It’s Transformers Thursday, and I promise to get back to some older Transformers next week. This week, I’m allowing my look at Metroplex to take over, because the feature has gotten out of hand and I can’t stop playing with him. Today, we’re wrapping things up with a look at his Carrier Mode, which should go very quickly and allow me to scamper off to The Pub for boozes and merriment. Ha! I said scamper!!

So, the Carrier Mode is really simple and is essentially an aircraft carrier that rolls along on the ground. Yes, it’s basically Metroplex with his legs out in front of him to form dual runways and his arms swept back. And yet, as simple as this mode is, I still absolutely love it. The runways show off a lot of stickers, which makes it look outstanding, so long as you applied them carefully, and there’s a cargo crane that can be folded out from the deck. I have yet to find a practical use for it, but it’s still a cool little extra.

The command center in the rear still features the ramp that comes down from his chest bay and a fold out gunnery station on the left shoulder. Also on the left shoulder is a helipad, which is smaller and separate from the one used in his City Mode. You can also still have access to his fold out right arm cannon if Metro needs to shoot behind him. Let’s load him up with some Minicons and get him ready for action!

Yup, I’ve got plenty of Minicon jets, which look great all lined up on the runways and ready to launch. If I had the space, I would definitely display Metro in this mode a lot of the time, just so I could showcase my Minicon air force. And if I owned this toy as a kid, I’d probably spend a ridiculous amount of time playing with Metro in this mode. It’s just so much fun! And that’s all I’ve got on the Carrier Mode. I told you this would be quick!

Thanks for your patience as I stretched this feature into three parts. It’s the first time I spent three days looking at a single figure, but I was really excited to finally have this guy and I honestly think he warranted the extra attention. In Part 1, I compared the box a lot to 80’s toys and as I come away from this look at Metroplex, I find myself with the same kind of delight and awe that I had for some of the bigger 80’s releases. Plexy joins other recent releases like the Millennium Falcon and the GI JOE Pit as love letters to those days of yore where you could walk into a toy store and find stuff like this all over the place.

Metroplex retails right around $100, which I think is a pretty solid value for what you’re getting. I haven’t actually seen him at any retail stores yet, but he is coming in and out of stock at a lot of online retailers as we speak. This release comes to us against all odds, as Transformers fans have been lamenting for ages that we’d never get another Fort Max sized Transformer in the US. It just goes to show you that anything is possible. Sure, I would have liked to see some of the chrome work on the SDCC version applied to the general retail release. At the very least, the face should have been painted silver, but really I’m nitpicking little things about what is a really amazing toy and one that I’m absolutely thrilled to have in my collection. Where’s he going to live? I have absolutely no idea! But he’ll find a place to hang out, even if I have to sit him on my sofa.

Couldn’t resist one more size comparison shot… Omega don’t seem so Supreme anymore.

And I’m back for the second part of my look at Hasbro’s amazing Metroplex figure. Much like the original G1 toy, Hasbro’s update comes with Scamper, a little Autobot car who can roll around Metro’s streets. Before we get back to GIANT robot craziness, let’s catch our collective breath and check out this little fella. We’ll start with his alt mode…

In keeping with tradition, Scamper is a little black car with a red gun on top. With the extended side pieces and six wheels, he looks to me like a sportscar that’s been retrofitted for battle. His deco consists of black and grey plastic with some sparkly blue paint for the windshield and a little silver for his back. There isn’t a lot more to say about his alt mode apart from the fact that he rolls along great and the top gun is removable. All in all, he’s about the size of a Legion Commander Class, which is to say smaller than a Scout. For some reason I expected him to be a little bigger, but it’s good that Hasbro included a figure that is sized relative to Metroplex.

Transforming Scamper is as easy as you might expect. You just fold out his legs from the back of the vehicle, fold down the hood to become his chest, and pull the arms out from the sides. In robot mode he’s a pretty cool little guy. His proportions are a tad wonky, as he has a Popeye-slash-monkey arm thing going on, but overall I like him. You can store his gun on his back and he can also hold it in either hand. Ball joints and hinges give him a great degree of poseability for such a little guy. By all accounts, Scamper is a cool little pack in figure, but let’s be honest, he’s not the reason we’re here… so give me a moment to set up the big background and we’ll check out Metro’s City Mode.

Aw… Yeah! Continuing the theme that this Plexy shares most of the design and engineering of the original G1 toy, the City Modes are extremely similar in concept. The biggest difference, is also the one that I thought would bug me the most, and that’s the fact that the ramp from the bay in his chest does not reach down to the ground like it did on the G1 toy. Instead, 2013 Metro’s ramp only extends down to one of the leg pylons. This means that instead of a nice symmetrical city with the two leg pylons out at angles, one has to go straight out and the other off to the side. I don’t know why this bothers me so much, but it probably has to do with my borderline OCD and demand for symmetry in design. I also used to like rolling cars out of the bay and have them shoot down the ramp and across the floor. Yes, it still irks me when I look at the City Mode, but I’m trying to warm up to it. In fairness it’s a petty annoyance, so let’s leave it be, and move on to some of the other features of Metroplex as a City. Dang… if only I had bags and bags of tiny little Transformers to play with on Metroplex… wait a minute… TO THE MINICONS!!!!

Hell yeah, I’ve got tons of Minicons, and they are hands down one of the best ways to populate Metroplex, because they’re closer to proper scale. Spychangers will also do in a pinch, but if you’ve got a large collection of old Micromasters, well now you’re really talking.

The top of the city features a gun pylon made out of his right arm. There’s a compartment to hold Scamper or a couple of Minicons. The shoulder gun makes up a tower rising up from the back, although you can also just angle it forward and make it an extra cannon for city defense. The left shoulder converts into a helipad along with a couple of other platforms where you can station some more small Transformers.

The two leg pylons are pretty much the same, with the exception of the bay ramp coming down to the right pylon. These open up to reveal little command and control stations with stickers to show off the control panels. The rest of the legs feature streets leading out of the city. Again, these are perfectly sized for Minicon cars.

I was not expecting a whole lot from Metroplex’s City Mode, but in the end I’m pleasantly surprised. Once I got him set up and loaded with figures, it’s easy to forget that he’s mainly just a robot sitting down with some parts folded out. I hate to pad this feature out further, but I still need to take some shots of Plexy in his Battlestation mode, so give one more day to play with him in City Mode and I’ll be back tomorrow to wrap this beast up!

It seems like only yesterday that Hasbro wowed TransFans the world over with their reveal of the new big boy of the Transformers world. He’s Metroplex and he’s the current record holder as the biggest Transformer ever. Fort Max? LOL… f’ck you!! The moment this guy was revealed, I knew I’d be buying him whatever the cost and he finally landed on my doorstep just last week. I don’t think he needs any further introduction, so let’s dive right in.

As one might expect, Metroplex comes in a giant box. It’s a GIANT box! This is exactly the size and type of box I would see as a wee lad in the aisles of Toys R Us circa 1985. It was exactly the kind of box that would make me realize that I had a lot of shit to make up for if I was going to be good enough to get something this big and cool for Christmas at the end of the year. It is a glorious box. I love how it says “Actual Size” on it, as if to confirm that your eyes are not playing tricks on you… the box really is this big! I don’t think I’ve been this impressed by a toy package’s size and heft since I first held Hasbro’s revised Millennium Falcon or AT-AT Walker. Folks,  I’m looking at this box of giant robot goodness standing on the floor beside me, and I do believe I’m getting aroused.

This is no namby-pamby window box. There’s no cozy flap to open up so you can have a window and look at the toy and maybe push a button through a “Try Me” hole. Windows are for pussies! You can look at your toy when you pony up the money, take it home, and open it, otherwise… f’ck off! You want to see the show? Buy a ticket! And a “Try Me” hole will do you no good because you don’t even get any batteries with it. In the 80’s you didn’t get batteries in your toys either. If you got home and there were no batteries lying around the house you were shit out of luck. Oh crap, I really don’t have any batteries… Gimmie those batteries, Xbox controller!

Open up the box and you get a big cardboard tray full of plastic. I kind of wish Hasbro would have used a brick of styrofoam, just for old time sake. There’s also a slab of cardboard holding the large instruction booklet and the equally large set of stickers. STICKERS!!! Metroplex comes mostly assembled and there ain’t a whole lot of spare room in that box. You need to pop on his right arm and his shoulder cannons. Unfortunately, the arm isn’t meant to come off again and with it on he can’t easily go back in the box. I really wish Hasbro had made the box that quarter of an inch wider that it needs to be to hold the assembled figure. I desperately want to keep the box, but if Metro isn’t going back into it, I probably will end up ditching it. Y’all know that I normally, I start out with alt modes, but since Metroplex has two I’m going to take a look at his robot mode first. But before I do that, I need to go off and put some stickers on.

…and an hour or so later I’m finally done. Holy crap, that’s a lot of stickers, although, you can’t tell from his robot mode because the bulk of these are only seen in his alt modes. None of them are terribly tiny, but manipulating this beast to get them in all the right spots while his legs are flopping all over the place got a bit tiresome after a while.

So, besides the obvious (he’s HUGE!) I am really impressed with this guy right out of the gate. Like a lot of people, I was a little concerned about how skinny he was in the middle, but it didn’t turn out to be a big issue for me. He’s a robot. Granted, he’s a humanoid robot, but there’s no reason for him to be bulked out in the middle if he doesn’t need to be. If I were to pick the one thing that I dig most about Metroplex’s robot mode it would be how much Hasbro stuck with the overall original G1 design, and that’s going to be a running theme through this feature. They didn’t reinvent the guy, they just took the original design, spiffed it up a lot and made it bigger and better proportioned. You can run down the checklist of common design elements, from his kneecaps to the boxy twin bays that make up his chest, to the shoulder guns, and the antenna-guns that adorn each side of his head. I wouldn’t even call this guy an homage, he’s more of an update, and an extremely successful one at that.

The deco is mostly white plastic, with some back, grey and red accents. While the toy is loaded with sculpted detail, most of the color comes from the billion stickers that you have to apply and hardly any paint apps. Here’s where I come out and concede that the chrome present on the SDCC version really does a nice job of breaking up the white plastic, so if you were lucky enough to pick up one of those… well, done! I think the only thing that feels off to me about the retail version is the white face, which should have been silver like the exclusive. I don’t even need it to be chromed, just painted silver. Is it a big deal? Not really, but I’m really looking for things to gripe about here.

So, the next thing I dig the most about Mr. Metroplex here is just how much fun he is to play with in robot mode. Metroplex is huge, but he’s no brick. You get a lot of useful articulation with him and some fairly strong joints to back him up. One tends to expect something this big to stand there and look pretty, but I have had just as much fun posing this guy as I have any Deluxe or Voyager. Now, I say “fairly strong joints,” because his hip articulation will give out from time to time. If you give him too wide a stance or don’t balance him right, he will crumble, but it’s the exception rather than the rule. Standing straight up, he’s as solid as they come and while I feel obligated to suggest some stronger ratcheting joints in the hips may have been in order, what we got is still perfectly serviceable and I can get him into plenty of cool poses.

Metroplex has a few nice play features to keep things interesting. First off, he has a huge gun that can mount on his shoulder or be held in his hand. If you got the SDCC version, you got two of them! The gun fits really well in either position and it fires a missile… right into your eyeball if you’re not careful! Seriously, I’m thankful I wear glasses. The head features a drop down red visor as well as moveable eyes. What? Yeah, I was pretty surprised too! There’s a lever on the back of his head that will move his eyes from side to side. You can, however, only see the effect when the electronics are active.

Yes, what giant toy would be complete without electronic gimmickry? Push the top of Metroplex’s chest down and his chest and eyes light up and the SFX will sound off. The sound clips alternate between sound effects and speech. Here’s what the big guy has to say…

“Metroplex heeds the call of the last Prime.”

“Foolish Decepticons!”

“Decepticon deactivation commencing!”

“Target synchronizing initiated!”

“Target obliterated!”

“These Decepticons scatter like cowards.”

“Til all are one!”

So how about that articulation? His arms feature shoulders that rotate and have lateral movement, hinges and swivels in the elbows, swivels in the wrists, and individually articulated fingers. His legs have hips that rotate and feature lateral movement and hinged knees with swivels. Metroplex can also swivel at the waist and rotate his head. There’s enough articulation here to make him fun to play with, but not enough to make him fragile or terribly unstable. It’s a thing of beauty!

Ok, I feel like I’ve gone really long here, so I’m going to break and come back tomorrow when we will look at Metroplex’s chum, Scamper, and then check out the big guy’s City Mode! Oh yeah, and if you’re wondering how he stacks up to Mattel’s giant Voltron…

Yup, right about the same height.