So, Autobot Jazz is cool, right? He got repainted into Stepper, over in Japan. And then I got an extra Robot Heroes toy of him, and made a Stepper of my own!
And then I found another Robot Heroes Jazz in a parking lot of a store that didn’t even sell Transformers. Today, I’d leave it there and hope that whoever lost it would come back to find it. But at the time, I wasn’t as…altruistic, I guess?… as I am today. I looked at it as a free toy. But I’d already MADE Stepper. What else could I do with Jazz?
Prepare for backstory:
In the early 2000s, Hasbro and Takara made a line of toys called Alternators in the US, and Binaltech in Japan, where they licensed real, modern cars and turned them into Transformers. Purportedly, there was a Porsche 986 sample created that would convert into Jazz (the original 1984 Jazz toy was a Porsche 935 Turbo) , but allegedly the Porsche motor company was like, “Transformers isn’t good enough for Porsche.” There was a similar story with the Volkswagen Beetle and Bumblebee, and maybe a few others. I dunno, it was 2004, I can’t remember every single detail about everything I like.
So instead, Jazz became a white Mazda RX-8. And for some reason that nobody seems to know, was released under his Japanese name, “Meister.” But it’s cool. At a quick glance, in ‘bot mode, it looked enough like Jazz without all the racing stripes, and I wasn’t buying Alternators anyways, so I didn’t care.
Except, in Japan, they ALSO released Meister in red. Again, a decision that nobody is really sure why? You’d think after 17 years, people would be like, “Oh because this reason,” but apparently not.
Anyways, G1 Jazz in red sounded kinda cool, so… that’s what I did. And I call this one Meister, since Red Jazz isn’t a thing in the United States.
Autobot Jazz, Meister, Transformers, Alternators, Binaltech, Robot Heroes, and all related everythings are co-owned by Hasbro and Takara. Some are even registered trademarks!