Zardak

Zardak is a Decepticon from the Wings Universe portion of the Generation 1 continuity family.

Zardak is a masked Decepticon Warlord. He leads the Maladroids.

Fiction

Wings Universe

Right after giving a prepared speech about his relative's campaign, Zardak was among the Warlords who were eliminated when Deathsaurus sent an unwitting suicide bomber to a council meeting. A Team Effort

Toys

Gentei! Gentei!

• Dark Skyfire (March 18, 2010)
  • ID number: C-06
  • Accessories: Hydrogen-fuel Turbo Thruster Pack, two-piece rifle, 2 photon missile launchers, 2 infrared homing missiles, helmet

Gentei! Gentei! Dark Skyfire was repurposed as Zardak in "A Team Effort".

Gentei! Gentei! Dark Skyfire is a Toy Hobby Market-exclusive black redeco and retool of Classics Voyager Class Jetfire. The primary changes to his deco are mainly for making him, uh, darker. Specifically, he's cast in glossy black and purple plastic, with painted purple details and new thin white stripes on his wings. The tips of his backpack cannons have been significantly remolded to make the barrels and stalks on which they are mounted a single, newly-jointed piece, with the result being that the cannons' bodies stick out ever so slightly from their housing. This change is likely to make the barrels more durable under the constant spring-loaded strain of being hidden, as well as allow one to pivot and deploy the cannons without sliding back the panels that are keeping them hidden, due to the fact that deploying the cannons this way with the previous tooling often resulted in the (detachable) tips of the cannons to pop out and send them flying. As with all Henkei toys, he lacks the heat-sensitive rubsign seen on the Classics release, but instead has some vacuum-metallized parts (his jetpack's exhaust nozzles).

The extent of Dark Skyfire's 'Dark' originally varied from image to image: early pre-production mockup images showed a dark matte grey similar to e-Hobby Astrotrain, whilst later images appeared gloss black with high-contrast silver details, leading to speculation that this redeco is the previously unreleased 'ghost' Classics Jetfire. Some possible hints of this remain, such as the Hasbro Classics-styled open cockpit instead of Henkei's half-painted version, as well as some entirely new paint operations, such as the added stripes on the sides of the intakes just behind his shoulders.

Pre-orders for Dark Skyfire opened up on November 12 and closed on December 11, 2009, with the toys shipping in mid-March 2010.

This figure was also repurposed as Shattered Glass Jetfire.

• More information on Dark Skyfire at TFU.info

Notes

• Zardak and his Maladroids were inspired by the 1980s Convertors toyline from Select. Zardak was a small version of the Takatoku Toys Macross VF-1S Super Valkyrie toy, later recolored black with some very festive stickers. A larger version of the Valkyrie, of course, was released as Jetfire by Hasbro.
• Though Select's Convertors lacked any tie-in media, packaging bios described Zardak and Zark as brothers, hence the Easter egg reference in "A Team Effort".

External links

• Maladroid photos by the Toy Archive, including Zardak