing hand? No wonder he dresses like a newspaper editor! --ed.] For weapons, we get the Solar Energy Bazooka he used against the Bounty Hunter in a few episodes (seriously, that's not a job title, the character's only name was "Bounty Hunter"), and the blaster pistol he had hidden inside one of Hawk Haven's computer stations when Hotwing was brainwashed into attacking the rest of the team. [as pictured here, the bazooka is in "storage" mode; it can also change into "attack" mode by extending the barrel and raising the little solar panel that will then be revealed --ed.] Like the rest of the figures in this line, Stargazer is accompanied by his sidekick animal, Sly-Bird. You can really tell Super7 is running out of steam, because unlike Series 1 and 2, none of the releases in Series 3 include fighting hawks in both bird and weapon modes. All we get is an angular yellow bird ready to perch on its master's arm. Sly-Bird has a few markings on their wings and a silver circle on their chest. On the cartoon, that acted like a camera that could show whatever Sly-Bird encountered while out on patrol, but here it's just a lump. On the original toy, you could pull the bird's wing out to the side to reveal a tiny magnifying glass, but that never appeared on the cartoon, so it's not on this toy. The only articulation we get at all is a balljointed neck. Stargazer will probably be the last Super7 Ultimate I order at retail - not just from Silverhawks, "at all." The quality has really slipped since those early toys, and there seem to be markdowns and sales pretty regularly. It's annoying, because there are definitely more characters that I'm really looking forward to from this line - and others - but Super7 is no longer delivering enough toy for the money. In all honesty, I was leaning this direction a while ago, but Stargazer and Mo-Lec-U-Lar were already preordered, and I didn't feel like cancelling. Then they turned out to be worse than expected, and my mind was made up. -- 05/30/24

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