It has been said that the deco for the BotCon 2013 Sunstorm figure was less than ideal, what with its use of black plastic for its forearms, fists, and feet, when those particular parts ought to have been instead cast in white plastic since those parts of his body are supposed to be colored white.
Opinions on this deco varied, with the black-instead-of-white bothering some while not bothering others.
But now, former Fun Publications member Jesse Wittenrich has shared the origins of BotCon 2013 Sunstorm's deco, explaining why black ended up being used for parts that should have been white (as well as a related sidenote that further explains Red Wing's existence in the BotCon 2013 convention comic). Jesse goes into detail about it in a post given at
Allspark.com:
So like 2013 Sunstorm was supposed to be a good Sunstorm. But during concept and pre-production, wires were crossed and confused with eHobby, Takara, and Hasbro.
As we were developing the toy, we were speaking with eHobby on how to coordinate releases in the US and Japan. During which time they mentioned wanting to do Sunstorm. Since it was their character to begin with, we changed our Sunstorm to something a little more "generic" by having it adopt the secondary colors used on Bitstream and Hotlink (The "new" trio would then be blue = Bitstream, purple = Nacelle, orange = Hotlink). Everything was fine there we thought. We even wrote a cameo of a second orange Seeker in the comic that we planned to have copy the eHobby Sunstorm color scheme.
But as eHobby tried to move forward, they were told that they couldn't proceed because Hasbro were planning a Sunstorm. Since this was around the time of the first WfC, everyone involved assumed that a retail release of the video game Deluxe figure in orange was coming. As the year's retail line was revealed though, it became clear to us that Hasbro weren't making that toy. And that by "Hasbro" Takara could very well have been referring to the Fun Pub toy itself. So the character bio was changed last minute and Fun Pub waited for pre-production samples to come in so they could call out corrections and change the black back to white and the silver to a darker orange. (Changes would have been made earlier but since the Obsidian changes were submitted early and considered more important, additional changes to other figures were kept at a minimum to reduce risk of confusion). If you remember though, NO samples materialized for the 2013 BotCon toys before the convention (and the final production run was super late as well, meaning the Fun Pub staff didn't even get to see the toys until unboxing them right there in San Diego). So Sunstorm ended up being... Well what he became.
BTW, trivia for you. We decided to keep the comic cameo of a second orange Seeker as an inside nod for us and eHobby. To commemorate the woefully groanful mix-up. But the final print colors made the orange appear red and Red Wing was born.
And after all that, longtime Seeker fanboy Randy Para (screenname Powered Convoy) then proceeded to
pester politely and civilly request Fun Pub (Pete Sinclair, specifically) to kindly give an official identity to this misprinted red Seeker. Fun Pub eventually
caved in granted his completely reasonable request and
officially christened the new red Seeker "Red Wing".
(We love ya, Randy.
)
