StarCom: The US Space Force.  This was a fictitious branch of the all powerful US military branch that was based in space.  StarCom stands for Star Command.  I can't remember the back story behind this series - the cartoon was dark and perhaps a little forgettable.  The toys, on the other hand, was a different story.

There were two sides to this conflict - the good guys, know as StarCom and the bad guys known as the Shadow Force.  Cliche use of white for good guys with red and blue highlights to capture the patriotic US sentimentalism, while the bad guys got black and red and purple.  Good colour combinations throughout.

Vehicles include the Starmax Bomber for the good guys, with the much smaller Laser RAT and the F-1400 Starwolf being amongst the favourites, while the Shadow Parasite was a bad guy favourite.  There were also about a million (OK, less than a hundred) figures to the line.  I don't know how many series this line has, but it seems to have at least two series.

There were three basic features that made this line unique.  The first two are advertised on the box of the vehicles.

Magna Lock is a very simple concept.  Each figure had magnets on the sole of their boots.  Each vehicle had metallic panels.  Thus the figures are capable of standing on the metallic panels of the vehicles, even upside down.

Power Deploy is another simple mechanism - each vehicle had a spring powered motor which can be activated by the press of a button to transform the vehicles and to reveal hidden compartments and artillery.

The most interesting feature, by design, is that the vehicles of the good guys are modularised.  Most vehicles can be folded up to the size of a cargo "pod"  These pods can then be transported by specialised vehicles.  There are even specialised vehicles like the Battlecrane that can be activated from a pod to a vehicle to transport other pods.

The tried the same trick with Shadow Force, the bad guys, but instead of cubic pods, the bad guys had triangular (and tetrahedron?) pods, which wasn't as efficient as Star Com.

If this has got you interested, why not pay a visit to THE StarCom fan site - Nemesisworld

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