I got a Fortress Maximus when I was a kid, for Christmas from my grandparents.  He was super huge.  He's still super huge, at just under 2 feet tall.  Until Metroplex came out this year, he was the tallest Transformer toy of all time.  

And during the past 25 years, I may have left him in a window.

It's not super apparent when he's been in dark, yellow basement for a long while, but get him out in the light and oh my lord, this poor thing.  And the plastic worries me.  If you try to turn certain parts, he creaks and you feel stuff want to buckle a bit.  And lord knows how many spiders are inside him.  I've cleaned him many times, but... only as well as a human is able to.  

He's also had a diaper on him since 1997.  I got a diaper as a gag gift at my eighteenth birthday party, and so I put it on Fort Max.  Why not?  And it kind of stayed on there, and I started taking him with me to my first BotCons so my friends could sign the diaper.  And eventually it became a Thing and the diaper never came off, because diapers aren't really re-applyable. This means he hasn't been transformed in sixteen years.  

(One of the of the signatures on the back belongs to Burt "Skyflight" Ward, who is no longer with us.)  

I'd passed on the Fort Max reissue when it was first announced and released, because I had a Fort Max.  I was pretty proud to have a childhood Fort Max.  He was my little pal.  Because of the diaper, he's one of the few toys I have from my childhood which I have attached sentimental value to.  But I think he's going to die soon.  And even if it isn't soon, he looks like a yellow-green mess.  He's heartbreaking to behold.

And so when Big Bad Toy Store knocked $120 off his price for a week a short while back, I decided to get an eventual replacement.  Surprisingly, Maggie thought it was a good idea, but I suppose she has less sentimental value invested in my original Fort Max and the "replace the old toy before it breaks while the reissue is cheap" probably sounded logical.  

I'm going to keep my old Fort Max, with diaper applied, until he crumbles.  When that happens, he has someone 25 years younger to take his place.  In the meantime, hey, it's a Fort Max toy I can transform.  I haven't seen his city mode in sixteen years.