I guess this could also be the "Autobots Stand" United 5-pack, depending on how you think the name of the set should be parsed.

I like to play this game where I will order toys from multiple online vendors, and whoever elects to ship first gets my money. BBTS won the race this time, but weirdly, when I tried to cancel my order with Hasbro Pulse on my desktop computer, there was no option to cancel the order. For some reason, the site just isn't optimized for desktop, so the little radio button to click "cancel order" didn't even show up for me. I was able to do it through mobile, though. Just a warning for anyone else who tries to cancel a Hasbro Pulse order in the future (and also a reminder for myself, since I may very well forget!).

Also, I was very surprised to get such an early ship notification, since Hasbro Pulse isn't planning to ship this set until around July 15, 2024.

So, this set is kind of diabolical. Four of the five toys (Jazz, Sunstreaker, Trailbreaker, Wheeljack) are arguably not vital to anybody's collection, as they were available at retail during the Earthrise era (Wheeljack, especially, was quite plentiful, as he got a Netflix redeco as well as a Kingdom package refresh). But, I guess you could argue that toys were a little harder to find in 2020 due to the pandemic-related shipping and distribution issues. Regardless, the only toy that's arguably a must-have in this set is Hound, who is the only character in the set who hasn't gotten a proper Earth mode toy yet.

The package is about 22" x 9" x 2.5", give or take. Long box is long. Everybody comes strapped down to the inner cardboard tray in robot mode, with their weapons strapped below them. No tissue paper or anything to mess with this time.

AUTOBOT JAZZ

This is, of course, a redeco of the Studio Series '86 version of Jazz from 2021. The idea for all of these toys is to do a paint deco that's as close to the G1 cartoon as possible, so to that end, Jazz got a few paint operations switched out. The silver originally used for his toes and shins was switched to a glossy grey, and the same color is used for his face and mid-section. His kneecaps got a new paint hit, and so did the little recessed ankle hinge on the tops of his toes (I'm not sure what to call it since it has no human anatomy equivalent; I tend to think of it as the "Seeker foot gap"). His rifle remains metallic silver, but the pegs on the sides are painted this time instead of being left white. He doesn't have paint on the grill section on his chest any longer.

I find that I become much more familiar with the design of a toy if I've ever painted it. I did a version of Doritos Jazz for ViceGripX, turning it into Golden Lagoon Jazz, so I gained an intimate familiarity with the toy's transformation and moving parts during that project. The biggest cosmetic difference, by far, is the opaque windows, which are painted a light blue. There have been versions of Jazz in the past that didn't have clear windows (like the 1989 Classic Pretender) so it's not wholly unprecedented. I find that I'm not as afraid to massage the window parts together during transformation, because I know that the white plastic is going to have much greater tensile strength than the translucent plastic they used during Studio Series.

Aside from the new painted windows, his car mode also has new painted racing stripes above the rear fenders (light blue with red stripes), the outsides of his spoiler are painted black, and the hubcaps are also painted more thoroughly, so they no longer have unpainted black sections. He retains the racing numeral 14 instead of 4, but it would be very easy to take some paint thinner and fix that. The hinge strut for his rear window is not painted blue, so the rear window looks like it's in sort of a squared-off U-shape, a bit like Rodimus Prime's front window in the cartoon.

I didn't dislike the Studio Series '86 toy at all, but I will admit that this version does look slightly closer to his appearance in the show. Also, I've always worried about the inherent fragility of the Studio Series release (I recall that the photos of the Jackpot redeco on the Hasbro Pulse site already had a crack in the window) so it's nice to have a version I can fiddle with, and not worry about breaking it during casual handling.

SUNSTREAKER

For some reason, Earthrise Sunstreaker from 2020 was a toy that tended to photograph very poorly, with the difference in his two shades of yellow usually much more strongly emphasized by digital photography. The color difference was never as jarring in person. However, a lot of modern toys have been getting his colors wrong. The version of Bumblebee, as seen in the Michael Bay movies, tended to be a deep, almost schoolbus yellow color, and that look has unfortunately bled into some of his modern G1 toy depictions as well. As a result of this, a lot of modern Sunstreaker toys have been made a bright canary yellow in an attempt to visually differentiate the two a little bit. Actually, though, it's supposed to be the other way around. In the G1 cartoon, Sunstreaker was an orangey-yellow color, and Bumblebee was the bright canary yellow.

So, the United version of Sunstreaker is a much richer, darker shade of yellow now. Also, he doesn't have clear translucent parts that have been painted yellow any longer. His window pieces are made of the same yellow plastic as the rest of him, so the color-matching problems have been eliminated.

His secondary color is now a dark charcoal grey instead of black. There are new black paint hits on his upper arms, meant to get him a little bit closer to his cartoon look. The black shins have been painted in their entirety, not just the raised surface details, and the faux headlights on his feet are white instead of silver.

The Earthrise toy only came with his detachable engine as a handheld weapon. This version has a grey-collored handheld rifle. It isn't the correct gun for cartoon Sunstreaker (he and Sideswipe shared a handheld weapon design) but it's nice that they included something for him this time. I want to say the gun was previously released with another toy, because it looks kind of familiar, but I'm at a loss as to its origins.

Car mode utilizes the fact that he has two hoods, a faux one (tops of his feet) and a real one (the bottoms of his feet), to make the Autobot symbol "magically" appear when he transforms to car mode, but he doesn't end up with symbol halves on each of his feet as a robot. He still gets the symbol for his roof as well, which is formed from the robot chest. The top back of the car is painted silver in an attempt to make it represent the missing spoiler (this is why the sides of his arms are silver in robot mode). If I had to choose between a gun or a spoiler... well, a spoiler would have been nice, certainly. The new black paint for the robot shoulders is now visible on the top rear of the car mode. There's no really good place to attach his rifle in car mode, unless you want to stick it to one of the C.O.M.B.A.T. ports and have it point backwards.

Earthrise Sunstreaker was a toy that benefited strongly from the Nonnef Productions add-on kit, which included rockets to stick in his shoulders, a rifle, and spoiler pieces. They're still in stock as of this writing for $7.99 plus shipping, and honestly I order one for every psuedo-Lambo I buy (even Spin-Out and Cordon). To me, the toy looks incomplete without the spoiler.

But, damn, Sunstreaker looks so good in this deeper, richer yellow. I have him standing next to Jazz and it's like they both stepped right out of "The Core" or something.

TRAILBREAKER

Where the Earthrise Trailbreaker toy from 2020 was produced in this weird "rubber tire" color (not even black, just a very dark brown), this version is a dark charcoal grey, so closer to his look in animation for most episodes. The silver paint on his shins and gun attachment have been changed to grey, and he got some new grey paint hits for the gun to help it blend in and look a little more like part of his forearm. His shoulder cannon is metallic silver this time (it was unpainted black during Earthrise).

Vehicle mode retains the dark grey look, of course, and the entirely of his front bumper. grill, and headlights are painted light grey. His rear bumper is now painted light grey as well. He has a more simplified red-orange-yellow stripe, appearing only once on either side, underneath the side windows of the camper shell, rather than the multiple paint hits on the Earthrise toy. The "4WD" emblem is also absent this time. All the windows are painted a light blue color, and they didn't miss any (even the back camper shell window is painted). If you want to get technical, Trailbreaker actually had two window colors in the cartoon. His front window was a light blue, but his color model used a darker blue for his side windows and front camper shell window. I'm sure Hasbro noticed it, dismissed it as an error, and went for a more uniform look.

WHEELJACK

The eggshell white color used for the Earthrise Wheeljack toy in 2020 exhibited great fidelity to the colors of the G1 toy. However, the brighter white used this time around for United really evokes the cartoon look much more strongly. Switching from the tinted smoke grey translucent windows to the bright blue windows also serves to really hammer this point home. The squareness of the windshield is still a little bothersome to me, but it's a design decision endemic to the mold, so it's not like they could have really done much about it.

Zobovor wrote:

> I want to say the gun was previously released with another toy, because it looks kind of familiar, but I'm at a loss as to its origins.

This was driving me nuts, so I finally reached out to Evan Brooks on Instagram, and he confirmed that the extra guns for Sunstreaker and Wheeljack are, in fact, from the Legacy Elita One/Minerva mold. I knew I'd seen them somewhere before!

Zob (mystery solved!)