Ha ha ha ha, let's start off my Dark of the Moon reviews with stuff recycled from the first and second movies.  That's kinda anti-appropriate, no?

This Walmart-exclusive pair is something we found out about only a few days ago, which is an amazing feat in today's world of action figure theft espionage.  How often does that happen, really, where a toy isn't known about until it shows up in stores?  Just about never?  Yeah.  And what a crazy pair of toys.  ...which is why I craved them, of course.  Let me enumerate the many ways in which they are crazy.

Of course, Dark of the Moon is going to be involving all sorts of  moony and spacey stuff.  Well, what about an Optimus Prime toy with the reflections of stars and the moon on the surface of his body?  "Twilight sparkles," to coin a phrase, trail up and down the sides of the truck mode, and more appear scattered across his windshield, with a very clear moon decoed in the corner of one of his windows.  He's spaaaaaaaaaaaaaace Prrrriiiiiiiiiiime!  (in space!)  The sparkling and the moon imagery kind of make him an unintended, unwanted callout to the Twilight series.  Look, he doesn't want to cut off your face!  He wants to take care of you and not eat you and absolutely not have sex with you!  Look how he shines.

How could I not own that?

What made it more appealing is that this deco treatment is on a version of Optimus Prime that I didn't have.  This is the Voyager Class Optimus from last year's post-Revenge of the Fallen toyline, with the flip-out blades and the chest-stored Matrix of Leadership.  I passed it up then because, well, I didn't need a Prime at that scale.  But this year, I kinda think I do.  Shockwave and Megatron this year are mere Voyager Class, and word from Hasbro at this year's Toy Fair was that they weren't considering doing them in a bigger size.  No Decepticons planned in Leader Class scale.  Fooey on that, man!  So I might as well get a Voyager Prime so my Voyager Megatron and Shockwave have somebody to interact with.  I choose Twilight Prime to fill this slot with no regrets.

Other than the star reflections, Twilight Prime has other differences from last year's use of the mold.  The toy came out in Japan with hooks instead of swords, and it's that version of the toy that's being used here.  (He also has a face instead of the mouthplate.  TFwiki doesn't mention it in the writeup for the Japanese release of the toy, so I'm uncertain whether this head is new or if it's just a dumb omission on the wiki's part.)  I've never owned a movie Prime toy with the hooks or the face, so those are other things that attracted me to it.

The toy itself is unsurprisingly complex.  Have you ever tried to transform the Leader Class ROTF Optimus Prime?  Well, Voyager Prime is designed to be the same toy, but smaller.  The robot mode explodes into a pile of parts and reassembles itself into a truck.  With the necessary aid of the instructions, I assure you.  You can't touch it with your thumb without feeling a joint or moving part.

Twilight Optimus Prime comes with a "bonus value" deluxe toy, Comettor.  Comettor is a redeco of the first movie's Landmine, which was one of the Sector Seven vehicles from the film re-envisioned as a Transformer.  It's a real Earth vehicle, albeit modified.  And guess what?  Now it's a moon buggy!  Or so the packaging claims, anyway.  Ha ha ha ha.  That also amuses me.  Comettor is an Autobot who transforms into a moon buggy that Optimus Prime counts on for assistance when he has to go to the Moon to fight Decepticons.  And so the old Movie 1 Landmine toy is redone up in moonish almost-white with some gold.  Even the wheels are painted over in white.  Because, y'know, moon buggy.

Whatever the intention, the toy is, at the very least, pretty.  White and gold with some black'll do that.  And since he's the old Landmine toy, he still transforms relatively easy and cleanly.  All four wheels have springs in their suspensions, so if you want you could bounce him around like he's in low-grav.

But let's get down to the real clincher.  This Voyager plus "bonus value" Deluxe toy is $17.77 for the pair.  That's a whole dollar less than a DOTM Voyager by itself costs at Walmart!  Comettor costs negative one dollars!  So, yeah, I bought the Hell out of it.  Looking for this set was the reason why Graham and I went out searching again late last night to Walmarts we'd already been to, in the hopes that they'd started putting their DOTM stock out.  Two Walmarts failed us, but the final one was good to us.  We found a dozen of him on an endcap.

I love this goofy lunar Prime.  And I know that he loves me, too.  I can tell by the way that he won't kill me.