The stickers seen on Cyclonus's shoulders are bright pink and like the one on the jet wing, appear hand-painted. There are similar stickers on his shins. You can also see that the toy has the blue ears and waist that the early-release production Cyclonus toys had, and those were typically found in the G1 packaging without the Movie poster offer.

In actual fact, the boxart and photography used for G1 Cyclonus's packaging features those same blank pink stickers as you can see here:

So how does all this differ from the Cyclonus that was actually released in stores?

The picture above is of a slightly later 1986 Cyclonus of the type that was released in the UK, US and Japan. This more available version has purple ears and waist (like the rest of his torso) and the stickers on his shoulder are black with coloured squares on them, and absolutely ALL production-version Cyclonus releases (blue eared as well) had those black stickers, they came on the stickersheet.

Now, this article is neither about the Toyfare-featured production sample with the pink hand-made stickers nor is it about a regular production Cyclonus. It is in fact about a pre-release Cyclonus whose roots and position in the timeline were just slightly harder to place...

This looks a very standard early 1986 pre-poster box blue-eared production Cyclonus. The stickers (although some are missing) appear to be machine-cut production standard factory and stickersheet issue.

What is strange, however, is that it does not have a rubsign. The reason I find that strange is because the toy is in extraordinary shape with almost no wear whatsoever. The rubsign could not have fallen off due to years of wear, because this toy simply has not suffered any wear!

Now, I know this is a production sample because of where I got it, and the lack of a rubsign on such a mint specimen adds further weight to that conclusion for me, but those two things alone are far from being concrete proof of this toy's origin. How would I prove this to somebody else?

Now, despite knowing this was probably one of very final iterations of Cyclonus produced by Hasbro/Takara before commencing mass-production, and despite it being a beautiful specimen of the slightly more attractive blue-eared variant of an already beautiful Transformer, I was considering parting with it as I already owned a childhood G1 Cyclonus.

I had previously owned a Targetmaster Cyclonus, and now I had owned a blue-eared early Cyclonus as well. My days of mass-collecting variants are behind me and I try to keep my collection as trim as possible these days, so I felt I could live with parting with what I knew was a slightly more special Cyclonus as there wasn't enough different about it to warrant keeping it.

I would have advertised this as a production sample but the only thing I could have used as proof would have been the source and the lack of a rubsign...

Before selling anything I know to be a little off-the-wall, I try to get as many detailed pictures as possible for future reference and possible articles. To that end, I grabbed my childhood standard all-purple Cyclonus for comparison pictures.

The childhood purple Cyclonus (left) has suffered a bit of sticker fading, hence the slight difference in shade of some stickers between the two.

Here's a close-up comparison of the two robot heads, blue-eared first:

An extremely recogniseable and distinctive head/face, Cyclonus has always been my favourite of the movie characters. I felt that even the non-speaking role he had in the Movie was very powerful and gave him unique character. You can see what look like age lines and wrinkles on the face of the blue-eared sample.

Here are the waist areas of both toys, again the blue variant is shown first:

The later release is just all purple, just like the head and ears are. Having got to this point in my comparison photographs, I finally discovered something about the so-called production sample blue-eared Cyclonus that I could call proof of its pre-production origins, and the eagle-eyed among you will already have spotted it in earlier pictures...

These stickers, usually straight off the stickersheet, should be applied to Cyclonus's shoulders. The reason I didn't spot them as soon as I received the toy was because on this sample they are placed on the back of the robot hands so they are effectively obscured or hidden in both robot and jet mode. To fully appreciate what's so odd about the sample's stickers, have a look at a normal Cyclonus shoulder sticker and then a side-by-side comparison:

All production versions of Cyclonus (blue-eared, regular and Targetmaster) have a black background on this shoulder sticker, but the production sample's stickers have a PURPLE background. They are also a slightly different shape and size. Now, remember the Toyfare Cyclonus had pink shoulder stickers so this sample is obviously one of the transitional phases between that Toyfare Cyclonus and the final production Cyclonus that saw release.

If you go back and look at the robot mode picture taken from behind, you'll see both purple shoulder stickers on the sample Cyclonus on the back of his arms. As soon as I spotted this difference I was amazed that I had not discovered it earlier, so blatant was the variation. Here, just for the sake of completeness, is a Targetmaster Cyclonus sporting the normal black shoulder stickers:

One other variation I noticed was with the landing gear. The metallic wheel in the landing gear was different. Pictured below are the sample gear, late production gear and a side-by-side comparison respectively:

The metallic landing gear wheel appears to be more detailed with the four circles on it. This is a standard difference between early 1986 Cyclonuses and late Cyclonuses, not exclusive to the production sample.

The copyrights for both are also different, but that is to be expected because all early Cyclonus toys were Japan stamped, later ones without the blue ears were Taiwan stamped and Targetmaster Cyclonus was Macau stamped.

You can see the Taiwan stamped wing on the late 1986 version is a different mould, with little notches cut out of the end of the wing just to the right of the stamping. There are a number of other standard variations between early and late 1986 Cyclonus releases as well, but they aren't specific to this production sample.

So as far as a timeline goes, this particular production sample would have come after any resin hardcopy prototype, after any hand-painted or unpainted test shot with hand-made stickers, after the Toyfare sample with the pink stickers used on the box, but before the final production-approved version with the black stickers and blue ears/waist.

There were of course other Cyclonus prototypes as well, like the Laserdisc-featured one with the proper (not bulky) retractable fists and moving horns, and the Cyclonus featured in 1986 UK catalogues with the silver ears. That can be seen below (and it was also depicted this way in a UK Ladybird book as well):

The above UK Cyclonus is very strange, the whole head section (both sides) is painted a very bright silver. Also notice that the shoulder stickers and shin stickers are almost the same as the Toyfare and Boxart Cyclonus toys, bright pink. The stickers on his arms are the same stickers found on the arms of my production sample Cyclonus, except these have a black background like production Cyclonus. Maybe they were originally intended as arm stickers, not shoulder stickers...

Things get even stranger in the UK with this advert, showing a blue-eared Cyclonus wearing cropped Blitzwing stickers on his wings and more!

And here is the uncropped version of Paul Vromen's spectacular artwork for this article:

To conclude, not only is the production sample Cyclonus a lovely specimen of the harder-to-find early blue-eared release featured in early TF literature, but there is now solid proof of its origin as a production sample. True, the evidence is centred solely around the stickers and the lack of a rubsign, but those too are part of the long and ongoing process of evolution from prototype stage, through sample stage to the final production toy. This is a significant part of G1 Transformers history and it has shed light on yet one more considered possible outcome for what would finally become the G1 Cyclonus toy we all grew up with.

Many thanks again to Paul Hitchens for his continuing support and specifically, the Toyfare, advertisement and catalog scans of Cyclonus.

All the best
Maz