TransFormers Collectors' Club BotCon 2008 (Timelines) Shattered Glass Megatron & Divebomb

Prompted by the recent reveal of a 'new' Shattered Glass Megatron, fanmoded out of the uninspiring Siege tank mold with a few added parts, I realised that my write-up of the original BotCon toy was long past overdue... I mean, it's from an event in 2008, for crying out loud, so it's more than ten years late.

The Shattered Glass concept certainly has its detractors but, for me, the idea of Evil Autobots and Heroic Decepticons was a pretty obvious, just not entirely novel take on the franchise. I've often said that the mottos of the two factions' respective leaders are open to wilful misinterpretation: "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings" could be offering the opinion that certain beings should not be considered 'sentient' - a parallel to the real world slave trade of old - while "Peace through tyranny" could be a rueful observation that only a world rigidly controlled can be considered truly 'peaceful', which echoes Beast Machines. Ultimately, Megatron wants peace, while Optimus Prime wants to reserve freedom for those who are deemed worthy of it.

And yet 'Shattered Glass', the comic book accompanying the boxed set, was a largely quite pedestrian tale which continued the adventures of Cliffjumper from the Collectors' Club membership magazine's ongoing story. It also did more with the Attendee Souvenir toys - particularly Megatron and Rodimus, sold at the show as a bagged set - than it did with the boxed set characters, and spent two of its mere 24 pages providing an infodump of the alternate history of the Shattered Glass version of Cybertron. Making matters worse, the Club had released a three page 'preview' of the comic ahead of the event - as an April Fool prank - which ended up being better (not least in terms of giving its characters discernible personalities) than the full comic published for the event.

 

All of which is to say that, if Hasbro are being a bit lazy with the Shattered Glass concept, it's not without precedent, to a degree. It wasn't one of BotCon's crowning achievements, but some of the figures - most notably those not part of the boxed set - were pretty good. So let's take a look at their Heroic Decepticon leader, Megatron.

War for Cybertron: Kingdom Megatron (Beast)

While I always preface these toy posts, it's not often I have to start by explaining why I had a particularly hard time with the write-up... But this toy certainly has some baggage now. This is the toy I referred to in my Hasbro Pulse/Courier Frustration post. The one that was delivered to entirely the wrong location, despite the courier's insistance that it was placed in my hands; the one that Smyths kindly re-sent, only for the original to turn up two weeks later thanks to the dilligence of the local postman.

So, on the one hand, I feel an immense sense of gratitude surrounding this toy, both to the company I bought it from, for their excellent customer service, and to Royal Mail (or a representative thereof), who went above and beyond the call of duty to ensure it reached me when the original courier failed.

But, on the other hand, every time I think about this toy, I am reminded of the frustration and anger I felt, dealing with the courier company and the inadequate process they have for investigating non-delivery complaints. I had been on the fence about this toy, and now occasionally wish I'd never ordered it.

...And that's before taking into account that I will naturally have complex feels about this toy because I already own both the Beast Wars original and the 2006 Beast Wars Reborn set. It's a little frustrating that I have, over the years, developed a habit of writing up 'new and improved' toys before their predecessors.

Kingdom Megatron is certainly new... but is it really improved?

Unique Toys R-03 Dragoon

I have a complicated relationship with The Last Knight, the final movie in Michael Bay's increasingly bizarre series of live action TransFormers movies. I refused to see it in the cinema, because it looked like a mess, and have continued to refrain from viewing it ever since. I didn't like the idea of shoehorning dragons and Arthurian legend into TransFormers (or vice versa), I have never enjoyed the excessive focus on human characters in movies ostensibly about giant alien robots, and the whole 'Knight' motif looked ridiculous...

...Nevertheless, I found the new design for Megatron strangely compelling. There was just enough G1 essence squeezed into his 'Black Knight' look (the stylised helmet, the arm-mounted cannon, Frank Welker's voice) and his vehicle mode (a coherent, albeit still very alien air/space craft) was vastly more impressive than any of those that preceded it, that it turned out to be one of the least aggravating designs for the Decepticon leader in the whole series.

Since I tend to prefer Leader class toys, when available, for Megatrons and Optimus Primes, I picked up the larger version from Hasbro's almost comically misnamed 'Premier Edition' line and, while it was a decent enough toy, it took some serious liberties with the design and its paint job was not just typically miserly but also amateurish and sloppy in its 'weathering' effects.

Since I'd already acquired Unique Toys' inaugural movie effort, Peru Kill, I wasn't particularly suprised when they unveiled their take on TLK Megatron, and it looked every bit as impressive... But does the end result meet the high expectations set by their first movieverse figure?

Street Fighter II X TransFormers Convoy [Ryu] vs Megatron [Vega]

Considering I already have three iterations of the Generations Blitzwing mold, I decided I wouldn't bother with the Titans Return remake, either as Megatron (the form it was first released in) or as Blitzwing. Conversely, while the Optimus Prime version of the Octane mold was of no interest to me, I've ended up with not only TR Octane (in fact the first and only contemporary Octane in my collection!), but the Tokyo Toy Show 2017 Nemesis Prime/Black Convoy version as well.

All of which is to say that, of these two Street Fighter II crossover repaints, only one was entirely new to me... but the idea was certainly bonkers enough to get my attention, and I ordered both of the Street Fighter II X Transformers boxed sets as soon as they became available.

If you've ever wondered how an arcade beat-'em-up would translate into TransFormers toys, read on!

The Last Knight/Premier Edition Megatron (Leader class)

Way back toward the end of May 2017, an announcement turned up on the TransFormers fan sites that Amazon UK had put up preorder listings for The Last Knight's Leader class Megatron for about £45. Before I'd made up my mind about whether I wanted it or not, the price and order button were removed. Later, without any fanfare, the preorder became available again and, being a somewhat impulsive creature, I ordered it.

Then I just had to wait for it to arrive... a wait of a little over a month. But, hey, at least I didn't have to pay the current price tag, which seems to be closer to £65!

And, since we're now three toys into this line, I'll spare you any detail about the box... Not least because the only difference (other than size) is that someone at Hasbro decreed that Leader class Megatron actually deserved four whole lines of bland bio in four languages.

Quick Teaser

Regular viewers may have noticed a bunch of new acquisitions from my Want List getting marked as 'On Order' or 'Bought' (so much for slowing down to conserve space - definitely need to do some housekeeping/shelf-to-storage rotation soon!). While I managed to take photos of much of it over the last, glorious weekend, I'm still having trouble sitting still long enough to compose a good write-up. Not for any significant reason, I'm just not really in the mood for concentrating on things in weather like we've been having lately, and with all kinds of other crap on my mind.

Still, one particular new purchase - preordered from Amazon a while back - only arrived today, so it missed the flurry of photography over the last couple of days. Considering how little toy blogging I've done over the last month-and-a-bit, I figured I should make an effort to pop something up here straight away, in lieu of a decent post.

Of course, as the old saying goes, the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley... and I barely managed the below before the battery conked out...

Once more, with the flash? Why not..?

Someone Up There Likes Me...

And, by "up there", I mean at WeiJiang/BlackApple, because now there's going to be an upsized and vastly improved version of Dark of the Moon Megatron, just like I've always* wanted!

Going by the images, it scales very well in vehicle mode with other (early) movie figures and MP10 (at least, I think that's MP10 and not their own MPP10) and, going by the comparison with Hasbro's version, it may well be even taller than M01. It strikes me that the head is disproportionately small to the rest of the robot, but proportionally similar enough to the original toy to make me think it's due to the amount of space available to it in vehicle mode... but, even with a shrunken head, he looks pretty cool. Can't wait to see what accessories he comes with (damaged head? fabric cloak?) and whether or not he'll have any weapons beyond the shotgun... It looks very much as though his entire tanker transforms into his legs now, meaning no upsized Mechtech fusion cannon...

(* 'always' being since I first learned about their upgraded/upsized Age of Extinction Evasion Mode Optimus Prime)

UFO Toys UP-2 Mega Arm & TF Dream Factory PJ-01 Evil-Blood Blade

I originally wrote about the Leader class Megatron figure from the Revenge of the Fallen toyline over six years ago, when I found it to be a rather poor attempt at realising the movie's CGI as a plastic toy. Given it's simplicity and lack of screen accuracy, one could be forgiven for thinking it wasn't even from the same toyline as its counterpart Optimus Prime, which is still one of the best TransFormers toys to come out of the movie line.

The problems with Megatron were mostly due to the CGI design being shit. Megatron in the movies was never recognisably Megatron, and not just because he didn't turn into a gun. After all, Megatron has been a jet/spacecraft thing before (Energon, Animated) and since (Prime, Generations), he's been a tank about a billion times (G2, Armada, Classics, off the top of my head) and since (Generations/War for Cybertron, twice so far in Combiner Wars). The problem was that, while all the other Decepticons and Autobots looked like robots that turned into vehicles, Megatron had been conceived as a character who felt that disguise was beneath him. The inevitable result was that he didn't look like much of anything in either robot or vehicle mode until Dark of the Moon and by that point he was, for the most part, a rusty shell of his former self.

As a result, the toys were terrible until the Dark of the Moon toyline, with the first being a misshapen jet/spacecraft made out of spikes, and the second being a misshapen tank made out of spikes. Both turned into misshapen robots made out of spikes, both had limited or poorly-designed articulation and neither one truly felt like they lived up to the potential of any of the available size classes. One would think, though, that Hasbro would have been able to do a better job of representing the rebuilt Megatron and his 'Murder Arm' considering the fact that his primary claw/blade pretty much disembowels Optimus Prime before his arm cannon finishes him off is quite a major 'plot' point in the movie, such as it was... and yet what we got was this:

"So... disappointing."

A downright shabby, poorly articulated, spring-loaded missile-launching mess, with a limply spring-loaded blade attached to a large, clawed plate... and then there's the other arm, known less than affectionately as 'the gimp arm', which is essentially the animatronic skeleton of a Skeksis spliced to a short, shrivelled arm on which the elbow is evidently also the wrist.

A tank... though almost by default.

Its vehicle mode looks like a robot doing weird alien yoga thanks to not even attempting to disguise the head (accurate to the movie CGI though that may be). Whereas RotF's Leader class Optimus Prime managed to include lights and sounds without sacrificing intricacy, this one - much like its predecessor - faked or bodged its detail to accommodate utterly lacklustre effects, and could have been made just as well in a smaller size class... My RotF Megatron has been stuffed into a box in the bottom of my wardrobe - along with the original movie's Optimus Prime toy, several others which were superseded by better toys, and a whole host of other junk - since I bought the Dark of the Moon Voyager toy.

But RotF Leader class Megatron need no longer suffer these ignominies. Two third party companies have independently developed replacements for both arms of this toy and, while it seemed pretty pointless to upgrade to UFO Toys' left arm and leave the right with its ugly, spring-loaded toy arm, the appearance of TF Dream Factory's take on the 'Murder Arm' suddenly seemed to turn both into must-have upgrades.

TransFormers Collectors' Club BotCon 2015 (Timelines): 'The Boss' Megatron

BotCon 2015's boxed set - Cybertron's Most Wanted - was an interesting concept, but only really had a couple of actual figures I was interested in. One in particular was the inspired - in my opinion - repurposing of the TF Prime/Arms Micron Breakdown mold (specifically the zombie/'Silas/CyLAS' version Takara Tomy put out) as a cross-continuity Dark of the Moon Megatron.

Combiner Wars Megatron

Considering that Combiner Wars Optimus Prime - based on the Motormaster mold - is a combiner torso, one would surely expect his Decepticon counterpart to perform the same function but, for the moment, at least, Megatron is his own standalone robot without any gestalt potential. Even stranger, Combiner Wars Cyclonus becomes the torso of Galvatronus, at once keeping in the tradition of Cyclonus being partnered with Galvatron (no hints yet of a CW Scourge, but they'd probably just churn it out as another repaint of either Alpha Bravo or Firefly, going by what we've seen of things to come in 2016), while irreversibly separating Galvatron from Megatron.

So... here we have the G1 version of a new tank-based Megatron (Hasbro losing points for originality straight off the bat, not even taking into account the almost immediate Armada repaint)... How does he stack up against the myriad others out there..?

TransFormers Animated Megatron

Over the years, Megatron has been a fairly unimaginative parade of tanks, dinosaurs and dragons, with a few oddities that tended to be a bit crap. The first - Voyager class - iteration of TF Animated Megatron took the road less travelled (at that point) and turned him into an awkward Cybertronian flying machine, taking his look from the TV series and crafting a vehicle mode which, as far as I can recall, never appeared in the show. When it came to the Leader class figure, Hasbro had something a bit more concrete to work with, since Megatron actually adopts a terrestrial disguise when he finally arrives on Earth...

...Not that it's really much of a disguise...

Armada Megatron

One of my biggest problems, as a collector, is that I often end up buying things I had originally intended to ignore. So it goes with all my TransFormers: Armada (and Micron Legend) purchases, which basically happened because the first one (Laserbeak, if I remember correctly) was kinda fun. That was the only one I really intended to buy, in part because it was broadly 'to scale', making it the distant ancestor of things like the Real Gear subline of the 2007 live action movie toyline.

Some years ago, when Woolworths still existed as a real world shop and before it became impossible to see a movie in Harrow without it being interrupted by people talking all the way through, I often ended up buying old TransFormers toys that were on clearance in Woolies, and much of my small Armada collection - in particular, Optimus Prime (for about a tenner) and Unicron (for not much more) - is from there.

Some, though, I chose to buy because I ended up wanting them... After all, when one has Optimus Prime, one must surely have Megatron as well...

TransFormers: Prime Megatron

For no obvious reason, Megatron has become a very difficult character to do 'right' in the TransFormers toyline and, by extension, the fiction. The G1 character was iconic and recreating his original alternate mode, a handgun, has proven contentious for many years. In many ways, transforming into a gun is the ultimate expression of Megatron's power... though it does come with the built-in drawback of needing someone else to wield him. Since G1 he's been a tank (several times), a dragon (several times), a purple dinosaur, a spider-tank head thing, a spacecraft, a car (twice) and a helicopter. In the live action movies, he was a jet (of sorts), a tank, and finally a rusty, heavily modified truck. In the many incarnations of Classics/Generations, he's been a Nerf gun, a Cybertronian tank and, most recently, a stealth bomber.

TF Prime, in some ways a development of the live action movies, has him as some kind of Cybertronian jet/spacecraft. Personally, I've found just about every 'Cybertronian' alternate mode in the history of the toyline to be lacklustre and ill-conceived... Does TF Prime break that awful tradition?

Generations (30th Anniversary) Megatron

And so begins the 30th Anniversary of the TransFormers toyline, kicking off with a set of Deluxe Class toys based on new character designs from the IDW comics. Considering the line has been going for thirty (not quite continuous) years, one would tend to expect Hasbro to pull out all the stops and create something incredible to mark the occasion. Certainly, things like the new Metroplex fit that bill, if you're into massive hunks of plastic that pretty much require their own display space, but with the 20th Anniversary having been celebrated by the commencement of the original Japanese Masterpiece and Binaltech lines, what does the third decade of Transformers mean to Hasbro?

DotM Mechtech Megatron

There were few characters in Michael Bay's TransFormers movies more contentious than Megatron. The fans had a very strong idea of what he should be, and Bay's production team singularly failed to deliver on all counts. In the first movie, he was a spindly Cybertronian attack jet that transformed into a ridiculously large, bulky and Shrike-like robot. In the second, rebuilt using parts from his minions, he became a spiny tank which transformed into a robot no less Shrike-like, but for the addition of what's known widely as the Murder Arm. Both had toys in Leader, Voyager and Legends classes and all were pretty terrible. Considering that, in many ways, Megatron played second fiddle in all three movies, would it be reasonable to expect his third incarnation would be any better?

TransFormers (Movie) Megatron

Although there was as much artwork of Megatron's live action movie appearance as there was for the other characters, his alternate mode was shrouded in mystery. For everyone else - Autobot and Decepticon - images had leaked of the contentious robot modes and the terrestrial disguises they'd adopted. Then came the bombshell: Megatron wasn't taking an Earth-based alternate mode.

While the scant information available before the release of the movie characterised this as arrogance - why would the Decepticon leader feel the need to have a disguise? - the news left most fans cold. Sure, we couldn't expect his to transform into a gun (Michael Bay had been adamant that there would be no 'mass shifting' to ruin his 'realism') but, if he wasn't going to be a 'Robot in Disguise', what would he be?

Masterpiece MP05 Megatron

After doing the MP01 mold to death and only producing one new mold in two years, Takara Tomy had to do something particularly special with MP05 to get some credibility back into the so-called 'Masterpiece' brand. The announcement that the fifth release would be Megatron met with mixed response. The revelation that he would appear in his old Generation 1 alternate mode - a Walther P-38 handgun - hopes were both raised and dashed in equal measure

Robots in Disguise Megatron

This is going to be a bit of an unusual one... Robots in Disguise, as a toyline, was a strange mish-mash of almost excessively humanoid Autobots and Beast Wars throwback Decepticons... or were they still Predacons... that's not entirely clear, as different characters had different insignias, and both traditional Decepticons and Predacons were represented. Indeed, some of the Decepticons were basically repaints of Generation 2 molds.

Megatron (and the slightly remolded 'upgrade', Galvatron) is very definitely a Predacon - as the prominent Spark Crystal will attest - but he's also very far removed from the true Beast Wars aesthetic.

Beast Machines Megatron Megabolt

This toy was released as part of the Robots in Disguise line, but it's perfectly obvious to anyone that it doesn't fit that line. The closest it comes to RiD, supposedly, is that it fits into the HeadMaster space on Fortress/Brave Maximus but, with no actual connector piece, it seems unlikely that this was intentional.

The design is actually based upon Megatron's battleship from the final few episodes of Beast Machines, and the overall aesthetic - not to mention the rather garish colourscheme - suits that range far more closely. Scale is a bit of an issue... Considering the battleship was huge - almost a city in itself - and this thing is the equivalent of a Deluxe toy. Had it been made to fit its original scale, its robot mode would be colossal... but Megatron's battleship never actually transformed in Beast Machines, nor was there any real indication that it could. Nevertheless, robot mode's head design most closely resembles Megatron's Beast Machines appearance, particularly when the mask - attached to the missile launcher - is engaged.

War for Cybertron Megatron

Ever since the halcyon days of Generation 1, when it was perfectly acceptable for Megatron to transform into a slightly off-scale replica of a Walther P-38 handgun, he's had to make to with some bizarre alternate modes. From tanks to Tyranosaurus Rex to weird jets to sports cars... and so the revelation that, back on Cybertron, Megatron transformed into a tank is about as surprising as finding that Optimus Prime was a truck.

Which is to say not at all.