G1 Strafe (1987)... and a Few Namesakes

If you were to ask most Transformers fans, specifically ones who have followed the franchise during the 1980s and have continued to do so to this day, to name all of the G1 combiner teams, the odds are reasonably good that they can remember all of them (and even if they somehow forget the Pretender Monsters or some groups of toys that never came out in the US, they're all-but certain to identify all of the "Scramble City" teams, as well as Devastator and Predaking). That said, even those fans are likely to stumble if you ask them to name all of the combiner team members, especially those who came out after 1985. The reason for this is apparent enough. While the combined forms, themselves, likely were featured on the popular cartoon of the era, the members often were only name-checked once, if at all. Thus, an individual like Strafe, whose G1 package art is seen here to the left, is frequently forgotten....

G1 Strafe is a member of the Technobots, who joined with his teammates to form the left-arm (usually) of Computron, the last Autobot combiner to come out in the US during the original G1 toyline.^* As seen here, he transforms into a made-up (read, "Cybertronian" or "futuristic," if you prefer) kind of spaceship or jet fighter (his instructions call him a "rocket plane," bridging both concepts).

Confession time. My G1 Strafe is significantly yellowed with age. I've attempted some targeted Photoshopping to make the images here more closely match what the toy should look like, and if there's any sense of "uncanny valley" going on here, I've no one to blame but myself. I only mention it at all because there's really so little to say about the actual toy at this point, but I need a place to put Strafe's robot mode picture....

But back to Strafe's identity crisis. Even if Strafe is remembered, one can easily be forgiven if they instead are thinking of times when his name has been used on toys that bear little resemblance to the original. For example, this blue Terrorsaur repaint featured in a two-pack with one of the many movie Bumblebee toys (you can see the toy better in this post written over a decade ago). Indeed, that blue pterodactyl was nominally intended to represent a monstrous two-headed mechanical beast that appeared in Transformers: Age of Extinction, who himself had so little distinctive identity that at least one of his toys came in a package that featured the G1 box art seen at the top of this entry, despite having no connection to the Technobot beyond coincidentally sharing his name! 

Sometimes, toys have come out intending to at least represent the G1 character, while still looking little like the original. For example, this G2 Cyberjet was released to sell the mold created for the Decepticon Space Case an extra time. You can tell he's intended to be an Autobot because they swapped out the red shoulders and thighs for blue ones, but there's absolutely nothing about this toy that evokes G1 Strafe. They just gave him the same name, and wrote up tech specs to suggest it was indeed supposed to be the same character.

A somewhat better example was this repaint of a then-recent Cyclonus toy in 2009, supposedly intended to represent a version of the G1 character before his appearances in the cartoon. At least this toy got the colors more-or-less correct. Nonetheless, Strafe remains one of those trivia questions that even die-hard fans may struggle to identify correctly. To borrow a phrase from another well-known franchise, "now you know...."

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^*A case might be made for 1988's Slamdance, but the cassette combiners typically aren't discussed as being part of the same group as combiners consisting of more than two members.