So, like, live-action movie Optimus Prime is now this deranged, pissy murder machine, but there was, like, a movie and a half where he was pretty okay!  There originally was some kind of majesty to him, honestly.  I don't think I'm ever going to cotton to the new kibble-less design for Movie Prime that's been in the past two movies partly because I associate that body with the murdery end of the characterization spectrum, but there remain some legitimately good feelings with the first look.

AAAAAND so I got myself a Masterpiece Movie Optimus Prime.  Just keep repeating to yourself that this is "Fate rarely calls us at a moment of our choosing" Prime and not "I'LL KILL YOU!!!!" Prime.  This is Movie Prime before he turned to cocaine to cope with his moviestardom.  

At first glance, you might wonder, okay, like, is this just a redeco of Revenge of the Fallen Leader Class Optimus Prime?  It's true, they're a little similar.  They're essentially the same size, and they transform very similarly.  Masterpiece Movie Prime is a completely new toy, though, and everything different about him is better.

If you've owned or handled an ROTF Leader Prime, you might recall that the transformation was incredibly involved, a little frustrating at points, but nevertheless somehow resulted in a surprisingly accurate action figure in both modes.  Masterpiece Movie Prime still has an incredibly involved (and, as noted above, very similar) transformation.  It's actually probably a little bit more involved!  The good news is, nothing frustrated me.  The transformation is more complex, but no parts get in the way of other parts, and I never wanted to throw it against the wall or give up in frustration.  So that's enjoyable!  

The toy is also more accurate in both modes.  The forearms are less-obviously hood chunks, everything's sculpted a little closer to on-model, and the kibble on the back tidies up much better and takes up a smaller volume.

There's also a buttload more paint.  (Takara's released a few ROTF Leader Primes with an obsessively-accurate paintjob, but this is the first for Hasbro, I believe.)  The flames are properly outlined in silver.  The insides of the legs are painted properly.  The biceps are wrapped in color instead of being left bare.  Silver areas are painted silver where it can be, rather than being left in silver plastic.

The headlights are translucent plastic, rather than being painted on.  Parts of the toy are in die-cast metal, which not only helps him easily stand (the feet are largely metal), but since the die-cast is left unpainted, it gives his metal parts an appealing, weary texture.

You can swap the faces on his head from mouthplated to bare mouthed.  There's a small Matrix inside his stomach.  He comes with two swords and his gun, which you can either give him to wield or combine and store on his back in either mode.  He has some finger articulation, and everything satisfyingly ratchets when you move him around.  

Also, there's an MP Movie Bumblebee, and the two seem to be in scale with each other.  That's allegedly the Masterpiece line's thing, robot mode scale, and that's an appealing draw to me.  I'm on board for accurate scale alone, pretty much.

He's pretty great.  I mean, he may eventually some day take your face, but the face-ripping hooks aren't included, soooooo.  

As was my singleminded plan from the start, I customized my Masterpiece Megatron to appear more like his color scheme in the original Marvel comics.  I mean, that's why I bought this guy, really, so my customized Masterpiece Marvel Ratchet would have a sparring buddy.

First I cracked open his faces to paint his eyes yellow.  ... Well, gold.  I was leaving most of Megatron's colors unaltered, and he's a very rich and sparkly gray, so I figured gold would mesh with that better than primary yellow.  Thankfully, on each of Megatron's swappable faces, Megatron's eyes are on a separate piece from the rest of his face.  This piece is a real doozy to remove.  It pulls out like a slotted battery cover, if that battery cover were also pegged in and not meant to ever be removed.  And so I had to violently crowbar it out with the smallest flathead screwdriver I had.  The back of these faces is a hacked-up mess.  A mess you'll never see since it's behind the face and inside the head when assembled, but a mess nonetheless.  And the gold paint would often scrape off the eyes as I squeezed the eye-piece back in, and so sometimes I'd have to crowbar it back out again and repaint and retry.  

Compared to that, the rest of my customizations were a breeze.  I got a big flat brush and painted Megatron's helmet gunmetal.  The gunmetal acrylic I used is a little shinier than the dark gray on the rest of the toy, but I'd never be able to match that in a million years -- it's speckly and textured paint.  It's close enough at a glance, however.  This process was relatively easy because you could remove the face to paint most of the helmet, which considerably lowers your chances of accidentally getting paint on the face.  You still have to paint each face's forehead, but that's way less surface area to need to be exceedingly careful with.

And finally, I painted his outward ab sections red.  Just red. There doesn't seem to be any gloss (non-transparent) acrylic reds from brands I recognize, so I just got a regular red off Amazon.  I have a flat red, but I wanted it as shiny as possible.  While painting, I transformed Megatron's many torso shards out of the way so I could have as unobscured a view of the parts I wanted to paint as possible.  

The comics also painted his gun barrel a medium blue, which was probably supposed to be a medium gray, but 1) this was never colored consistently and 2) I'd DEFINITELY never get the silencer attachment on again with fucking everything up, so no thanks.  Another detail I didn't bother with is moving his Decepticon chest symbol over a little to his right.  I'd never be able to match the gray, and they'd stopped off-centering his logo eventually anyway, as it was based on a bad perspective error on his model sheet which the artists seem to have eventually figured out.

He still transforms.  I checked.  And, really, the parts I painted seem to be more safe from scraping than the factory applied paint he came with.  There's more clearance around his helmet and his ab slabs than on, say, his barrel and silencer.  My modifications just mean there's a strange black area just in front of the trigger guard.

Look, I gotta crank out this Masterpiece Megatron (the second one) review so I can paint the head of mine dark gray like in the comics.  I've taken billions of photographs of him in his various modes and all the various stuff he comes with, and I've processed them, and they're all friggin' accessories from the friggin' cartoon, and I've just gotta de-cartoonify this guy.  I bought this dude to face off against my Masterpiece Ratchet, dangit, Marvel comic style -- I don't need no Giant Purple Griffin doofus.  

(I do like his Prime Problem mind-control helmet because it is hilariously ridiculous.)

The original Megatron toy was awkward.  Its robot mode looked awkward, it transformed awkwardly using tiny struts that easily broke, and the little curly-q scribble across his chest probably said "awkward" in some alien script.  The comic and cartoon strongly anthropomorphized the robot design further, essentially ending up with a robot mode that didn't really have a lot of recognizeable gun kibble on him.  They altered the shape of the chest so it didn't look so much like a gun chamber, his legs were thickened up, his head shape rounded away from looking like part of the grip, and maybe the halves of the hammer were left on top of his shoulders.  And, yeah, there was a relatively unaltered scope on his arm, but now it was a cannon!  

There was an attempt at a Masterpiece version of Megatron early on in the line.  It was number five, if I recall, after some stuff that was easier to retranslate animation models into toys, but eventually you gotta do the Decepticon leader.  Even if he transforms awkwardly into a handgun.  And, man, this first Masterpiece Megatron was awkward.  I think we learned recently that it was designed in a rush, like over a weekend, and I guess that explains a lot?  It just didn't look good, it was thin and gangly, stuff popped off it if you looked at it wrong, and it was a chore to transform.  Oh, and its metal parts rusted on you overnight.

WELL GOOD NEWS, at Masterpiece Number 36, there's a new Megatron.  Since the first MP Megs came out, there was an adjustment of scale, and not only was the original Masterpiece Megatron an ugly piece of crap, but he was also excessively oversized.  But, again, the source material is awkward, and so I feel like TakaraTomy kind of pushed this one off for as long as they could.  They redid Optimus Prime at MP 10, but Megatron?  Ehhh, 36.  After, you know, Cheetor.  

Where was I?  Oh, right.  GOOD NEWS.  Because this guy is... way more complicated.  Waaaaaaaay more complicated.  He's half the size and probably has twice as many parts.  But!  He's not an ugly piece of crap.  He is goddamned fucking beautiful.  See, that's the secret -- you can make a handgun transform into Megatron's animation model if you essentially sculpt the thing from one form into the other like clay.  That's how many parts this guy is made of.  Transforming him feels like you're changing his shape on a molecular level.  At that point, anything can be anything else.  

Much like Masterpiece Cheetor before him, Megatron's chest is fake.  It's a fake gun chamber.  Because, as I mentioned above, the animation model's chest wasn't really that gun chamber shape anymore.  They angled it up all to hell and ended up with something new.  Instead, the gun chamber is the entire rest of his torso, which was split up into shards and crumpled up behind the fake gun chamber chest.  To transform him, you unwrap the shards and essentially form the gun chamber around the fake chest as if you're wrapping it up in aluminum foil.  It takes a while.  

Meanwhile, the legs have to go from being thick cartoony Megatron legs into much thinner, less-stylized gun grip halves.  You basically unwrap them, squeeze them skinnier, and then reattach all the ends elsewhere.  It is impressive.  It's not fun, but it's impressive.

And that, I think, is my take-away from this toy.  I think I hate transforming it, but I RESPECT it.  There was a goddamn lot of engineering work put into making one thing magically morph into another thing.  This toy is amazing.  I am in awe of it.  But, also, I'm probably never going to transform it again because goddamn.

I am surprised at the amount of charisma this toy has!  Like several other recent Masterpieces, Megatron comes with a few extra faces with different expressions.  And his laughing face?  It is the best.  My MP Megatron with his laughing face is the most I have ever liked G1 cartoon Megatron.  He's just so happy.  So happy and evil.  I want to be the friend of this dope.  

Also, his articulation is far and away the most extensive of any Masterpiece so far, I think.  Which for a Megatron is weird, because I don't think one's had even a rotating waist before.  Usually the transformation gets in the way of that.  But no, his waist rotates, he's got an ab crunch, both his elbows and knees are doublejointed so his limbs can bend back on themselves, he's got small amounts of finger articulation, and his neck has some good range of movement.  You can get this guy to do a shitload of stuff.

(there's more photos on my tumblr)

Okay, have I talked enough?  Can I go try to start paintmatching the gunmetally grayblack he has?  Good.

A few months ago, I spent some time marveling at how much Masterpiece Optimus Primal dedicated itself to looking like the CGI model.   Well, motherfuckin' Masterpiece Cheetor is here, and he's all like, ha ha ha, that's cute, but get a load of fuckin' me.

Beyond the observations about Generation One Masterpieces I made in regards to MP Primal, here's another: I feel like the G1 Masterpieces.... homogenize the style a little bit.  They sand down the edges, scootch things to and fro to make a toy look more what a character looks like in your mind's eye.  Heads are shrunk, hands are less big and mitteny, proportions are massaged, etc.  But Cheetor, moreso than Primal, makes apparent to me how much of a bigger commitment there seems to be to making the Beast Wars Masterpieces especially media accurate.  Yes, sure, it has been remarked upon frequently that the spots on Cheetor's surfaces are purposefully made to look stretched like the 90s CGI surface texturing the cartoon model had.  But.... Cheetor's THUMBS, man.  Cheetor's CGI model had long-ass freakish thumbs.  And yet here they are on this toy.  Long-ass freakish thumbs.  No sanding down the edges, no massaging the visuals to look more like Every Other Masterpiece Fist.  He closes his fingers into a fist and his thumb still stretches far beyond like the head on a coiled snake.  It's just Cheetor's actual freakishly awkward CGI hands, replicated in plastic.

And I eat this shit up.  I do.  It's embracing the wrinkles of Beast Wars and not just our fuzzy happy half-memories of it.  It's not Beast Wars: But FIX'D, but just... Beast Wars.

The toy itself, much like Primal, transforms similarly to the original.  The cheetah forelegs still end up on the back, the robot forearms still hide under the spine just behind the cheetah head, the robot legs still become sort of cheetah hind legs.  There's a t-bone steak-shaped piece on the small of the cheetah's back that flips down to be Cheetor's crotchpiece.  The differences between old and new are all in the details.  The cheetah forelegs are now articulated (versus not at all) so that they can fold across each other on Cheetor's back.  Pulling the robot arms out of the cheetah's back is a little more complicated now; there's way more moving pieces involved to get things just so.  The hind-leg-to-robot-leg transformation is... I mean, you still see robot parts easily in cheetah mode.  You're going to.  It'd be impossible to engineer otherwise.  But it minimizes the robot parts as best as one could hope while also making a more natural cheetah hind-leg shape.  

And, yeah, the cheetah head on the robot mode chest is fake.  The real cheetah head is buried inside the robot torso JUST BEHIND the fake robot mode cheetah head.  There's little wire cheetah whiskers rooted into the real cheetah head, which bend a little when shoved inside the torso cavity, and you kind of have to groom them back into shape whenever you transform him back.  Whether I think this whole charade is a good creative decision changes depending on what time of day it is.  

There is a crazy amount of paint on this guy.  I spent a good while trying to identify places on it that were unpaintable nylon plastic, because 99% of his parts have paint on them somewhere.  But there are a few small hinges here and there that appear to be unpaintable nylon, like the yellow inside the cheetah forepaw's wrists.  (Unpaintable nylon is generally used for structural reasons, which is why HasTak bothers to use it at all, and it's why you can find it buried within MP Cheetor's joints only.)  All of Cheetor's gold is paint, so you don't hafta worry about GPS.  Altogether, MP Cheetor is just ... visually dense.

Like MP Primal, he has a set of swappable heads with different expressions for both robot and beast modes.  For robot mode, he's got Stoic and Grrrr Angry and OH SHIT, and for beast mode, he's got Half-Lidded Stoned, Grrrr Angry, and OH SHIT.  The beast mode head's jaw is openable in each iteration, and also there's three sets of eyes you can swap into whichever beast mode head you're using.  One set looks left, another center, another right.  It's not QUITE as elegant an eye articulation solution as with the Figma Elsa (let it gooooooo) I have where the eyeballs are literally articulated (but you have to use a little pick to move them), but I appreciate that this is an option at all.

MP Cheetor comes with two guns.  The original toy had two guns, as well, but only one of them made it onto the cartoon showed up much at all.  The original toy had a water squirter gun fashioned from Cheetor's intestines.  You heard me.  Anyway, that's the one that was frequently represented on the cartoon.  The Masterpiece version doesn't watersquirt, sadly, but it does finally paint those intestines pink.  The second weapon, was Cheetor's cheetah ass.  You ripped off his ass and folded back the tail and there was a barrel under there and Cheetor grasped his own ass and shot his ass at you.  The Masterpiece version is very similar, only differing in how the tail folds underneath instead of over the top.  My favorite part is how the Masterpiece version of the gun borrows some of Cheetor's midsection and sculpts them into the buttocks-shapes of the original toy's ass gun.  Cheetor's ass gun is no longer made out of ass, but transforms from non-ass into a more ass-like shape.   For nostalgia.

You can stow both weapons on his back in robot mode.

THIS TOY IS AMAZING.  It is not perfect, though.  One, he's really bad at holding his ass gun.  It doesn't peg into his palm like the gut gun, and you kind of just have to wedge it loosely into his grasp and hope gravity and friction work.  Secondly, and this is the biggest, he doesn't seem to, like, peg together in his cheetah midsection in beast mode.  Mind, when you set him down in cheetah mode, this self-resolves, because he is jointed so that he closes himself up if he's standing on something.  However, once you pick him up, he kind of flops open like a real cat hanging over you lazily but if a real cat also showed you the robot parts inside him while he did so.   Cheetah mode is FOR DISPLAY ONLY, it seems.  You pick him up to play with him and he kind of goes ploop.  It's weird, because the rest of him is so satisfyingly stiff.

That's it, that's what's wrong with him, setting aside the "is the fake cheetah head on his chest a bad thing" situation.  There is so much love in him, though, those bits are overshadowed pretty strongly.  I don't even fucking like Cheetor that much, and I have fallen hard for this action figure.

NOW WHERE IS MY DINOBOT, GIVE ME DINOBOT, HE WAS ANNOUNCED, SHOW ME PICTURES

When your stomach is in knots and you find yourself just dreading the very act of passively existing, I find it beneficial to find small things to force myself to do, just to keep momentum going.  Momentum is king.   You might not do those small things well, 'cuz your brain isn't quite working at capacity, but you kinda just have to make yourself do things anyway, pushing up and through your emotional numbness.  "Fake it until you make it?" maybe?  Not quite, I dunno.  Too platitude-sounding for what shitshow's going on in your mind.  But it's close enough.

With that in mind, let me talk for a bit about Transformers Masterpiece Beast Wars Optimus Primal.

It's Beast Wars' 20th anniversary, and while Hasbro's been all "beast wars, what is that, optimus isn't no dumb monkey, have g1 recycled forever," TakaraTomy has stepped up and given us this amazing thing.  (I've been singing TakaraTomy's praises in contrast to Hasbro a lot more these days, I feel.  Am I weeabooing up or something?)

Let's consider the Generation 1 Masterpiece toys.  Generally, they try to replicate a look from the cartoon, and the cartoon they're sourcing from was cell-animated.  And so the toy, despite all its attempts to look like the cartoon as much as possible, must always fall short, because.... hey.  Three-dee object existing in front of you.  Flat cell-animated image.  And you get into these debates like with the upcoming new Masterpiece Generation 1 Megatron: should he have a silver/chrome finish like a gun or his original toy, or should he have a flat matte light gray like the cell animation?  There's always this dissonance between the source and the product, no matter how hard one tries.  Masterpiece Shockwave might be the closest to achieving a seamless transition.

But Beast Wars' source material is a whole other animal.  (so to speak)  It was CGI, albeit mid-Nineties television CGI, and so the characters from the cartoon are "real."  They don't look different when you look at them from the side versus the front or back, they have texture, they have alternating gloss and matte... and, frankly, they're more visually interesting.  Ironhide and Ratchet are just cardboard box towers.  A CGI model like Optimus Primal has curves and contours and nuance.  Relatively speaking.  This was 1996, again.

And that's where Masterpiece Optimus Primal really succeeds.  He's glossy where he needs to be, he's matte where he needs to be, and, god of gods, his terrible texture-map-in-lieu-of-actual-modeled-fur-because-this-is-1996 is honest to god printed all over him.  It doesn't come out well in my photography, but it looks like someone lightly hand-painted fur pattern everywhere on him that needs to be so.  These interplays of various glossies and faux texture map honestly make the toy come alive.  It's like the CGI model is standing on your shelf.

The painted-on-texture also has me a little on edge.  Does this stuff scratch off easily?  I dunno!  I don't wanna test its endurance so much!  And so I'm extremely careful with this guy.  There is a small bit on his forearm, right over a seam between two adjacent plastic pieces, where you can see the texture painting wasn't successfully applied.  And so I'm always eyeing that.  During transformation, you have to rotate his robot head out at the same time as rotating in his gorilla head, and you have to get the rotation just right through this very tight space so there's no scraping the top of the gorilla head.  I worry that I'll untransform him some day and find a scrape.  And I have no idea how baseless this fear is, as this is a new painting technology to me.  

The transformation is similar to the original, mostly because it kind of has to still be "arms become arms, legs become legs," but the differences are interesting to me.  In the original toy, the ape head folded down and flipped over to become the robot chest; on this new toy, the robot chest is formed from the gorilla's stomach, while the gorilla head hides inside the torso.  The gorilla back rotates upside-down for robot mode.  The gorilla legs are a huge mess of parts on its way to becoming robot legs, rather than the original "just unfold them at the knees, switch the feet, the end" deal.  Lots of flipping and turning there.  I do recommend having fingernails.  There's parts that require a very thin edge with leverage to unsecure them from their location.  Usually on Transformer toys, there's little helpful edges or nobs that give you leverage, but that would mess with the contours and accuracy of each mode.  

He's electronic.  Push down his robot head, and his robot eyes glow.  He comes with a number of alternate faces.  Four for robot mode (neutral, screaming, Dreamwave smirk, and mouthplate deployed) and three for gorilla mode (neutral, growling, smiling).  

He comes with his swords, which he can hold or store on his back, and he has both his flip-out shoulder missile launchers, and his forearm-deployed cannons.  You definitely need your fingernails for the latter.  You can do some folding on his backside to reveal his flight jets.  

Other than my apprehension regarding the texture painting, there's not a lot for me to complain about.  It's about as perfect as a Season 1 Optimus Primal toy as can be possible.   In robot mode, he might as well be a fancy maquette reproduction of the CGI model.  In ape mode... there are seams, but they're all understandable.  And the choice of different faces brings whatever character is otherwise missing.

I think I'll like him if my emotions come back.

When I look at photos of other people's Masterpiece Ratchets, theirs appears to be different colors in places than mine.  It's weird.  Maybe mine used to look like that, too?  He arrived in the mail on Tuesday, I opened him up, I blacked out, and when I woke up he looked like this.  The oddest thing.

If you haven't been paying attention here long, then I should tell you that Ratchet is my jam.  He was the star of the first comic books I ever read, and I guess that sort of thing tends to leave an impression on you.  There's an argument to be made that the Marvel Transformers comics are ultimately the story of Ratchet.  When the stories get their most heated, it's Ratchet who's there, delivering the emotional punches.  Hell, he goes up against Megatron (badly) more often than Optimus Prime does.  And, well, it makes dramatic sense, right?  Optimus Prime versus Megatron is a battle between a pair of equals.  But put the pitiful but resourceful doctor up against Megatron?  That's an underdog.  That's an uphill battle against an unstoppable evil.  That's drama gold.  

I think Ratchet was also on the cartoon.  He sounded like Papa Smurf.

My love for Ratchet is so great that I purchased this okay-ish looking Masterpiece toy.  As you can see, its proportions are kind of wonky.  It's hard to turn a van cosplaying as an ambulance into a faithful recreation of the original character model of his robot form, which was a pile of boxes wearing a windshield glued to his tummy.  Ratchet had no wheels on him, no other identifying vehicular parts.  That tummy windshield was it.  And so speaking of  uphill battles: this toy's engineering!

I mean, it does a valiant job.  It does its level best to hide all the windows and all the wheels and all of the EVERYTHING so you could get a pile of unremarkable white boxes.   The entire roof and back window fold in on themselves and get stuffed inside the torso.  The lower third of the vehicle does its level best to tuck inside his legs.  The only remaining visible vehicle parts other than the desired windshield on his chest, are the windows on the back of his forearms and the two fairly visible hip-thingers.  A commendable effort all around, really.  It doesn't result in a perfect Ratchet robot mode (as according to the model sheets) but I'm not sure that's actually possible in a world with real physics.

He comes with a billion little extra accessories.  They're from the cartoon.  Who cares.

Gonna quickly scrawl this Masterpiece Shockwave review before I head out later today to the airport on my way to Seattle!  It's Emerald City Comicon weekend!  You can find me at booth 112 with Cyanide & Happiness.  It's also BotCon weekend, but I made my choice between the two.  I'm still gettin' the toys (through my buddy who's going), so I'll have them to talk about shortly after I get back... which explains why I gotta get this Shockwave post done first!  It won't happen if I have a bunch of new Beast Wars combiner guys!

Anyway, Shockwave.  At first you might think, man, what does a Masterpiece Shockwave bring new to the table?  Because, really, his show model isn't all that different from his original toy, and honestly his Masterpiece is about the same size as his original toy, and that original toy wasn't a complete loss when it came to articulation, and so you're left with a pretty close copy of a toy you might already have had for like 30 years.  

AND YOUR FIRST THOUGHT WOULD BE RIGHT, BUT WHO CARES, MASTERPIECE SHOCKWAVE IS PRETTY DAMN GREAT

I love this guy.  And admittedly a huge part of that is "I love Shockwave," but I swear the toy is objectively cool besides that.  He still transforms into a purple space gun, and he's still a one-eyed one-handed dude (unless you give him his alternate extra hand), and he's still electronic.  It's only lights this time instead of lights and sounds, but I'm pretty cool with just the lights.  I have twin boys.  I'll have enough toys that make noise soon enough.  The lights are real strong, too.  He really glows (and has separate batteries for his gun-mode light and his wrist-gun light).  

Masterpiece Shockwave transforms a little differently this time around.  I mean, it's 80% the same.  He puts his arms over his head and bends over.  You can't really change that if you want a Shockwave that looks like the original Shockwave in both modes.  But now the designers decided his barrel wouldn't be a separate piece you kept aside in robot mode.  Now there's a long die-cast arm that folds up and places the barrel on his back.  Meanwhile, the part of the gun that USED to be the part that USED to fold up on Shockwave's back folds down and bolsters up the bulk of Shockwave's legs so they aren't so half-a-gun-handle thin.  Oh, and there's a weird garage door of abs that slides down and covers up his trigger penis.  Other than these changes, it's the same transformation.

If you're upset that Shockwave's backpack is no longer purple and looks like his old gun barrel, there's a separate piece you can slip over the new backpack to make it look like the old backpack.  Pretty silly, admittedly!  But it also doubles as a stand for Shockwave in gun mode, so at least it has a secondary purpose.  Speaking of silly, Shockwave also comes with a small handheld version of himself in gun mode, because there was once an episode of the cartoon where Shockwave fired a small handheld version of himself.  As you do.  

And finally, Shockwave comes with a large assortment of various hands.  He's a got solid lavender hand and gun-hand.  He's got a solid lavender replacement hand for that gun-hand in case you want to revisit that one time he was drawn in the cartoon with both hands.  He's got a saluting right hand so he can salute.  And he has ALL OF THESE THINGS AGAIN also in translucent plastic to match the original toy and also facilitate the electronic lights.  There are choices, is what I'm saying.  Like how you can choose between stickers of the proper Decepticon logo and the dorky misdrawn one from the cartoon.  

Much ado has been made about Shockwave's purple coloring.  In some photos it's looked kinda pinkish, while some folks pine for the dark purple of the original toy.  I can tell you that in person, his color... well, it's hard to explain.  It's a very deep purple, but not a dark purple.  It's essentially Shockwave's color of purple from his old Action Master toy, but milkier.  I don't mean "milkier" in that it's whiter, but that it absorbs and reflects light in a certain way.  It... really absorbs light.  How the purple looks is drastically altered by the lighting ambience.  It's difficult to photograph.  Sometimes it looks really different just from photo to photo in the same lighting.  Hell, if you want him darker purple, just stand him in front of something black.  But regardless it's a real attractive color in person.  Like I said, it's deep.  It's like he's carved out of purple milk chocolate.  

My one annoyance with the toy is the head.  You need to pull up on it (and the neck/collarbone section) to lock it into place in robot mode, but there's a real good chance you'll take the head off the neck balljoint instead.  And then you spend time trying to get a head to pop back onto a balljoint that's affixed to a swinging hinged piece from which you can't hold in place.  You know how it is.  I recommend grabbing the head from all corners and pulling directly up, keeping the head looking forward, when you try to lock it in place.  That generally keeps the head from popping off first.  

Anyway, he's excellently articulated, and a waist swivel and an ab crunch is something I never really expected a G1 Shockwave toy to have.  And given how G1 Shockwave tends to appear in his original toy body in basically any G1 story more than any other guy (up until the RID ongoing title in IDW, for example), this toy feels like, more than many other Masterpieces, to be basically any G1 Shockwave.  He can be cartoon, he can be Marvel, he can be Dreamwave, he can be IDW.  

And it makes you wonder if Senator Shockwave also transformed into a flying laser gun.

I wasn't super sold on the last MP Rodimus, in general.  I got him strictly because he was a large Hot Rod-type guy who could be more in-scale with my Beast Era Wreckers toys than the original Hot Rod toy.  Nobody who got the toy seemed to like it, and also it kind of liked to break easily.  But I needed that large Hot Rod, and all he really needed to do was stand at the back of the shelf and be a big Hot Rod, so I got him.  

But seriously, he was not great.  I've never successfully transformed him.  I've gotten close, but at best I end up with a convex automobile, with the vehicle mode sort of bent in the middle in a way that keeps both axels of wheels touching the ground.  There was something I was doing wrong, but just transforming the thing was such a chore I couldn't be bothered to investigate.  What a fiddly mess.

The experience left such a bad taste in my mouth I didn't really pay much attention to the NEW Masterpiece Hot Rod for the longest while.  But folks seemed to like him when he came out.  He was relatively simple to transform.  (I mean, he'd have to be.)  And he was play-withable.  And he wasn't a clusterfuck.  But I didn't really see a need for a Masterpiece Hot Rod, so I continued to not really care.

...until I went back and looked at that Beast Era Wreckers groupshot and realized that its Rodimus is shorter than Primal Prime, not taller.  Huh!  I could get the new, smaller toy and chuck the old piece of garbage that I hate.  And so I did.

Yeah, I like this Hot Rod.  Other folks weren't lying, he's much easier to transform.  He's a bit of a shellformer, to be sure, as a large chunk of his altmode folds up and compacts onto his back, which is one step down from the older larger version.  However, he's otherwise a billion steps up.  All that kibble pegs together very securely at every step of compression and the result is not as bad to see in person as you'd think from photography.  

In fact, this new guy tends to be, as a rule, better in person than photographed.  Our first photographs of the test shot caused people to scoff at his flat chest and kibble backpack and skinny legs, but when he's in front of you, the three-dimensionality kind of smooths those flaws over.  

This new Hot Rod comes with almost all the same stuff the older Rodimus did.  He comes with his buzzsaw arm attachment, and his two guns (but they don't combine), and now he comes with a fishing rod.  I wish I could set aside my extreme fatigue with the animated Transformers movie long enough to enjoy how objectively awesome it is that a Transformers toy comes with a fishing rod.  I should be tickled by the goofiness.  But, well, eh.   I'm all TFTM referenced-out.  Hot Rod does not, sadly, come with a transforming Targetmaster Firebolt partner like the American Rodimus did.  This Hot Rod can hold him fine in robot mode, though.  Not, like, properly, with the notches fitting into the sculpted slots or anything, but he can get a good grip around the handle regardless.  Unfortunately there is no way to attach the Targetmaster gun to vehicle mode other than friction and gravity.  

Have I mentioned I like that this guy's pink?  Hot Rod in the animated Transformers movie was pink.  Pink and yellow orange and gray.  But when he become Rodimus Prime, he's red, and his toys are invariably red, even the non-Prime ones.  I appreciate that this toy is the proper hue.  

I also appreciate that it's not fragile, untransformable garbage.

The Masterpiece line to me was pretty blah back a few years ago when all the toys were mostly the same height in robot mode.  Optimus, Grimlock, Megatron, Rodimus, Optimus a few more dozen times... But these days, they're doing more than just Big Guys and they're trying to scale them according to how they appeared in the cartoon, which means you've got tall guys like Optimus, slightly less tall guys like Soundwave and the jets, medium-sized guys like Prowl and Wheeljack, and tiny guys like Bumblebee.  Stretching out in the other direction is Ultra Magnus.

Ultra Magnus might be the first guy in this new paradigm that isn't scaled perfectly to how tall he is in the cartoon -- he's just a head or so taller than Optimus Prime, but this toy he's a few heads taller.  This is because they seem to have wanted MP Magnus and MP Prime's truck cabs to be the same size.  And when your entire body is the trailer of a car carrier, you're probably going to be way taller than the guy who's just a truck cab.

Speaking of which, unlike the original Ultra Magnus toy, which was really just a redecoed super robot trailer combiney thing for the original Optimus Prime, this new Ultra Magnus doesn't have an Optimus Prime robot inside him anywhere.  The truck cab splits up completely differently to help complete the torso.  It can remain attached during transformation or detach from the trailer hitch as needed.  There being no white Optimus Prime involved makes me a little sad, but I guess engineering challenges may have gotten in the way of that.  It probably would have involved taking the trailer apart, at any rate, if there was to be any leg articulation, while this toy manages to not need anything to separate during transformation.  Even the missile launchers are on little arms so you don't have to unplug and plug them where they need to go in either mode.  

Speaking of missile launchers, Masterpiece Ultra Magnus is also unique in Masterpiece in that his vehicle mode, at least from the back of the truck cab, is really obviously a bunch of Ultra Magnus robot parts rather than being based on any real-life car carrier trailer.  It's accurate to the original toy and the cartoon, but it's still conspicious next to the Real Life Licensed Cars that have been the staple of the line for a while.

That said, it's a fun and hefty toy.  It's not annoying to transform, and it's a fun process throughout.  When I see him, I actively want to transform him -- even the part where you replace the real rubber tires in his feet with smaller fake plastic molded tires that match the animation model better.   It's ridiculous and you don't really need to do it except for aesthetic reasons, but the change itself is fun to operate.  

He comes with two faces which are interchangeable.  One's a stoic face and one's a shouting face that's supposed to accompany use of his extra pair of Matrix-holding hands.  (Matrix not included.)  I love the shouting face, and interpret him as being angry at people for flouting technicalities of law.  If you leave both faces off, there's a white Optimus Prime head sculpted underneath which harkens back to the original toy.

Magnus also comes with little figurines of Spike and Daniel Witwicky.  They can ride inside his cab mode, if you want.  More likely, you will lose them.  

Masterpiece Ultra Magnus is a good purchase if you want a giant, hefty Magnus.  He's really good at that.  It may be the thing he's best at.  It's not that he's bad at other things, it's just that he's... a really huge Magnus.  It is a quality that overwhelms all the others.

I'm not sure there's a lot to say about this purchase.  I got it for three reasons:

       1. I like Transformers

       2. I like Evangelion

       3. I like purple, orange, and green on things that shouldn't be

Or, wait, four reasons:

        4. Mad porn monies

If you've handled Masterpiece Optimus Prime The Second, you'll know this guy's deal, but Convoy Mode "EVA" is in crazy secondary colors instead of the usual primary colors.  There's a little Spike painted up in NERV uniform, an intricately-decoed trailer, plus an ax and a Matrix crystal done up in blood red.  It's insane crosspromotional zealotry between two of my favorite properties, against all reason, and I had to have it.  

Anyway, now TFWiki has a Misato Katsuragi article, the end.