The year was 2001!  Transformers Beast Machines, the toyline, was not doing so great!  And so a bunch of tail-end product was shuffled into the next toyline as store exclusives.  A toy of Beast Wars/Machines Megatron as a robot that transformed into his Giant Head Spaceship Thing, But With Legs was eventually released at KB Toys as Robots in Disguise Megatron Megabolt.  The back-of-the-packaging bio recast the toy as not Beast Megs but as RID Megatron, the redubbed Gigatron from the Car Robots anime.  

I bought it, because, like, it was a BW/M Megatron toy I was worried we wouldn't otherwise get, and tried to personally ignore who the toy was "officially."  

I'm not good at this.  It bothered me.  I am anal retentive.  

Yeeaars later, Japan finally imported the series, sort of, but, like, on some weird nobody television station and released a bunch of Beast Machines toys in extremely limited numbers.  And so the toy that would have been Beast Megs was finally released as himself.  But he was, again, extremely limited, which made him both hard to find and expensive, and I was much poorer then.  I sucked it up and shrugged.  My Megatron Megabolt was close enough.

BUT I WAS STILL SECRETLY REALLY BOTHERED, YO.

Anyway.  I decided recently that this hole in my otherwise pretty comprehensive Beast Megatron collection was something I now needed to plug.  Easier said than done.  Once again, extremely limited production run.  Even if you have the money, you can't buy what isn't available to buy.  My pal Robowang grabbed one off eBay earlier this year while I was lax in searching there, and for a pretty good price, if I recall.  Like, it was listed under a typo or something.  Anyway, he got one.  He keeps it in his bathroom.  I think he does this to taunt me.

Finally, after checking eBay for "Beast Wars Returns Megatron" every other day for several months, another one popped up, and I grabbed it.  It's mine!

Megahead Megatron is a robot that transforms into a head with spider-legs -- y'know, like Mr. Freeze in New Batman Adventures.  If you roll the spider-legs-head thing along the ground, the wheel-gears on the underside open and close the mouth (and launch the missile out of the mouth) while the spider legs articulate up and down.  It's pretty awesome.  It's hard to not like a head with spider legs.

In robot mode, Megahead Megatron is.... very back heavy.  The whole spider-leg-geared contraption is an indivisible unit unto itself, and it's gotta go somewhere.  It goes on the back.  The robot mode's legs are a series of multiple ball joints, and you can imagine how well that goes.  If the ball joints aren't tight, he's gonna collapse like a marionette.   The balljoints on mine are thankfully stiff, but he's still a balancing act.

The head mode's missile launcher is springloaded to flip over the shoulders of the robot and land on the robot's head, giving Beast Wars Megatron's head a Beast Machines Megatron helmet and facemask.  This is also pretty neat.  There's magnets involved.  I don't think toys can afford magnets anymore these days.  Or springloaded missile launchers.  And certainly not both at the same time as the geared spider leg contraption, anyway.

The huge difference between this Megahead Megatron and the US release Megatron Megabolt is the red was swapped out for purple.  The silver plastic is also a little more purple.  And although the Japanese-release Beast Machines product mostly didn't alter the American paint operations at all, this guy has a new set of paint operations -- the teeth on the giant spiderleg head are now painted white.  It's a good addition.

Undocumented feature: Head mode fits on top of Fortress Maximus really nicely.  Fits even better if you pull the balljointed spiderlegs out.  

It's Tankor!  Well, the other Tankor.  The Windblade comic book is currently milking the fact that there's two guys named Tankor hanging around, and their peers have -- without their knowledge -- labeled them "tall Tankor" and "fat Tankor."  Well, let's hope that at some point nobody has to play a game of Dungeons and Dragons to save fat Tankor's life, huh?  

"Squat Tankor" would be a better description, I think.  This is one of those "conservation of toy mass" things that resulted in us getting really short Bulkhead and Lugnut toys back in Animated.   Tankor here was presented as a super-massive large-ass dude in Beast Machines, and so if you want to find some Beast Machines Maximals remotely to scale with this guy, maybe try the McDonald's Happy Meal figures.  

The robot mode makes me super happy!  It's an amazing Tankor robot mode, both in regards to cartoon accuracy and in fun.  He's just this wide slab of awesome.  I love his stubby back-canted tread legs and his large meaty arms.  (his forearms could stand to be more meaty, but they wouldn't fit during transformation if they were any thicker)  He's got a missile launcher (the pressure-release kind the old Cyberjets had) that operates if you pull back on the cannon barrel.  Or ditch the missile.  It's kind of dopey-looking.

Transformation is pretty easy.  You pile his arms into each other, fold his torso down, and peg his legs into his crotch.  It's not terribly accurate to his Beast Machines cartoon tank mode, but that thing transformed via magic anyway, so it's not very surprising.  The robot mode head ends up on top, and that's really the most important thing.

I very much like him!  Especially since he's showing up in Windblade's comic these days.  I think of the toy as that guy more than the Beast Machines guy.

He comes with a comic.  Its pages are insanely out of order.  Yikes.

Here's one last Beast Machines guy from this year's BotCon set.  The customization class was provided a tan and red Strika as Blastcharge to assemble and paint, and for the first time ever, BotCon sold assembled and unpainted versions of this customization class guy to anyone who wanted one.  I opted for the assembled painted one, since it cost half as much as the class, and I didn't have to get there a day earlier and pay an extra hotel night, plus that frees up a spot for one more dude who hasn't done the customization class before.   I can paint this guy on my own time, after all.  And I did!

I wasn't in the actual class, so I didn't get the stickers that were intended for the toy, but I tried to make do anyway.  I'm also still waiting for a specific color of green to arrive in the mail so I can paint the middle of the crotch, but I'm gonna be on an airplane in a day or so, so I figgered I'd take a picture and show you now anyway.  Another difference between mine and the official instructions is I put a Decepticon logo on mine instead of an Autobot one.  In my day, Vehicon Blastcharge was a former Decepticon who worked for the original Megatron, and I've been hankering for a toy of him in that hinted-at Decepticon form since then.  And I'm not feeling terribly beholden to this year's storyline about clones and whatnot, so I have managed to break free of my MUST ADHERE TO CANON neurosis and change up his faction symbol to one that makes me happier.

All that said, this is a pretty great idea for a redeco, and I'm glad that it exists and that I can have it.

So in the first two pages of BotCon 2013's comic book story, the Autobots commit a war crime.

If it were lampshaded as something terrible to do (especially since the folks directing them to do so are villains hundreds of years later) it wouldn't bother me so much, but instead it's played as if disguising yourself as a non-combatant to facilitate your sweet ambush is an amazing and awesomely clever thing to do.  Sure, Cybertron doesn't have the Geneva Convention, but the Geneva Convention has some pretty common sense stuff in it to help protect the innocent, like, say, not teaching your jerky enemies that they should fire on random civilians in case they might be you in disguise.  Heroes one and all, these Autobots.

Anyway, it's more important to the story to point out that Obsidian and Strika are hilariously obtuse when giving out orders, rather than point out, hey, maybe not commit war crimes maybe you guys.  You are supposed to be Cybertron's greatest (obsessively rule-bound) generals, right?

Which is not to say I dislike having these guys as toys.  Pre-Beast Machines bodies for Obsidian and Strika have been on my want list for a while, and these aren't terribly-realized versions of them.  Strika, in fact, is pretty damn amazing.  I like her a lot, and wouldn't have considered Warpath for her until being shown how perfect his toy is for her.  She may be the best toy of this year's entire set.  Obsidian isn't quite as on the mark, since I think RTS Lugnut would have given him the proper gangly arms and bad posture, but using Highbrow/Powerdive for him isn't awful.  He's at least got propellers on those tiny ineffectual arms of his, and his new head is impeccable.

This is what I was gonna do with that extra Beast Machines Mirage I wanted.  I ordered one off eBay shortly after getting home from Sunday's toy convention, and I realized the next day that, hey, I could proooobably paint the one I have while I wait for the new one to get here.  Plus, well, the roommate who owns the table is getting her own place tomorrow, so it might be a good idea to get him done before then.

So here he is!  Devcon!  Renowned Autobot bounty hunter, temporarily inhabiting a Vehicon body.  I'm going to say an unpopular thing and say that I liked Wreckers Devcon.  Yeah, he was a jerk, and people say he wasn't that jerky in his original cartoon appearances, but if I have to choose between watching The Gambler or reading the 3H Wreckers comic books, I'm gonna choose the latter every time.  The Gambler is a terrible episode.  Terrible.  If I had to live through that episode, like Devcon did, I'd be kind of a jerk, too.  (And I am.)

And, frankly, the common wisdom that Devcon wasn't as big a jerk in The Gambler versus Wreckers is a bit overinflated.  That episode's so uneven, and original Devcon is indeed a  jerk at moments while he's nicer in a sparingly few other moments.  Watch as much as you can stand some time, and you'll see what I mean.

I am not a good painter.  In fact, I'm a terrible painter.  But sometimes I luck out.  I think I lucked out as much as I'm able to with Devcon.  He looks pretty okay!  And he's all the right colors, as far as I can discern.  I tell you, the red was a bitch, since it goes over black plastic.  I put a coat of, ahem, silver Sharpie marker on the legs first before painting red over them.  There was kind of a weird chemical reaction in places between the two kinds of coloring, but after going over the bad parts a few times, I was able to get a good smooth, bright red on the black plastic without having to put like fifty layers over everything and burying too much detail.

The ball joints are silver Sharpie, too, though the attached limbs are the proper light gray paint color.  Silver Sharpie coats pretty thinly and fuses almost immediately to the plastic, so I figgered it'd withstand wear and tear better.  And without painting the balljoints, they're kind of obviously Mirage's yellow.  I'd hate to look at the thing.

Anyway, I'm pretty happy with the results.  And now he can go in my Wreckers display.