Yes, folks, the short hiatus for Transformers Thursday is over and I should be able to keep things going again for another month or so. Today we’re looking at a release that I have been super excited to get. Ah, Megatron! The original big bad of the Transformers Universe. He’s been reworked and redesigned a dozen times over since his G1 days, far more so than his nemesis Optimus Prime. But that’s what you get when you’re alt mode was a gun and is now taboo for the toy aisles. I think there have been some excellent versions of Megatron over the years, but all of them have left me all the more wanting for a solid Generation One version again. Even Takara’s so-called Masterpiece Megatron was a miserable disappointment. Now, after all these years, Hasbro has stepped up to give me what I want: A Megatron that is faithful to his G1 robot mode. Yes, folks, this is likely as close as we’re ever going to get to a G1 Megatron in a Hasbro package, so let’s see how they did.

And there he is in all his packaged glory. Despite not being an actual combiner (and thank Primus for that!), Megatron is still part of the Combiner Wars branding. “Transformers” runs up the right side of the front panel and a window box shows you the glorious figure inside. And man, does he look glorious. Even if I hadn’t gone down the whole toy collecting road some fifteen or so years ago, seeing this figure in the aisle at Target or Walmart would have stopped me dead in my tracks. The front of the box also features some great character art. The back of the package has pictures of the figure in both robot and alt modes and a little bio blurb that follows the IDW narrative. Megatron has been many things over the decades, but I don’t think there’s any mode that suits him more than the mode he first adopted as part of Generation 2: A battle tank! Yes, I think this form suits him even more than his original gun persona. It’s something that’s been difficult for me to reconcile since his animated G1 design is still my favorite of all of Megatron’s many robot forms, but making that work as a tank seemed rather unlikely. At least until now. I honestly cannot wait to get this guy out of the box, so give me a few moments with a box cutter and then we’re going to take a look at his alt mode.

As far as tank modes go, this one is a thing of beauty! It’s a fairly realistic style modern day tank made only conspicuous by its unusual color. The bulk of the tank’s skin is a brilliant silver, which may be unrealistic, but makes up for it by being absolutely gorgeous and also serving the dual purpose of giving us a G1 colored Megatron in robot mode. I can’t believe how great the paint looks on this toy! Toss in some black for the guns and treads and a little exposed red here and there and this vehicle gives off a very familiar and pleasing deco even before he gets into robot mode. The bright purple Decepticon logo on the front is the perfect final touch!

The sculpted detail goes above and beyond what we’ve been seeing in Hasbro Transformers lately. From the panel lines to all the tiny plates of armor, compartments, and vents. There’s barely any part of the tank’s surface that isn’t adorned with some kind of little creative touch. And what’s that? Real rubber treads! Be still my heart! That was one of my favorite things about the Revenge of the Fallen Bludgeon figure and it’s nice to see Hasbro doing it again. The turret can rotate and the main cannon fires off a red missile. There are also two smaller guns that can peg in to the top of the turret separately, or they can be combined to form a bigger weapon. Oh yeah, he also sports some Mini-Con ports, which are no doubt tied to the other version of this toy, but are none the less welcome here as well. I love Mini-Con ports!!!

Transforming Megatron into his robot mode goes fairly quickly. The box claims it takes 15 steps, and while I didn’t count that sounds about right. Everything is quite intuitive and while some might argue the process is a little simple for a Leader Class toy, it’s hard for me to argue when the resulting robot looks like this…

Hot Freaking Damn! Is this G1 Megatron? Not quite, but it’s ooooh, so close and the way Hasbro managed to make this robot mode look this close to G1 from a tank alt mode impresses me to no end. And yes, I realize this figure is based on the IDW design, but it’s clear what that design was based on. I’d say that the head and the chest are the figure’s two best features in terms of Sunbow G1 goodness.  In fact, I think that both are pretty much perfect. The portrait has all the personality that I’ve come to know and love from the Megsy of my youth. I can practically hear Frank Welker’s voice coming out of his mouth. There’s some excellent light piping in his eyes, although I found it tough to trigger because of the backpack. As for the chest, the only thing it’s really missing is the scrollwork designs from his gun mode. Fantastic!

The proportions on the figure are also excellent. Yes, I think the lower legs could have been a little bulkier, especially since Megatron is packing some serious guns, and I’m not talking about his guns. His arms are substantial and I like the way they’re designed to pull away from the torso at the shoulders to give him a better range of motion. The red on the inside of his arms is also a great nod back to the G1 Megatron toy. I also really dig how despite the treads on his lower legs, they still manage to maintain the overall shape of the pistol grip legs of the original Megatron toy. About the only other thing that makes this design stand out as not my traiditonal Megatron is the tank tread backpack, and even that is very neatly packed away. The fusion cannon is mounted on a hinge so that it can be positioned on the front of his arm for firing, or angled to the side to allow him full arm articulation.

My two biggest gripes with Combiner Wars Megatron don’t really involve the figure as it is, but rather what it could have been. I really wanted the fusion cannon on his arm to match the G1 design more closely. All it’s really missing is a more flared out front end, rather than the narrower tank cannon muzzle. Secondly, he’s so close to being in scale with Masterpiece Optimus Prime (MP-10) that it’s almost a crime that he doesn’t quite make it. If you really want to make it work, you probably can, but I can’t have my G1 Mesgy be even a smidge shorter than Optimus. It just doesn’t work. Again, both issues are personal gripes and happily, both issues should be fixed when I get my Upgrade Kit from DX-9. At least for the time being, he does scale quite well with Masterpiece Soundwave and Laserbeak!

I have nothing but accolades for Hasbro and the fantastic job they did on this figure. Megatron set me back just a bit under fifty bucks and he was worth every damn penny. Hell, even with the additional forty bucks I’m going to pay for the Third-Party Upgrade Kit, I still feel he’s totally worth the money. Then again I have become used to paying a lot of money for 3P Change-A-Bots, so that may have colored my sense of value. And speaking of 3P Transformers, I’d stack this toy up against most of the ones I’ve been getting from those other companies. This figure really feels like Hasbro has been paying attention and learning from their unofficial competition and I dare say this is one of my favorite releases of their’s in a very long time. In fact, here we are only in April and I feel as if this figure will be a strong contender for one of my favorites of the year. Am I picking up the Armada variant? Probably not. It actually looks like a great figure, but I think this version of the mold does it for me. Besides, I still have and love my Armada Megatron and I’m not looking to replace him. As for this guy… DX-9’s Kit is supposed to arrive sometime next month, so we’ll be revisiting Megsy here when I get it in.

It’s that day of the week again where I tear open another one of these Hasbro Change-A-Bots and see what he’s all about. Last week I started down the dark path of Stunticons by checking out Motormaster and I came away almost instantly (and surprisingly) impressed. Will that be the case with the first one of the Stunticon Deluxes? Well, here’s a spoiler: No. No, it won’t. The truth is, it took a couple of days of playing around with Dragstrip to really start warming up to him. But I’m getting ahead of myself and protocols must be maintained. So, allow me to do the thing where I write about the figure for an average length of two Word Document pages and then snap some photos. Kay?

I don’t know, but I think the Combiner Wars packaging is growing on me. It still doesn’t really speak to me as a Transformers branded package, but this one does feature some pretty bitchin’ character art. I mean, holy shit, Dragstrip looks like he should be on the cover of a Meat Loaf album riding a guitar into the bowels of hell and laughing the whole time. The bubble also gives you a really great look at the figure you’re getting, which in this case might not be a good thing because looking at this bot in the package did absolutely nothing for me. I ordered this guy online, so that’s my excuse. Dragstrip comes with a weapon, some combiner parts, a character art card and some balled up instructions. Let’s start with his alt mode.

As any GeeWun fan worth his salt should have guessed, Dragstrip is a Formula-1 racer with a yellow and mauve deco. The homage is a decent one and the biggest thing that separates him from his 80’s namesake is one less pair of wheels, but I’m OK with that. The thing that strikes me first about this car mode is just how damn big it is. It seems like Deluxes have been shrinking for so long and now all of the sudden… BAM, we get a growth spurt like this! The car mode here is more in scale with the Masterpiece cars than recent Deluxes. In fact, Dragstrip is almost as long as the Classics Seeker mold in jet form. Nice!

Along with being big, Dragstrip’s alt mode hits all the right points. It’s a good looking car, albeit not exactly packed with detail. There’s some nice silver paint on the wheels as well as the front wheel connecting bars, and again near the back wheels. The driver’s compartment is painted black and you get a crisp Decepticon insignia stamped right in front of that compartment. The car locks together perfectly and rolls really well. It’s a perfectly fine alt mode, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it, and yet I still feel a little underwhelmed. I can’t really explain it.

Transformation is about as simple as you can expect for a Deluxe Class figure. Pull the arms out from the sides and flip the fists out, pull the legs down from the back of the car and split them, rotate the legs at the waist and twist the top of the car and fold it back. It takes no time at all. Some may criticize a toy of this size and price having such a simple Transformation, but I would have loved playing with this as a kid for the quick and easy conversion, so I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing.

I am so conflicted about this robot mode. On the plus side, Dragstrip is a big and satisfyingly chunky figure for a Deluxe. The proportions are decent, he stands well, and he’s pretty solid and poseable. Also, with the wheels on his shoulders and legs and the front of the car neatly pegged to his back, the car kibble is all well placed. On the other hand, he ain’t the prettiest thing to look at and I’m mostly blaming the torso for this because it looks so unfinished. Dragstrip has four exposed screws in the most visible area of the figure and that connection port making up his chest just isn’t doing it for me. Some more paint apps might have helped, because he just looks unfinished to me.

The portrait is another sticking point. I’m not sure what they were going for with this head sculpt, but it doesn’t strike me as a head that belongs in the Generations line. It’s not really bad, but maybe a little too stylized. I was hoping for something more akin to the Sunbow look, and maybe that’s my fault for coming in with the wrong expectations.

Nonetheless, the more I play with Dragstrip, the more I find myself liking him. As I said earlier, he’s a solid figure and lots of fun to play with. You get ball joints in the shoulders and hips, hinges in the elbows and knees, a ball jointed neck and a swivel just below the waist. What’s more all the joints are nice and tight and nothing pops out of this guy when I’m transforming him.

Dragstrip comes with a purple weapon that can be used as either a sword or a rifle with a bayonet. It’s a cool design and I like having the options with it. His combiner part, on the other hand, isn’t of much use when it isn’t being a combiner part. I’ve seen people stick it on the figure, but I find it’s best left in a tote until called upon for combined mode. Speaking of which, I’m not bothering to look at Dragstrip’s limb modes until I’ve got a full team and I can do a proper Feature on Menasor.

I rarely find myself this torn on a Transformer, or really any figure, but Dragstrip is one of those rare instances. I can’t point to anything about him as being particularly bad, and yet the figure as a whole doesn’t seem to come together for me as much as it should. In the end, it would be safe to say I like Dragstrip, I just don’t love him. But considering I had really low expectations of this figure when I opened him, he deserves some credit for bringing me around at least part of the way.

And now for a little administrative crap. I’m in the process of transferring all my stuff to a new PC, which is partly why today’s Feature went up so late. I was going to wait until the weekend, but I’d rather spend it enjoying the new computer rather than beating my head against it. So, there will be no new Feature on Friday, I’ll take the usual weekend off and I’ll be ready to get back in action on Monday.

So far, I’ve only dipped my toe into the Combiner Wars line by picking up the Legends figures. I passed on the Hasbro Aerialbots in favor of the Takara versions, which should be coming my way later on in the Summer. The Stunticons, on the other hand… well, given my affinity for Decepticon cars, I just couldn’t resist these guys and even then it was after a lot of waffling because I wasn’t entirely pleased with what I was seeing in the official Hasbro photographs. Anyway, I decided to dive right in with Motormaster himself, so let’s check him out…

Hasbro really loves their black packaging! Motormaster comes in a mostly black window box which feels very un-Transformers-y to me despite the fact that it’s branded right along the right side of the front of the box. The artwork is kind of cool, though, and can’t say I’m totally hating on the deco. It does, however, have an awful lot of Autobot symbols on it for a Decepticon. Just saying! The back shows the other Stunticon figures and roughly how they combine together to form Menasor. Motormaster is packaged in his robot mode, but as you might have guessed already, I’m starting things off with his alt mode.

Motormaster is a very modern looking truck cab and not a bad one at that. I am getting flashbacks to Age of Extinction Galvatron, but then I rather liked his alt mode too. It’s not a particularly attractive vehicle, as there’s a lot of seaming on the sides and the sculpted detail is kind of soft, but I don’t need my Motormaster’s alt mode to be pretty, just so long as he’s a giant evil truck and this fits the bill. Everything locks together quite well, he rolls beautifully, and you can store his gun on his trailer hitch.

In cab mode, the paint (or lack there of) on this figure is disappointing, albeit Motormaster is helped by the fact that the gray base plastic matches his primary color. It doesn’t look nearly as bad as if, oh I don’t know, let’s say someone were to use this mold for Optimus Prime and leave unpainted gray plastic corners where red should be. That having been said, I’m still not a fan of the bare gray plastic, especially when I get a look at the little area of metallic gray paint on the back of the sides and get a sad glimmer of how good this truck could have looked. Also, the lack of purple paint on some of the windows really is inexcusable. On the flip side, there’s some nice silver paint on the grill along with a lovingly tampo a tiny Decepticon logo as a hood ornament. Also, the purple stripes on the sides help to give him a gloriously traditional Decepticon deco. All in all, I’d say the good outweighs the bad here, but I’m still going to take a hard look at Takara’s version to see if it will warrant some double-dipping.

Motormaster’s transformation isn’t ground-breaking. The legs form the back hitch area, the arms fold into the cab sides, the head flips out of the top. We’ve seen something like it countless times before with good old Optimus, albeit now with some tweaks. Let’s just say it’s a case of the same dance, different tune and it works just fine.

It’s in robot mode where I really begin to fall in love with this figure, possibly even more than he deserves. He’s a big and beefy bot and the oddly enough the proportions here don’t bother me, whereas they most definitely do on the Optimus version of the mold. With the exception of some extra packed kibble on his forearms, Motormaster sports a pretty clean robot mode and while he’s definitely a broad design, the backpack helps to give him a little depth and even things out. There’s a lot more sculpted detail to be seen in the robot mode than the cab mode, and I do like how they kept the overall shape of the torso in line with the look of the Sunbow character model.

The portrait is pretty much money. In my mind, you can’t have Motormaster without having that box around his head. The countours on the face might be a little too organic for my liking, but I’m not going to quibble about it when the reast of his noggin looks so good.

Motormaster’s coloring works much better for me in robot mode. The bare gray plastic is enhanced by some high gloss black and purple on the chest as well as a crisp Decepticon insignia. You get some more purple accents scattered about the figure and more black plastic, giving him a nice, traditional Decepticon look.

The articulation here is quite serviceable. The arms rotate and are hinged at the shoulders. The elbows are double hinged for transformation, but because of the sculpt, you can really only make use of one of those hinges for forward movement of the forearm. He legs are have universal movement at the hips and hinges at the knees. Motormaster can swivel at the waist and his neck is ball jointed. The hips feature nice ratchet joints to support the figure.

Motormaster comes with two weapons, a sword and a gun, both are complex sculpts and painted silver. They can also combine to form a larger sword, which is intended for Bruticus, but Motormaster actually looks fine wielding it himself.

I picked up Motormaster for $25, which I guess is about what Voyagers are going for these days. He’s a remarkably, and somewhat surprisingly, solid figure that’s only held back by Hasbro’s unending desire to cheap out when it comes to paint. I’ve always loved the idea of Motormaster as a character and it’s nice to see Hasbro finally give him his due again, especially when the figure turned out this good. You’ll notice I didn’t cover his torso mode, but I’m not going to bother with that until I’ve got a team of Stunticons to do it right. Not sure how long that will take, but I do know that next week on Transformers Thursday, I’ll be checking out Dragstrip!