But, where the original toy was a rocket base with a motorised tank that turned into a walking robot, brought by Hasbro from a company called Toybox and shoehorned into the US TransFormers line, while being made available in the UK as part of Grandstand's Converters line (putting the toy on a par with Tandy/Radio Shack's Galactic Man), the Energon toy took a very different tack, and presented two unique vehicle modes that combine into a single enormous robot (technically making him the largest Duocon - or Duobot, 'cos he's an Autobot - in TransFormers history, and a distinct variant of the line's Powerlinx/Superlink combiner concept), with the old G1 HeadMaster gimmick thrown in, just for larks.
Not sure what to make of it? Neither was I... so let's see how this fifteen-year-old, pre-Titans Return Titan measures up, and find out how many variations of 'Omega...' we can squeeze in.
Omega Train:
I'm not sure how, precisely, this constitutes a train... I mean, sure, the very front might look kind of like a stylised, dystopian future bullet train with horrific cowcatcher spikes... but its wheels appear to have tyres and pretty much every other aspect of the vehicle just screams 'construction vehicle'.
The front section is, by and large, quite chunkily sculpted, almost looking like a largely black 'train' plugged into and surrounded by a yellow framework that allows it to tow the crane section via an enormous, articulated coupling. This 'train' could equally just be a futuristic Freightliner-style truck, since it has the sort of headlights and grille more typical of a road vehicle than a train. Its metallic blue-painted windscreen is broken up into six curved panels, with two additional side windows largely obscured by the yellow framework. Yellow paint runs round the sides of the cab area to link in with the yellow plastic framework, but it's a warmer yellow, verging on orange, and the headlights are picked out with gold paint. The middle of the 'train' features an area of - I'm assuming - exposed engine detail on the roof, painted greenish-silver and rather more intricately detailed than the surrounding panels. The rear of this section appears to possibly have a couple of windows sculpted on the angled front of the raised section, but they're unpainted so are possibly just indentations... and its roof accommodates a three-clawed mini-crane which is nicely sculpted for its size, but also entirely unpainted. The cab section is beige plastic and can rotate a full 360°, while the arms are blue, each one hinged at the base and below the claw, so their movement looks a little odd - almost as if these arms were designed with tidy stowing in mind more than their intended function.
The yellow framework is more chunky and angular in its detailing and, while its only moving parts are its wheels, it features guns as sculpted surface detail on either side, picked out with blue paint that then tracks back via some pipework to the rear, at which point it appears to angle down into the rear wheel well and just disappear. There's sculpted detail inside both wheel wells on either side, but still nothing to give the impression that this is really a train. The only real decoration is a set of three slightly recessed sections of red-painted diamond-textured panelling on either side, just above the blue-painted vents, but a wealth of other detail is unpainted. The right side of the framework features an additional fold-out section with a square plug designed to attached to Energon Optimus Prime's vehicle drones, though I believe that's intended more for robot mode. The presence of this peg meant that one of the rear wheels became sculpted detail only, and it's also unpainted, which looks a bit crap and lazy. It honestly feels as though there would have been a better way to accomplish this - not least locating the peg further back on the vehicle, and above the wheels - but it's easy to say that in retrospect... Weirdly, this peg can also rotate a full 360° at its base, for no readily apparent reason... perhaps they just needed to make up the parts count.
For the trailer section, the predominant colour suddenly becomes black, with the chunky details either picked out or framed with red, yellow or greenish-silver paint. Quite what this chunk is supposed to be is anyone's guess because, other than having a crane mounted on its rear, it's just an asymmetrically sculpted, tiny-wheeled block, and there's not a single bit of identifiable detail on it... The crazy thing is that the TransFormers toyline has featured myriad construction vehicles for decades, so there's reall no excuse for this chunk of weirdness, not least because there's clearly been no attempt made to make it blend in with the 'engine' part of the vehicle either stylistically or in terms of its colourscheme. The paintwork is fairly extensive - particularly the applications of red - seems sloppy here... but then, there's also some feathering of the yellow paint. The silver at the front of the trailer chunk appears to have been applied to a pair of cockpit sections, either side of the articulated coupling between the two halves of the vehicle, despite the clear signs that this section of the vehicle could never function independently of the 'engine' part as it only has six tiny wheels at the back, almost directly under the base of the crane arm. Probably the biggest issue I have with the paint job is that, extensive though it may be compared to the rest of the vehicle, it's inconsistent as to what's highlighted and what's left as bare plastic.
The crane arm itself is, again, very chunky. It's made up of beige, yellow and blue plastics, with the claw molded in red, and there's a black slider on the lefthand side which, when pushed in and slid forward or back, extends and retracts the frontmost yellow section of the arm via a couple of geared hinges. The opposite side features a matching sculpted detail, unpainted on the yellow plastic. Aside from applications of blue paint on either side, highlighting a sculpted piston detail, and an Autobot insignia (bisected by the sculpted detail it's stamped onto) on one side, there's no significant decoration on the entire arm. There's a translucent orange cab on the back of the arm's base, and you can sort-of wedge the HeadMaster figure, Omega, into it with his arms sticking out the slot on the front, but it's a very tight fit, and I get the impression he's more supposed to be there in his head mode. Oddly, the canopy appears to feature sculpted details of window frames, door handles and roof-mounted beacon lights, giving the impression that there should have been some paint applied, to make most of the cab opaque, but all it got was an Autobot logo inside something that looks like a five-toothed cog, stamped on the roof in black. The back of the cab and the tip of the arm each feature another of the chunky combination plugs for Energon Optimus Prime's drone units. Either side of the cab, just below the latticed section, there's a Mini-Con port... though neither actually activate any additional features of the toy.
The cab can rotate 360°, while the arm can raise about 80°, as well as bend about 90° left and right and twist a full 360° if it's out of the way of the ground unit. The claw itself doesn't have a great deal of range, either for tipping up/down or opening, and it seems like a missed opportunity that they didn't include additional gearing to open or close the claw when the slider is operated.
When viewed in isolation, it's not immediately apparent that this is basically just half a robot lying down... but, equally, it's not a very believable vehicle because its design makes so little sense. Had the rear section been made more in keeping with the rest of the vehicle - more yellow and perhaps more like the base of a crane - it might have worked better... but the design of the 'trailer' section is the first obvious sign that there's - pardon my saying - more than meets the eye to this vehicle simply because its aesthetic is such a poor match to the two 'functional' components of the vehicle.
Omega Battleship:
I don't follow anime quite as much as I used to in my teens and early 20s, but I can tell a Space Battleship Yamato reference when I see one... and, in that respect, this is probably a more believable pseudo-nautical vehicle mode than Titans Return Broadside's aircraft carrier mode, let alone the Omega Train. Only barely, though. With its patchwork of seemingly random paint applications and asymmetrical sculpted detail, this is a space battleship as built by the Junkions. Real life Naval battleships aren't perfectly symmetrical, of course, but this is way more jumbled, particularly in the middle section. It's far too colourful, looking more like the result of a children's colouring competition than something that's theoretically a military vehicle of some sort. It's also, curiously, where all of the toy's more interesting features are located - and not just the electronics.
The base vehicle is mostly blue, with large black chunks in its midsection and yellowish bits at the bow and stern - at the front is a section of translucent orange plastic, while the back has what appears to be supplementary engines on either side coated in yellow paint. Similar sculpted protrusions on the top deck are unpainted, which seems like quite an oversight, but it almost feels more as though the yellow paint of the sides was superfluous, just used to break up an otherwise completely blue chunk of plastic at the back of the vehicle, rather than its lack on top being an omission. The very back of the vehicle is open to reveal a set shallowly-sculpted boosters in a cavernous space designed to facilitate the combined vehicle mode. Naturally, there's no paint within, with the beige plastic presenting an unexpected contrast with the surrounding blue, and failing to really convince as the mechanical detail it's intended to represent.
Since the other Omega vehicle is ground-based and this one is - most likely - a spacefaring rather than seafaring vessel, its flat base is supplemented by four free-rolling plastic wheels, presumeably for 'added play value' and to minimise scuffing to the underside. Given that the underside is also open to the joints of the upper arm and leg - not to mention the fact that the battery compartment is located just behind the bulbous bow of the vehicle - I don't feel there was any danger of anyone trying to float the Omega Battleship in their bathtub, so I tend to assume these wheels are present more in service of the combined vehicle mode than the individual Battleship part.
Now, looking back on this figure fifteen years after it first hit the shelves, the lights and sounds may seem a little underachieving, but they were actually not too shabby for the time (particularly bearing in mind that the previous year's Armada Unicron figure just had flashing LED eyes along with a flashing LED in his hand, with no electronic sounds). A button on the starboard side activates a laser blast sound effect accompanied by the flashing of a pair of LEDs embedded in the prow, behind the translucent section. While they provide adequate light for the effect, it's rather jarring that the translucent piece is sculpted with four separate square gun barrels, yet only has two lights, neither of which actually align with any of the barrels. I know four LEDs would have been overkill (not to mention more expensive), and I'm not even fussed that the outer two gunbarrels have to made do with light bleed through the plastic... but it's quite frustrating to so clearly see two lights wedged awkwardly behind the bottom, outer corner of the middle two gunbarrels, when they could at least have been aligned with the centre protrusion in each.
A wheel near the button, in line with the frontmost turret, can be used to turn the three batteries on the foredeck, and the elliptical base of the front two turrets lifts the gunbarrels as they reach either extreme of their movement. Pushing the wheel to the full extent of its range in either direction activates a cannon fire sound, but there's no lighting effect because the mobile cannons are all made of opaque plastic. The larger weapon, mounted on the upper section of the foredeck, is a spring-loaded missile launcher with two individual triggers. This toy being from back in the days when spring-loaded missiles packed a fair bit of punch, the missiles can travel up to a couple of feet when the battleship is resting on the floor, potentially further if held up in the air. Another set of cannons mounted behind the tower mast is also fully articulated, but not connected to any of the other geared features, and the gunbarrels don't raise and lower as it turns because it lacks the elliptical base.
That's not the full extent of his armament, though - there are sculpted guns on both sides of the vessel, including the greenish-silver triple-barrelled launchers on the front section, the similarly-painted double-barrelled cannons in the middle, the pairs of small, spherical guns mounted on the edges of the deck on either side of the central tower section, and the banks of raised, circular details - just below the rear guns - that traditionally denote missile pods. There's also the red-painted detail inside the smaller tower, set just behind the tower mast, which may be either additional missile pods or simply exhaust chimneys of some kind.
The HeadMaster figure's interaction with this part of the toy is rather more convincing than it is with the Omega Train - the tower mast transforms into a strange sort of throne, albeit one where the HeadMaster figure basically faceplants on the seat rather than sitting on it. This has the effect of revealing the robot's head in its more G1-looking configuration, with Omega Supreme's face concealed by the visor, and more robotic, mechanical detail left visible. The figures arms spread out to the sides, while the legs sink into the tower, and a couple of RADAR/satellite/solar power panels are released from the roof of the tower and can be tilted up and down. The windows of the bridge remain visible, lifted up over the HeadMaster and, while the tower then seems to lean precariously backward, it actually looks more like a spacefaring vessel with this new, alternate, domed section on the front of the tower, and the figure fits very snugly.
Cybertronian Armoured Super Train:
So here we have the combined vehicle mode... which is literally just a case of stuffing the front of the construction train into the back of the space battleship. Scale had very clearly been thrown out of the window for this toy. Amusingly, the TV show appears to show an alternate configuration where the construction train is in front and the battleship becomes a trailer... but I've no idea how that can possibly work as there's no identifiable means of connecting the front of the battleship to the back of the 'train'.
Since the Battleship component is supplemented by tiny plastic wheels on its underside, and the Train component has an almost full complement of wheels, it rolls quite well... but the only point of articulation on the entire vehicle is still the coupling between the front of the Train and its crane section, so I honestly wouldn't like to see how this would handle on roads.
The different aesthetics between the two vehicles is compensated for to a small degree by the matching of the yellow paint on the Battleship's side-mounted boosters leading fairly well into the yellow plastic of the Train... but it's such a bizarre-looking vehicle overall, and I can't see it having a great deal of play value when compared to, say, G1 Omega Supreme's rocket base with motorised tank. Plus, I really don't see how plugging a train that doesn't really look like a train into the back of a space battleship makes it into a 'Super Train'...
HeadMaster Omega:
This oddly-porportioned little fellow looks rather wide of torso for his height, but that's all to do with the enormous Omega Supreme face backpack he's lugging around. The torso and arms are nicely detailed, with the latter being mounted on ball-jointed shoulders offering excellent range of movement. The legs, meanwhile, are weirdly stubby and lacking in detail - even his feet barely protrude from his shins, while the weight of the backpack is supported by large, fin-like heel spurs that start just below his knees. The combination of ball jointed hips and pinned knees isn't ideal with such a small footprint and so large a backpack, but he stands pretty well in a neutral stance.
The paint job is seriously lacking, given the amount of sculpted detail on the torso, and the red plastic doesn't do it any favours either. Omega's own head is very reminscent of G1 Omega Supreme's blank cockpit face, while his visor is painted metallic blue. The pipework around his jawline would have benefitted by a bit of paintwork, but then so could the entire torso. The majority of the paintwork is on the larger robot's head - this figure's backpack - which feels like a waste. Then again, how many HeadMaster figures used five different plastic colours in the first place?
Probably my least favourite aspect of this figure's design is the cavernous screw hole in his belly. Granted, that's a feature of the more recent Titan- and Prime Masters... but they all used tiny screws. The hole in Omega is almost 6mm in diameter at the outside, at least 6mm deep from the surface, and it's position leads to an ugly circular mark on the combined robot's forehead.
Omega isn't a particularly dynamic action figure in and of himself, but he's certainly an improvement on G1 HeadMasters. His main purpose is to provide a head for the combined robot, though, so any additional articulation for a supplementary robot of this size is welcome. It's just a shame than none of his robot parts actually peg into any secure position for his head mode. Unlike the more recent mini-figures, Omega's head isn't on a ball joint - it didn't need to be as the larger robot's neck socket is articulated - though it would have been a neat addition.
Robot Mode:
Standing a massive (for the time) 35-36cm (13 3/4"), Energon Omega Supreme is surely the epitome of a big, dumb robot toy. My first thought, looking at this, is that it's a reference to the G1 cartoon episode where the Autobots build a new robot - Autobot X - out of spare Autbot parts, and it somehow ends up playing host to Spike after he gets critically injured. The limbs on each side no longer appear to be part of a vehicle, more that each one should have been a separate vehicle (kind of like Energon Optimus Prime's supermode), while the torso is just a jumble of parts, made up of two jumbly sections of two separate vehicles. Neither the design not the paint job matches particularly well, except for the main black section at the top of the chest. I normally like asymmetry in robot design, but this thing is just an eyesore.
Some of the sculpted detail makes a bit more sense in this mode, but it's still jumbled and still doesn't make much sense overall. I like how some of the sculpting appears to sort of wrap around his body from one side to the other, but the mismatched plastic colours and lack of appropriate paintwork rather diminishes the effect. Also, as dull as the crane arm looked in vehicle mode due to lack of paintwork, it's worse in robot mode because the bare yellow plastic - and particularly the translucent orange cockpit - look so out of place as part of the robot. A few bits of black paint here and there would have worked wonders, I think.
In terms of bulk, Omega Supreme is on a par with things like G1 Trypticon and Galaxy Force Megalo Convoy, but feels far blockier than either. Maybe not surprising versus the latter, since it came out a year later... but Trypticon is a Generation 1 city-former - all chunky parts and motorised action originally made in the mid 1980s - so this should have been better.
Weapons-wise, just about everything that was available in vehicle mode is still available here, albeit in some awkward positions. The Battleship side fares better, with a gun battery and possible missile pod on the shin, another gun battery on the forearm along with the electronic lights and sounds, while the spring-loaded launcher and the last gun battery end up on his shoulder. Naturally the geared feature now only operates the forearm guns, but the sound effect is still there. The right side features three of the four fold-out connections for Energon Optimus Prime's drone rescue vehicles, but the mini-crane on his shin becomes completely redundant. For additional armament, there are four Mini-Con ports spread across his shoulders - two on each, front and back - but they feel like something of an afterthought.
Omega's head mode feels like it's based very much on the cartoon version of G1 Omega Supreme, with a full face behind a cockpit-like helmet visor, but now with the added bonus of a sun visor and without the dinky cannon rat-tail. What he gains instead is a pair of killer protruding cheek panels and surprisingly - not to say 'disturbingly' - luscious robo-lips, very much on a par with the Collectors' Club's interpretation of Overlord/Gigatron from the BotCon 2012 boxed set. The expression, from the squared-off eyes to the neutral mouth, is utterly blank, lending him a strangely Kardashian vibe. Paintwork is almost nonexistant - aside from the aforementioned black paint on the base of the visor, only the eyes are picked out, in the same metallic blue as Omega's visor. Much like the body, the head seems mismatched in its palette, with blue antennae, a red face behind a translucent orange visor, and a beige sunshield.
Plus, just for fun, the main robot body has an alternate head that 'transforms' out of his neck - pull up the top section of the socket assembly and the dinky, beady-eyed visage of Omega Grand is revealed... so this toy is already pretty interesting even before you take into account that Energon Optimus Prime could be folded up and installed in the large cavity enclosed within the torso. Since I've only watched a handful of clips of the TV show, I don't know if Omega Grand actually came into play at any point, but his noggin is hopelessly out of proportion and barely looks like a head
Can one even call what Energon Omega Supreme does to turn into a robot a 'transformation'? Sure, certain components change shape/orientation - such as the control tower/throne on the Battleship - but 'transformation' feels like too grandiose a term for a couple of daft-looking vehicles that smash together and then bend into an approximately humanoid shape... It's like a toy based on something from one of the knockoff movies by The Asylum rather than a 'proper' TransFormer. Needless to say, it's quite a simple process, with the Omega Train literally just standing up on its very front, then rotating 90° at the knee, and the Omega Battleship needing a few steps of vaguely convoluted panel shifting to free up the space needed to extend his leg... but then the two halves literally just peg together down the middle of the torso, and the HeadMaster plugs in.
Given his size, Omega Supreme is reasonably well articulated, with good, strong ratchets on every joint bar the neck. The shoulders rotate through 16 clicks, but all the other joints are comparatively limited - the left arm traversing just six clicks between vehicle mode and 'down by his sides', while the right only manages four due to the bulkier shoulder. The elbows are similarly limited by shoulder bulk, neither managing a full 90°, and there's wrist rotation instead of bicep rotation, each with 12 clicks. The crane arm can still make use of its extension gimmick, though it just adds to his mismatched appearance and gives the impression he's in need of repair. The claw actually looks pretty decent as a hand and, while it doesn't have the greatest range of movement, it's good that a figure this size does have one vaguely poseable hand, even if it's not a patch on Armada Unicron's hands. The legs have great range out to the sides, with the left leg even able to swing inward a couple of clicks due to the way he transforms, but the forward/backward swing is weird. He can move both legs through a full 180° in 12 clicks, but his stubby thighs mean that the lifted leg barely clears the mass of the other leg. Each knee bends to 90° in six clicks, with a 16-click, full 360° rotation just above the joint... unfortunately the feet are immobile (except for transformation on the right) and, due to the way the legs flare out at the base - particularly on the left - he ends up standing quite precariously on the edge of the base of the ankle rather than actually making firm contact with his feet. Dynamic poses end up looking not especially dynamic - not least because waist joints weren't generally a thing in 2004 - because his footprint just isn't stable enough to support much beyond a typical A-stance... and his construction means he can't stand with his legs perfectly straight because they compete for the same space between his lower legs. The head has a full 360° rotation at the neck, but actually turning the head is made all the more frustrating because his head feels like it's falling apart - the HeadMaster figure's legs and arms are likely to have moved due to finger pressure before the head starts to turn, simply because none of it pegs together. Even the visor is inclined to move with the slightest of nudges.
I'm pretty sure that Energon Omega Supreme was one of my 'Woolworths Stock Clearance Specials', bought at a hefty discount as the line came to a close and that dear, departed department store wanted to clear some shelf space. Back in those days, larger figures didn't tend to sell and, while the Armada Unicron figure turned out better than I'd expected, this one is a bit... Meh. Sure, it brought back the HeadMaster concept about a decade before Titans Return made it a main feature again, but this is a toy from a different era of toymaking, and it really shows. From the simplistic transformation and the perfunctory gimmicks, nothing about this toy couldn't have been achieved, if not improved upon, at a smaller scale, and the fact that the robot's cavernous chest is designed to accommodate Energon Optimus Prime for a whole different Powerlinx/Superlink gimmick really doesn't help as that toy is also terrible in and of itself. Plugging it into this absolute unit doesn't make either any better.
It's probably a good thing that the name Omega Supreme hasn't been often re-used since the motorised G1 toy and, while I'm dubious about the quality of the new War for Cybertron version - a dumbed-down version of the original with an oversized rocket and an undersized track for its tank component - this one does the name absolutely no justice. It's a messy-looking, ill-conceived chunk of oversized plastic that doesn't really seem to fit within the Energon continuity except in the loosest terms. Some of the shortcomings of his appearance were corrected by the later Omega Sentinel re-release, which upped the paint budget (much of it silver) and replaced most of the yellow plastic with either blue or black, for a more coherent, less patchwork look.
Energon Omega Supreme feels as though it's been made large simply because it could be, not because it needed to be, and the simplistic sound and light features don't excuse that. The option to combine it with the line's Optimus Prime figure was clearly part of the design process, but still feels tacked-on. The HeadMaster feature is similar - it's not 'an Omega Supreme thing', it's not 'an Energon thing', and it didn't need to be included... it's basically an anachronistic curiosity.
I've not bothered photographing the so-called 'utility' modes of either half of the robot, because they both just look like half a robot, posed awkwardly, and the crane is even less useful than in its vehicle mode because it's upside-down. The fact that each has a pair of handles for any robot large enough to grasp would make more sense if there were more robots in the toyline large enough to make use of the feature. As it stands, it looks like a random, last-minute addition to the perceived 'play value' of the toy.
It's good to see that Hasbro has imrpoved its larger-format TransFormers toys in recent years and, much as I might not like their WfC take on Omega Supreme, it's certain to be less of a disappointment than this one. In its favour, it's a weighty figure - clearly made of good, dense plastic, and without any of the visible hollowness of Hasbro's more recent output.
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