 Most people who acually had Skywarp released in their country (alas, I was never so lucky) are familiar with the image of a Skywarp with a purple nosecone. Seeing as how both Thundercracker and Starscream have a colored nosecone, it would really be quite consistent for Skywarp to come with a purple nose. Well, enter the mexicans! It's been long established and extensively covored by my buddy Maz, that those wacky mexicans did in fact release a Skywarp with an actual purple nose. Now the mexicans produced stacks and heaps upon heaps of variants all over the place. A lot of times they also produced a number of variations in a single figure (a good example would be the mexican versions of Prowl). Now so far we just had the one version of the mexican release of Skywarp. So far... Well no more. ;)
 Enter mexican Skywarp V2! In the above picture we have a pre-rub US Skywarp, Skywarp V2 and Skywarp V1 lined up. Alas my V2 is missing quite a few parts. Hunting them down is on my list of priorities, but it'll take time I think. The differences between a US release Skywarp and the V2 edition of its mexican release can be found in an extensive article by Maz. From this picture we can allready spot a number of quite interesting variations between the two mexican releases. The most obvious is of course the fact that the V2 version comes with an extremely dark canopy as oposed to a rub-sign mold type orange canopy. While not all that obvious, the diecast metal parts in V2 Skywarp's chest are quite a bit darker then the metal in the V1 version of Skywarp. Lets take a look at the two mexican Skywarps from the side.
 V2 Skywarp to the left and V1 to the right. Let's take this from the bottom up. ;) First of we see the vertical tailfins. I think the above picture speaks for itself here. the V2 has a FAR darker purple color as opposed to the more blue-ish purple used for the V1. The V2 fin is radically different from a normal Skywarp as well (take a look at the first picture for example). The feet are also a slightly different color from the V1. Now on to the main wings. The only thing going on here is the stickers. This also goes for the other factory applied stickers, like those on the vertical tailfins. Lot's of blue vs purple going on here. Just a little to the left we come to the launchers. As you can see the purple in the launchers is consistent with the purple on the vertical tailfins on both the Skywarps. Alas, we can't do any sort of comparison on the hands, seeing as how I have none for the V2. Let's make these guys do a left turn and a conehead impression!
 Obedient little 'cons aren't they? You can make out the differences in the metal colors a lot better here btw. As you can also hopefully make out the colors for the two nosecones differ as well. We can see this a bit better in the below picture as well.
 I've also placed the US Skywarp into this picture as well to show how all three of these babies differ in pretty much every non-black color on their sleek little Seeker bodies.
Thanks to NAPJR i now have a picture of what would be version 3 of the mexican Skywarp series. A lot of the mexican release toys have ended up having three distincs releases, so this does sort of fit in with the whole picture. Here's a scan of NAPJR's toy:
 Basicly this seems to be the same as Darkwarp, but with at least a normal canopy. I can't make a judgment on the diecast though based from this scan. (it does tend to look as dark as Darkwarps though..) I just hope to get the toys owner to part with it at same time. Well that, or find one of these for myself! ;) |