You know that Branson Reese meme with the "NO FEAR" t-shirt, the second panel, and then the "ONE FEAR" t-shirt?  Well, my middle panel is "MP-scale show-accurate Beast Wars Transmetals third party toys."  I was never a third party (not-Hasbro/Takara, unlicensed, illegal, infringing, etc) guy, but once you have TakaraTomy indefinitely stall their Beast Wars Masterpiece efforts, essentially signal that they're never ever going to slip into Season 2/3 Metals guys, and have TransArt (a 3P company) start cranking out screen-perfect toys of Beast Wars Transmetals folks, that's really my silver bullet.  I'm sorry.  I can't not own these.  It's impossible.

I saw on the Internet that Transart's "BWM-06 Metal T. Rex" was going to exist, saw that it was perfect, and then amassed their previous offerings in anticipation.  So I have their Transmetal Cheetor, their Optimus Primal, their Ravage, and these are basically all I ever live for now.  Well, my wife and children, sure.  But also mostly these.  

These third party toys by TransArt also avoid the pitfalls that both official Masterpieces and third party offerings often succumb to, by my experience.  Usually they're overwrought and fragile with complexities and unnecessary engineering, but so far TransArt's outings have kept things simple and robust.  These are mostly just oversized versions of the original toys, with extra articulation.  They're not literally upsized knockoffs or anything -- all the sculpts are distinct from the originals (the CGI models were very similar but not identical to the toy sculpts), but the endpoint is you have a toy that you can transform back and forth without having to take an afternoon off.  It helps that the Transmetals were pretty close to their original toys, so you don't have to change much to them to keep them accurate other than the "upscaling."  The hugest difference between "Metal T. Rex" and Transmetal Megatron's transformation is that Metal T. Rex has some folding panels to cover up his forearms in tyrannosaurus mode.  And these fold easily away.  

But it's a big, MP-scale Transmetal Megatron.  Transmetal Megatron is... probably my favorite Transformer.  Of all time.  It's a t. rex and it has roller skates and VTOL engines and it transforms into the best Megatron ever in the form he was in when he did all of that Megatron's most memorable things.  Also, unlike the Hasbro version of Transmetal Megatron, he doesn't crumble into pieces cuzza Gold Plastic Syndrome.  So that's a plus! 

But it's a Transmetal Megatron who has ankle tilts, articulated fingers, an ab crunch, shoulderpads that fold up out of the way for more poses, a head on a neck ball-joint, opening tyrannosaurus jaws and moving tongue, separate, articulated t. rex fingers for waggling, a t. rex head that can look up and down and left and right, and swappable robot head faces.  And electronic lights in both heads for glowing eyes!  Tap the magnetic end of his large effects part for his tail blaster on either head and the eyes will turn on and glow.  (Mine arrived with dead batteries, so I had to swap them out with new ones first.)

He's also got finger guns to replace the t. rex fingers for when you want the robot mode to use the tyrannosaurus arms as blasters, plus a Golden Disk shard projector that replaces the tip of his tail, for when you want Megatron to show Ravage home movies of G1 Megatron.  

The toy does include two tails, one for each mode.  There's some... size changing between modes, and so you do have to give him the larger tail in tyrannosaurus mode and the smaller tail for robot mode.  A little disappointing, but understandable when you have him in hand and see how incompatible the sizes are.  The larger tail can also store the extra faces and tyrannosaurus finger guns.  

And he's MP-scale, so he's, you know, large.  A bit taller than MP Season 1 Megatron, who's already pretty huge.  

I did have to do some customization, paint-wise, when he arrived.  Some parts of his faces aren't adequately painted, and so I opted to add some gunmetal to his helmet and around his eyes, plus separate his teeth on his smiling face with some black.  There's also a few chrome hits on his shoulders and legs that were neglected, but I haven't gotten to those, nor are they as important to me.  Maybe if Toyhax does some labels to fix those up, I dunno.  

But he's probably my favorite thing.  If our house had a fire and I could only grab one toy, he'd be in my top five.  (his size, realistically, is what'd keep me from putting him at #1, he'd be kind of a liability to have to drag around, plus, like, what, do i keep his extra tail in my pocket, or)

TransArt is doing a second run of him later this year/early next, so there's still opportunities to get him.  I think the second run will come with stickers for his various eyes, since many of him have had trouble with his electronics.  

Since a lot of recent Leader Class toys have been Voyager Class Guys With Extra Stuff recently, it's nice to dig into one of the fewer Leaders that are just properly large boys.  Leader Class Megatron (Beast) is one of those boys.  A full head taller than the original 1996 Ultra Class Beast Wars Megatron, our new T. rex Megs is a tower of chonk.

Like Kingdom's other Beast Wars reimaginings, he marries a cartoon-accurate robot mode with a more realistic-looking animal mode.  (The animal mode doesn't try to look like the 1996 CGI but the robot does.)  Megatron's beast mode does attempt something that the smaller toys don't, however -- it tries to recreate the feeling of hide.  Much of the Tyrannosaurus skin sections are a slightly rubbery plastic affixed to a solid plastic interior.  Like an ogre, he's got layers.  Many of the interior plastic sections are cast in a bony white color, and so it has the presentation of flesh over a skeleton.  It's a pretty compelling arrangement, and it makes handling him feel different from other toys.  

The robot mode rearranges (with some parts clicking together a little too solidly) into a pretty amazing T. rex.  The trade on this is that the robot mode piles more beast mode parts on his back.  The thighs are now back there, too, since some actual Tyrannosaur thighs were wanted for beast mode rather than just the old flat missile-firing cylinders of the original toy.  There's some creative jointing there to allow the thighs to articulate with the rest of the legs while connected.  

Megatron's robot mode does have a fist sculpted into the tail arm, but the tail itself doesn't separate.  There's no water-squirting bladder in the dinosaur head arm, but there is a 5mm port inside the mouth if you want to add energy effects parts (sold separately).  

The toy tries its best to make the dinosaur mode poseable.  There's jointing at the middle of the tail and at the base, giving the tail a chance to sway how you want.  And the dinosaur neck has... lots of stuff going on to make the head be able to move around while keeping fleshy panels filling in the gaps, with mixed success.  There's a springloaded trapezoid of neck flesh on either side of the head, which more or less follows the skull as you move it to and fro, but the unspringloaded panel above the neck has to be manually moved into position each time the head moves.  But I like the effort.

Another change is that Megatron's dino torso transforms upside-down compared to other versions.  The beige tummy coloring ends up on the tops of Megatron's shoulders, rather than the green coloring along the spine.  

The important thing is that the toy has a great presence that's equal to Megatron's powerful personality.  It meets the Beast Wars Megatron of the mind's eye, and that's what you pay for and receive.

When listings for Earthrise toys started leaking last year and we began to learn we'd get a few of the Cybertron-mode Stege guys back in new Earth mode toys (hello Starscream and Optimus Prime), many of us figured, yeah, okay, they probably won't do a new Earth Megatron.  There's a long history now of Megatrons just sticking to their Cybertronian modes, the Stege toy is fine and a passable tank, and honestly it's the one toy from the Voyager Class pricepoint range that tends to shelfwarm.  We knew we were getting a Grapple, so wouldn't that slot be better taken up by Grapple retooled into Inferno?  

BUT NOPE!  

EARTHRISE MEGATRON!  

And he's like the Stege Megatron toy, but retooled to be worse!  See, one of Stege Megatron's nicest features was that his tank barrel transformed into a sword.  The blade halves folded out from underneath, eclipsed around the barrel, and bam! sword.  A sword that was sword-shaped!  It just had a neat barrel encased in the middle.  I liked that!  It was based on the sword that the original 1985 Japanese version of Megatron came with (in lieu of the fusion cannon, actually), which isn't precisely my cup of nostalgia tea, but it did the job very well!  

Earthrise Megatron just sticks the tip of that same sword design onto the back of a giant chunk of Abrams tank that includes the barrel.  You peg it onto Megatron's forearm.  It looks like a giant chunk of tank with a little pointy pokey part.  If it weren't so wide, he could probably use it to stir his morning coffee.  And then you remove a part of the tank from the back (from between where the legs go) and peg it onto all that.  

It's a terrible, embarrassing change that makes a toy worse.  

I mean, the reason that chunk exists is that they want to keep Megatron having his little 1984 Walther P-38 pistol hammer halves on his shoulders.  The chunk of Abrams tank covers them up when you transform him into tank mode.  Stege Megatron transformed into a Cybertronian tank, so he could have the front of the tank look however it wanted.  (though the tops of the arms transformed a little to obscure them)  

But it's... super not worth it...?

Beyond that, Earthrise Megatron is actually a pretty extensive retool of Stege Megatron.  They essentially transform the same, and all the new parts are shaped similarly to the old parts, but like 80% of him is different.  New head, new, chest, new crotch, new shins, new Abrams tank front half parts, new fusion cannon, new backs of his upper arms, new... barrel shield pointy stick... 

All this is in service of making him more of an Earth tank who transforms into something even closer to the old cartoon Megatron design.  He's got those little vents on his obliques and smoother, slopey legs that sort of resemble gun handle shapes better.  His fusion cannon looks more like a pistol sight.  He's got a ... new cartoony Megatron head that looks worse than the Stegey cartoony Megatron head.  

And he's two to a case, with one Quintesson Judge filling out the third spot!  Oh boy!  

anyway because of this he's much easier to get one's hands on, i got one, and i stole stege megatron's head and arms and sword/barrel, stuck them on earth megatron, painted his obliques red (the stege head had already been painted by me), and now i have an earthier Marvel Comics-style Megatron that has a better-sculpted noggin and doesn't carry a dumb-looking chunk of terrible tank/barrel/butterknife around on his forearm 

(see image on right)

Sure, in tank mode the barrel area doesn't look as Abramsy, but THAT'S AN OKAY TRADE-OFF.

(the plastic colors are the same, and the head and arms swap real easy, don't even gotta unscrew anything)

i recommend doing this, if only so you all help get these guys off shelves before Kingdom shows up next year, if straggling earthrise megatrons are the reason there's no shelfspace for a new dinobot toy to reach saturation i will murder everything

(walmart-exclusive netflix stege megatron pictured in comparison images)

gonna get this out of the way first, but the rubber ducky is a season two thing, and this is a season one megatron toy, so no it wasn't gonna ever come with a rubber ducky and no it's not weird or wrong that it doesn't

Many people assume Dinobot is my favorite Transformers character.  I do like him a lot, and I collect him religiously, but he's not actually my Number One.  My favorite Transformers character is actually Dinobot's nemesis, Predacon Megatron.  Megatron's an intellectual and physical powerhouse whose only weakness is he loves being evil with style and class.  He's not just a jackass, he also enjoys being a jackass, and he wants you to know he enjoys being a jackass.  It's fun to watch him fail, it's fun to watch him succeed -- it's just fun to watch him, which is rare for a Megatron.  

So the Masterpiece toy line has finally gotten to my favorite Transformers character, and... it's a big'un.  He's not the biggest Masterpiece toy so far (Ultra Magnus and Star Saber are larger), but he towers a bit over the G1 and Movie Optimus Primes and G1 Megatron.  Masterpiece toys have long maintained a strict robot mode scale, and if you want Megatron to be in scale with Masterpiece Optimus Primal and the nearly-as-large Masterpiece Dinobot, you're going to have a giant-ass Beast Wars Megatron toy.  

Like the other Beast Wars Masterpieces, Megatron is meticulously decoed.  He's got metallic paint and/or plastic to match the look of the mid-90s CGI.  He's got texture-mapped deco across his dinosaur skin surfaces.  The color matching is meticulous.  There's no places where the paint runs out because it goes around a corner and the budget's thin.  He's painted from every angle.  

He's electronic!  Batteries go into both of his heads.  The batteries in his robot head make his eyes light up.  The batteries in his tyrannosaur head play speech clips.  They're all in Japanese, of course, but there are quite a few of them.  

For the reasons listed above, he's also pretty expensive!  Amazon.jp has pretty good discounts on preorders, but without them, he was the most expensive Masterpiece toy thus far.  That is, until the third Masterpiece Optimus Prime comes out this fall.  (Prime's shorter, but he comes with, you know, a trailer.)

Megatron comes with a handful of accessories.  He's got two extra faces in addition to the neutral one.   There's the trademark grimace, which should remind us of the original toy's expression.  And most importantly, there's the Grin.  Some call it the Triangle Grin, some call it the Eric Cartman Grin, but it's the Grin.  I love that face.  It's the "Yeeessss!" face.  It's the "I love being an evil jackass" face.  And finally it's in plastic.  

There's also a toothbrush.  Yeah, there's a toothbrush, so you can replicate that scene in "Before the Storm" where we catch him with all his extra parts off brushing his dinosaur hand's teeth.  ...the extra parts also all come off.  You can yank off the hip guns, the tail itself from the arm, the kibble piled on his back, and the shoulderpads.  This leaves you with a pretty skeletal Megatron robot that's only got the dinosaur hand, his dinosaur boots, and the dinosaur taint.  And it's all so you can more faithfully replicate that time he brushed his dinosaur hand's teeth. These Transformers folks at TakaraTomy are madmen.  

Megatron comes with the shotgun he carries in "Call of the Wild."  He also comes with an adaptor for Dinobot's stand so you can mount Megatron on the stand's arm so that Optimus Primal can stand under Megatron's raised body -- also to replicate a scene from that same episode.  (There are also stand adaptor pieces for both robot and dinosaur modes.  There is no stand itself included -- you've gotta use Dinobot's or get a second Dinobot.)  There's also a weapon blast effect that you can plug into one of the shotgun barrels or into Megatron's open tyrannosaur mouth.  

Transforming him the first time isn't fun!  The instructions actually come with a second, smaller sheet of... corrections, so that you transform him properly without breaking him.  Some of his hinges -- especially within the pile of tyrannosaur hide that bunches up on his back -- feel a little fragile.  The instructions want you to fold them in the proper order.  It's also difficult to pull the tyrannosaur hide parts apart the first time.  They're locked together pretty well, and you don't know yet where the connection pieces are and where the hinges are.  It's a pretty large web of interconnected thin plastic sheets.  

The second problem area is transforming his torso.  Most of it pulls out along a slider, and that sucker is, like, paint-locked or something.  It requires excessive force to pull out the first time, and you're not really sure what you can leverage against without breaking something.  I recommend... pushing with your thumb against the inside of the top of the pelvis while yanking back?  I dunno. 

It's all much easier the second time around.  You know where the tabs are, you know where the weak points are, and everything stops being so hard to yank out as it was the first time.  Which is good, because both modes are excellent (unlike Dinobot's) and so you're actually going to want to spend time with both of them.  

Some people have reported problems with the purple swirly plastic in the crotch.  A handful have reported cracking, and a few more have reported fear of cracking.  It's swirly plastic, and there are already some carved grooves in there, and so once you hear about splitting, every facet looks like breakage.  Mine, so far, doesn't seem to have any problems.  It's been suggested that the problem is not actually weak plastic, but that those few handful of cracked crotches were because of a rarely-occurring gear misassembly inside the crotch.  Meaning, hopefully, that it's not something inevitable that will happen to everybody's Megatron, but something that will happen immediately to maybe five people once they move a hip in any direction, and everybody else's will likely be fine.  

Since mine seems to be okay, really the only downside to this fucking gorgeous toy is that my kids expect me to transform it constantly, and also transform it immediately.  Like, children, okay, but come back in half an hour, all right?  This is not a satisfactory answer to them.  They want dinosaur mode right now.  

I hand them Rescue Bots T-Rex Optimus Prime.  You just twist that guy's waist and he's done.

So far the Studio Series Leader Class toys have been pretty baller.  Like, Blackout and Grimlock?  Very good.  And here comes Dark of the Moon Megatron and... oh no, he's also baller!  Dang!  Oh no!  These are all great!

For Dark of the Moon Megatron, it's about time.  He's my favorite live-action Megatron design, largely because he actually turns into some kind of Earth thing.  Plus he's wearing a tarp on his head like he's Obi-Wan Kenobi, chilling in Africa shooting elephants (but only in a scene cut from the movie but left in the various adaptations).  He's such an impressive visual that Megatron even looked like that for a bit in the IDW Generation 1 comics.  

The original Dark of the Moon Voyager Class toy of this design was Not Impressive!  He was this dinky, skinny little thing.  Gangly, even.  And so that never really satisfied.  

But this new toy does that design very well!  Does it an amount of justice!  You may be put off at first by the soft goods, since it's very obviously a small piece of beige fabric that does not look like it is actually a very large tarp on a very large robot.  But you can squish it around a bit in your fingers, or get it wet and drape it better until it dries, or other kind of weathering techniques, and it starts looking pretty okay.  I am not really done playing with mine yet, because I didn't want to make too many changes before taking photography.  Didn't want to give off too false of an impression.  But I'll be wadding it up a bit now that I'm wrapped here.  See if I can get properly to Ragged.

Impressively, Megatron scales well to Studio Series Optimus Prime in vehicle mode.  Like, their semi cabs are the same size, with Megatron towing a large covered trailer behind him.  How does this work, with Megatron transforming into only a slightly larger robot?  Here's the secret:

the truck cab is essentially hollow

For real, look under it, and there will be nothing in there.  It's a shell.  It breaks up into pieces and then compacts into his legs, which are much less hollow, because they are several strata of truck cab wadded up.  And then his thighs and upwards become the entirety of the trailer.  Fold the tarp over the top, wrap his little rubber chain harness across that, and you're done.  It's a very large truck-and-trailer mode, and it looks very neat.  Very Mad Max, with the spike bumper and what-have-you.  

And then you unwrap it back into a large hunchy robot with half its skull blown off and wearing a hood.  He's got a lot of personality and I like it.  

Bonus: He comes with Igor, the little disembodied head guy who appeared in the movie but otherwise didn't receive a toy, possibly because Hasbro didn't know he existed until it was too late.  Hasbro also didn't know DOTM Megatron carried a shotgun, and they released the shotgun with an Optimus Prime from the following movie.  It happens.  But hey!  Igor!

I really like Megs and Igor.  They're neat.

Honestly, from initial photos, I was kind of meh on this guy until I mentally envisioned what he'd look like with a darker helmet like Marvel Comics Megatron and suddenly dang I needed him.  I haven't painted it yet, as of this writing, but it will be very soon.  

I was initially kinda meh because, like, it's another G1-style Megatron.  I have a few of those!  And Combiner Wars Leader Class Megatron is pretty great already.  I use him on my Lost Light shelf, since he's properly Magnus-sized.  And my regular ol' Decepticon shelf has Classics Megatron, who is an amazing toy.... but is severely yellowing.  But is still an amazing toy!  It would hurt to replace him.  He transforms into a Nerf Gun.  It's hard to beat that. 

I didn't think I needed yet another Megatron.  I already skipped the regular Titans Return Megatron for the same reason.  (I later ended up getting the purple Takara Tomy redeco of him because, well, he's really Beast Wars Megatron and comes with a tiny Savage Noble.)  

But here I am with another Megatron again anyway.  And, you know what?  This is a pretty solid Megatron toy.  He's just trying to be a really good Megatron, The Way You Remember Him.  And he generally succeeds.  Sure, he transforms into a Cybertronian-style tank and not a gun, but the latter isn't gonna happen again and Megatrons transform into nonEarth stuff all the time now.  Megatron's been a Cybertronian vehicle for three out of his four movie appearances.  He was a Cybertronian jet for all of Transformers Prime.  He was a Cybertronian tank for all of More Than Meets The Eye/Lost Light.  And so, like, Megatron not being an Abrams tank or a Walther-P38 but some kind of space tank doesn't really register on the Not Megatron scale anymore.  He could be exactly this toy in a toyline full of otherwise licensed Earthy guys and you wouldn't blink an eye.

If you're a fan of 1984 Megatron, other than a gun transformation, this toy has basically everything you want.  He's obviously cribbing a lot from the original cartoon/comic book character model.  He's got an arm-mounted cannon that looks like a gun scope instead of a tank barrel.  His head is incredibly buckety.  And he even comes with a big sword, if you pine for the original Megatron accessory Japan got but we didn't.  You can peel the blade away and attach the tank cannon inside the sword on his back, if you want to duplicate the barrel placement of the original Megatron model.  (It may take some Cog pieces to get it to attach around his hip like the original toy.  I haven't tried, but it might be possible.)

Again, Stege emphasizes articulation.  There's that ankle tilting again, though you can lock those ankles in place completely vertically if you want.  Megatrons rarely have rotating waists, due to their transformations, but this Megatron manages.  His head really only turns left and right, but it's on a panel that rotates forwards and backwards a little before you rotate it too much and it looks kinda dippy.  

The transformation is more involved than you'd think.  I mean, he's a Cybertronian tank, so he could look more like a pile of Megatron parts if Hasbro wanted him to be.  But his chest tucks away underneath, and the hull of the tank folds out of his back and wraps around the front.  Like Sideswipe, a panel opens up on his legs to give room for his thighs to hide inside, though Megatron's thighs do some 90 degree bendery to make it more interesting.  The arm-mounted cannon pegs onto the arm via the usual 5mm peg, but it doesn't remove for transformation; it rotates around, pointing backwards in the middle of the turret that the arms fold.  The sword transforms into the tank's barrel and plugs into the back of the arm-mounted cannon.  The sword halves themselves tuck under the turret.  The turret can rotate in tank mode, which is always a welcome feature as it's not always possible.  The feet, uh, stick out the back.

The feet sticking out the back is really the toy's only visual downside.  

If you want a good, no-nonsense Megatron that gives you a good feel for the classic iteration of the character, you can't really go wrong with this guy.  Again, I think that's essentially what they were going for.  

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.

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.