Decepticon Pretender Birdbrain

I'm still on my G1 Decepticons kick, but taking a break from Headmasters in favour of my least favourite Transformers gimmick ever - Pretenders.

My good friend and I were hanging out last night, and I told her to scope out Seibertron.com's toy gallery in the G1 section, pick one out, and I'd draw it, hoping she'd find something delightfully weird or disturbing. She did not disappoint. She selected "melting vulture flesh," as she called it - G1 Birdbrain. She literally could not have picked an uglier one - not only is the shell a nightmarish decaying atrocity, but even the Robot guy has the ugliest face I've ever seen on an old-school Transformer, with an enormous nose and wormy lips, as recreated above. Bravo, Katie!

I always found the Pretenders toys a little strange. My mom's best friend's son used to have tons of these things when I was little, but I never once suspected they were Transformers (I think he displayed them as just shells for the most part, or maybe misplaced some of the robos.) Heck, I MYSELF owned a Pretender for DECADES, apparently, and never knew it. Not this fine feathered fucked-up nightmare fuel, but one of his buddies, Wildfly. I had the Robot and the shell. I NEVER KNEW they went together.

Furthermore, Wildfly, Birdbrain and his buddies were apparently those cyborg dinosaur dudes from Transformers Victory? Why did they change that? Why did the replace those shells with horrifying walking placentas and other such Lovecraftian fare? Were they afraid cyborg dinosaurs wouldn't sell? I assure you, they would have!

Anyway, I chose to draw Birdbrain here as the robot guy emerging from within the pretender shell like a cocoon, covered in viscera, like something out of David Kronenberg's The Fly. Birdbrain's robot mode even kinda looks like Jeff Goldblum, don't you think?