People have been feeling kinda sore over the last new (non-live-action) Galvatron toy we got, way back in 2008, because that toy was garbage.  It was!  It's one of the few toys I skipped from that line because it just looked terrible all-around.  It was way too short and it looked awkward and it just wasn't very good.  I did end up getting a later redeco of that toy as part of a box set that came with a comic book I wanted.  My feelings did not change.

Since then, folks have been clamouring for a Non Sucky Galvatron, one that was a little more substantial.  And eight years later, lo, there was another Galvatron, a size class higher, who transformed into his classic cannon mode instead of a realistic Earth tank, and also there was a third jet mode, sure, why not.  WILL THIS BE THE GALVATRON WE WERE WAITING FOR???

I waited for the TakaraTomy version of the toy, which had some additional paint apps I wanted, though the plastic colors itself are a little too lilac for me.  The American one's a very dark and vibrant, classic purple.  But, eh, I have plenty of toys in that purple, and at least the lilac's kind of a change of pace.  

In-hand, the toy hits just about everything you'd want in a Galvatron toy.  It's sizeable, it transforms fine from robot to cannon to jet mode (jet mode's more interesting than cannon, I feel), and it has a good presence.  What's wrong?  Well, first of all, the arm cannon kind of gets in the way of itself.  It's so large and bulbous that Galvatron's right arm can't do much at all.  Getting it into positions is either a chore or impossible.  The cannon is easily removable -- it's required for transformation -- but a Galvatron without a cannon is probably on nobody's want list.

But the big deal is his goddamn head.  The Leader Class toys, Blaster and Powermaster Optimus Prime, have big-ol' helmets that deploy from the back and fold over the Little Head Dude, almost completely covering it.  And these helmets are included on the neck rotation hinge, and everything's fine.  Galvatron's little head dude (who is Megatron) plugs into the neck fine enough, but like the Leader Class toys, the part of the head that makes him look like Galvatron is stored elsewhere.  You open the chest, and the front of Galvatron's three-pointed crown helmet spring-load flips out and sort of almost does its job completing the look.  The face itself is buried a few millimeters deep behind the flip-out helmet part, and it looks kind of awful from any angle but head-on.

The real kicker is that the head can no longer move.   Oh, you can get a few degrees of movement left or right, just a fraction of a millimeter or so, but this is an inperceptible difference.  Though the inside of the torso looks like it might accommodate some rotation, it's the connection of the helmet to this rotational stuff that gets in its own way.  Effectively, Galvatron cannot turn his head.  

And so, between that and the very awkward way in which his cannon negatively impacts his arm articulation, there is not much you can do with his robot mode that does not make him look dippy.  It's such an incredibly frustrating problem, that quite a few folks have modded their toys, removing the Galvatron head piece entirely from the flip-up part and gluing it permanently onto the little head dude.  Without the flip-up part contraption, the head can move fine.  But this takes a lot of skilled kitbashing work, and you end up with a little Megatron headmaster dude that no longer fits into the cockpit of his own toy because of the added Galvatron helmet part.  

So if you're cool with a Galvatron toy that only looks good from directly head-on, then this is your guy.  I mean, his other two modes are pretty good, the jet in particular, but goddamn.  

Back in 2004, the official Transformers convention was run by different people.  One of their last gasps was releasing mockups of toys that would-have-been if they'd kept the license and Fun Publications hadn't taken over.  One of these toy concepts was RID Megatron/Car Robots Gigatron in red and gold with a new Beast Wars Megatron head.  Dubbed "Transmetal 3 Megatron," he would have come with a rubber ducky accessory with a 5mm peg and starred in the then-current Transformers: Universe comic books as the reincarnation of a post-Beast Machines Megatron.  

It was an okay idea.  At the time, I was lukewarm on it.  I have never liked RID Megatron's toy very much, and I liked Beast Wars Megatron as a dragon (instead of a T. rex) even less.  And so I was pretty okay with the toy not happening because of the change of licenses.  Back then Beast Wars Megatron was not a distant memory of a beloved favorite character, forgotten and buried under decades of subsequent franchises.  I didn't need another right then.

But I'm much more than okay with one now.  I miss Megs, and I'm super happy to get a new toy of him.  I've suffered a Beast Megatron drought, and this toy is a fresh glass of cool water.  

In the meantime, other people kept up demand.  They kept asking Fun Pub when they were gonna make this guy.  And their answer was always "eehhh we dunno" because, well, frankly, it wasn't their idea, and it makes sense to me that they'd rather do their own ideas.  You don't take over a license from somebody else and crib their notebooks, you make your own notebooks.  And so it kind of makes sense, in Fun Pub's final BotCon, to finally put this guy out there, as a bookend.  So as the previous licensee ended, so too will these guys.

If only they had made more than, like, five of him!  Jeez!

Anyway, yeah, this toy is pretty nice-looking.  He's still a toy that has ... nine?  ten? modes, and all but one or two of them are garbage.  But the robot mode is pretty fucking great, and the dragon mode is pretty okay.  The jet mode and the gargoyle-mode-you-can't-do-anymore-because-the-snout-was-removed-to-fit-megatron's-head and especially the car mode... they are not very good.  And you can make him into sort-of-a-hand, which is neat, but, like, there's still giant wings on it and that kind of ruins the illusion.  But, again, robot mode is beautiful.  

Some problems I should mention: He's started to immediately shed his chrome for some people.  Me, I put some clear nailpolish on him before I even transformed him, to stave this off.  So think about that.  Maybe in a few months when everybody's TM3 Megatrons are completely chrome-shedded, he'll come down from the like $800 he's going for on eBay.   Also, the forward-movement ratchets on hips can be... frightening.  Like, squeaky-this-is-gonna-break frightening.  So I had to open him up and sand off some nubs.  He also was erroneously given a Dinobot spark crystal instead of a Predacon one, probably because the Dinobot spark crystal tooling is the only spark crystal tooling that still exists.  There's a Predacon logo sticker that's sold separately that can cover this up.  So, like, keep that all in mind before plunking down major cash for him.  

He doesn't come with the originally-planned rubber ducky 5mm accessory.  There was a normal-sized rubber ducky sold at the convention, but, like, it's just a normal rubber ducky with the BotCon logo stamped on it.  

---

Okay, since this toy has like six (five?) modes, and I need a wall of text to fit all the pictures in, let's *sigh* talk about the convention comic these guys featured in.

Ever since "The Agenda" aired, the legacy of G1 has been used as a cudgel to beat any possible new life out of the Beast Wars cartoon.  For a good two seasons, Beast Wars gave us new characters in a new setting that divorced us so far from what we knew about Transformers we had really no choice but to submerse ourselves in these new possibilities.  And it was pretty glorious!  But then we got "The Agenda" and a hook back into G1, and it's like a switch flipped.  Beast Wars-the-cartoon was now chainganged to this fucking monster and was going to be devoured.  Everyone had their "this is how the old war ended, this is how the era of the Maximals began" story, and you want to know the secret?

They are all bullshit.  

Knowing that stuff is antithetical to what makes Beast Wars great.  To the Beast Warriors, G1 was the stuff of legend, a distant terrifying-yet-glorious past that is best left to the imagination.  ...sort of.  Some people's imaginations leave much to be desired, and those're the kind of imaginations that keep getting fucking put in charge of writing Beast Wars stories.  They decide, one by one, that each character/toy in the Beast Wars needs to be some guy from G1.  Sure, Beast Wars Grimlock was explicitly the G1 guy on his packaging bio.  We'll let that slide.  (but does he have to be on the Axalon????) Okay, there's a Soundwave, so maybe that Soundwave is the other Soundwave, even though that Soundwave is a goddamned bat/gator Animorph toy!  Hey, did you know that Magnaboss shared its components names with some G1 guys?  Well, you're in luck, because now Prowl, Silverbolt, and Ironhide from G1 are in Beast Wars.  Oh, there's ANOTHER Beast Wars Prowl?  Hey, guess what, now they're BOTH G1 Prowl, simultaneously, with one being a clone of the other!  

Was that already kind of annoying?  Well, this comic and the accompanying profile cards gives you more.  Two of the members of the Tripredacus council are probably old Decepticons you know!  Under-3 might be a famous Autobot!  Autobot Inferno might be Beast Wars Inferno!  There is so very little Beast Wars left when you get done with all this shit.  It's not even clever.  No one's going to be handed an award for noticing two completely different guys have the same name.

Did you like the enigma surrounding the Great War and the reverence the Beast Warriors had for the Autobots and Decepticons of the past?  Well, too bad, because everyone in Beast Wars was around for those years and were important and sharing the same space.  Remember when Beast Megatron was entering the Ark and everyone comatose onboard was large and special and magical, and the whole event felt like an intrusion upon sacred ground?  Well, fuck that, now Megatron knew those guys and was once as large as them and they hung out all the time and he bossed them around because he was in charge.  Beast Wars Megatron himself was a Decepticon.  Everyone in the Beast Wars was either an Autobot or a Decepticon.  All the show's talk of "our Decepticon/Autobot ancestors" is taken out behind the shed and shot.  

It just makes the universe so... amazingly, pathetically SMALL.  This comic book's universe is so small, you guys.  Did you like the mystery of the 300-year-span of time between G1 and BW?  Well, good news, turns out there wasn't anything new to know.  You already know the cast.  They were the guys you already knew, and some of those guys are also the same guys as the other guys, secretly!   You weren't missing anything.

I think how little regard the comic has for its alleged source material is made clear in the following: 300 years ago, Optimus Primal was already on board the Axalon (which is G1-robot-scaled), serving as its captain, and already going on exploration missions.  With Rattrap.  WITH RATTRAP.  After the comic was released and objections about Rattrap knowing Primal for that long were raised, the response was, "Well, they never say EXPLICITLY how long they knew each other!"  The fuck they didn't.  It was abundantly clear in their every interaction in the cartoon.  Rattrap's entire first season arc is buried in the idea that he starts out with zero regard for Optimus Primal and then over the course of the Beast Wars slowly warms up to him and respects him.  At no point does Rattrap literally say "I've only known you for like two days," sure, but he is constantly degrading and belittling Optimus Primal.  He places no value on his commander's life or on the lives of his fellow crewmembers.  He only cares for saving his own skin.  This is a guy who has served with Optimus Primal on this same ship for THREE HUNDRED YEARS?  How the hell was he not fired 299 years, 11 months, and 29 days ago?  "This your first day on the job or somethin'?" he asks.  "You sure you're cut out for this commander gig?" he asks.  The apologists say he's being sarcastic.  Is the entire first goddamn season's character arc also sarcastic?  

This informs my final point: This comic book feels like it was written from the Wikipedia article about Beast Wars.  It's like somebody's bad book report.  There's some attention to surface detail ("Rattrap doesn't outright say how long he's known Primal!") but there's no proven familiarity with the actual material as it is viewed in-the-moment.  But that's okay, because all what made Beast Wars great is obviously secondary to making it connect to G1.

That is sarcasm, by the way.

I was pretty damn satisfied with my 2006 Classics Megatron.  He was gray and black and green and orange and purple and he transformed into a motherfuckin' Nerf gun.  The green and orange and purple was really only there to help him pass toy gun regulations, but it really made me love him.  Plus, you know, Nerf gun.  Bonus.  

And so when we were first introduced to the new, bigger Leader Class Megatron, I was initially a little meh.  The new toy was in classic colors, meaning the purple and orange and green were gone, and he was back to being silver and black and red.  Silver and black and red are fine colors, it's just, y'know, not as interesting to me.  Plus the toy fell into the body proportion aesthetic a lot of the new Transformers team's stuff seemed to find itself in -- wide body with thin legs.  It's a good set of proportions for Animated Batman, but I prefer my bots to be more stompy.  

But, well, Stuff is happening in the comics.  Megatron's an Autobot now.  He's joined the cast of my favorite Transformers fiction, and it's phenomenal.  And this new Leader Class Megatron toy would include a change of Autobot faction stickers to represent that development.  Suddenly the toy became Lost Light Megatron, and I had to have it.  Sure, the rest of him's not specifically designed after the body he has in the comics now -- it's more of a generic "G1 Megatron as a silver tank" thing -- but it's close enough and that's its official intent and that's how my brain works.  Plus he's a big enough toy to actually fit in with my Lost Light display.  Slapping an Autobot symbol on my Classics Megatron would result in a guy who stands eye-to-eye with my Rodimus and Brainstorm, and that just won't do.  

Original misgivings aside, he's a great toy in person.  His skinny legs aren't bothersome when he's actually in front of you in 3D, and they ratchet to and fro with satisfying clicks.  Plus his legs are shaped that way to accommodate his real working rubber treads.  He's got a set of real working rubber treads on his back and a set in his legs.  They don't combine into one single pair of working treads in tank mode, but that's fine.  

That the toy is mostly covered in silver paint also helps.  He's this giant shiny attractive thing, and there aren't huge spots of unpaintable nylon plastic breaking up his silver like some metallic-painted Transformers have.  Sure, there are a handful of unpainted silver spots, but they're not conspicuous or incongruous.  Despite not having purple or green, he's an attractive chunk of plastic.  He does have some orange detail, though.  I'm sure it helps.

In tank mode he's got a rotating turret... if you leave him half-transformed.  The proper instructions have you close his pelvis onto the back of the turret, locking it in place, but if you don't connect that piece,  he's engineered so that the whole turret rotates.  He's got springloaded missile launcher in his barrel/arm cannon, and also both of his secondary tank weapons combine into a longer rifile for him to carry in robot mode.  When you lift up his chestplate during transformation, there's a sculpted spark casing under there, with details borrowed from its appearance in Beast Wars.  

This toy is also available in Armada Megatron flavor, if you so choose.  That version has a new head (with the antlers) and is mostly green, gray, purple, and florescent orange instead of mostly silver and black.  But that dude isn't in my comics and I like my original one better, with the real working wrist-shiv deployment, so screw it.  

The only huge disappointment with this guy is the sticker sheet.  Sure, I like the Autobot logos, and they work well enough on him, but Hasbro also put his original toy's chest deco on there.  You know, the little swirly loops that look like chest hair.  The problem is, they printed them on a white background, like his symbols, instead of a clear background, so they look pretty terrible on his chest.  Reprolabels better solve this one for us.  I need those chest swirlies.  I'll keep the real swirlie stickers on him until then, because my love for the chest swirlies slightly edges out how terrible I think these stickers look.  

His real name is "Sharkticon Megatron," but I just like calling him Fish Megatron.  FISH MEGATRON!  WITH HIS TARTARSAUCE SWORD.

Tartarex Sword?  Whatever.

Beast Hunters gave us a bunch of extensively-remolded guys I already had as crazy-armored beasty versions of themselves, and while that appeals to me on a toyetic level, I didn't want to end up with a double set of the cast.  But some of these guys I just couldn't resist.  Like Fish Megatron here.  

I mean, look at him.

He's fantastic.

I'm also happy to report that his plastic tolerances feel a little more satisfying and he clicks together more securely than the original version.  If you don't care that Megatron doesn't look like this on the teevee show, this is an objectively better toy.  

He does have big fins on his arms, which means his usually-arm-mounted cannon has a longer connection peg so it reaches past them, but that's not what you want to do with the weapon.  You want to transform it into the monstrous sword mode.  You really do.  It completes him.  Screw arm cannons.  Giant heavy fish sword, dudes.

FISH MEGATRON

(Megatrout?)

Part of me wanted to just drop that blog post title bomb, throw these photos at you, and then back away slowly before running away in shame.  But no, I guess I'll actually, like, do my job and talk about these guys a little.

Man, Megatron Origin.  There was a point in time in IDW's recent history where the powers that be were like, "hey, would anybody care if we ignored this?"  Megatron Origin is one of those.  For a long while it was this isolated piece of weirdness buried deep in the IDW continuity's past.  I'm not sure where it went wrong, whether it was the story, the art, the coloring, or a perfect storm combination of all three.  It was really hard to tell what was going on in that miniseries, artwise, and when you got through the gray art down to the story, maybe it was for the best?  

Artwise, though, those folks have gone on to do some really awesome things very well.  Alex Milne is now the the very readable penciler of More Than Meets The Eye, and Josh Perez is now the very readable colorist for Robots in Disguise.  Those two are now seriously among my favorite creative people.  Eric Holmes hasn't written anything Transformers since, so who knows if today he'd likewise be amazing. 

So I'm just gonna blame Megatron Origin, the entity.  Maybe it was cursed.  The story was repurposed from an abandoned Dreamwave idea, so maybe reanimating the story for IDW was akin to building over sacred burial ground, with like Pat Lee ghosts seeping up into the story's foundation and haunting the shit out of it and also probably not paying anyone.   Either way, I believe we shouldn't let its memories soil the talented people involved.  

Regardless, here are these two Megatron Origin toys.  The first is a retool of Generations Scourge with a new head as Senator Ratbat.  It's a Japanese release, so I'll forgive it for not having a "REPUBLIC SENATOR!!!" call-out starburst on the front of the packaging.  In Megatron Origin, Ratbat was a pre-war Senator with like a real humanoid body and everything, and he wore a bat-head-shaped helmet on his head.  And then at the end SPOILERS Soundwave extracts his spark and shoves it into this tiny bat Recordicon body and there you go.  This toy does its best to replicate that first body by translating Senator Ratbat's color scheme onto Generations Scourge's toy.  It does a pretty good job.  Like the other Japanese Generations toys, he's in shiny plastic and shiny paint.  This would visually clash with my other Generations toys in usual circumstances, but this is a Senator, so I'll let him be exceptionally shiny.  

The tiny Megatron is an entirely new Legends Class toy of Megatron in his original miner body, when he was a revolutionary for social reform before he got a taste for violence that drove him evil.  And so he's got the hazard stripes painted on him that he and his fellow miners had.  He's a pretty amazing Legion Class toy, considering some of the others!  His turret can rotate all the way around, and his head turns.  Both of those are kind of crazy for a toy his size.  He transforms from robot to tank by folding his arms in front of him to form the turret and then opening up his legs so they can fit around the rest of him to form a shell.  

He also comes with a tiny Chop Shop, but I don't know where he is now.  I need to clean up the office.

Megatron is available in American stores now.  Ratbat is available in Japanese stores as of a few months ago.

Man, I still have a huge-ass backlog of toys from BotCon and SDCC which I haven't talked about.  I remember when weekend updates were unlocked during the Dumbing of Age Kickstarter, and folks worried I wouldn't have time left to do comics.  Oh, I'll have time to do comics!  Just... other non-comic things fall through the cracks, is all.  Like toy reviews.  And so let's try to put a dent in this backlog.

One thing I really really need to talk about is this customized BWX Megatron.  Cheetimus painted one up to look like Transmetal Megatron, which is basically the one thing this universe is sorely missing.  And I know I talk a big game about Dinobot and Ratchet and Hot Shot, but I assure you that Beast Wars Megatron is, in fact, my favorite Transformers character of all time.  And that his Transmetal form is my favorite iteration of him, though I think I like his BWX toy the best.

So obviously, the BWX toy painted up in is Transmetal colors just might be the best thing possible.

My decision was made for me, and now he is mine.  

I bet if you wanted one, too, you could commission one from Cheets.

I tell you what, I did not care a lot about Megatron's new stealth bomber body when it was introduced in IDW's first ongoing Transformers title.  I mean, I didn't hate it.  It just kind of existed.  It was  undoubtedly a thing, just not a thing I gave a lot of thought about.  And it had a big M on his forehead, which I'm not sure if I love or hate for its goofiness.

But then Hasbro decided not only to make a toy of it, but to also commission of comics about the toys they were making to include in the packaging.  And so we got this amazing comic book both written and illustrated by Nick Roche.  I wish Nick Roche would write more.  Hell, I wish he would draw more.  .... while he writes.  He also both wrote and drew Spotlight: Kup, which is another fantastic Transformers story, easily one of the best.  The connect between what the story wants to do and what it actually does is strong.  Not an inch is wasted.

You might roll your eyes at a "Spotlight: Megatron" issue because, yeah, oh boy, FINALLY, there's gonna be a focus on Megatron, leader of the Decepticons, ABOUT TIME, but the comic book lives up to and exceeds your expectations.  We see Megatron returning to life in a new body amidst his crumbling army, and we see how we begins to build that army back up again.  He has a way of things, a formula, and center to that formula is Starscream.  However, Starscream's as much in shambles as the rest of the Decepticons, and so Megatron literally spends the issue beating Starscream back into his usual self again.  And Jesus God, is it slashy, and not in a kind way.  By issue's end, you have a perfect idea of how Megatron's brain works.  It's brutal, but amazingly executed.

ANYWAY NOW I CARE A BUNCH ABOUT THIS PARTICULAR MEGATRON BODY I GUESS.  Thanks, comic.  Stupid excellent storytelling.

Stealth Megatron is a Deluxe.  This means he's on the small size for towering over much of your collection as he should, but there's a Starscream who's arriving on pegs at the same time who is just about the right size relative to him.  Legends Starscream is also an IDW comics design, but a discarded one that was never used for Starscream himself (just Thundercracker).  Also, this Starscream comes with a tiny Waspinator partner/weapon.  I'm just piling on the reasons to own these things, aren't I.  And so I've been having my Deluxe Megatron smack my Legends Starscream around my desk since Megatron arrived in the mail.  They're a good pair.

Despite Stealth Megatron's Deluxeness, he's pretty meaty.  His arms have a great mass to them, and he just looks like this intimidating chunk of dude who could mess you up... so long as you don't put him next to anybody else in his size class.  He transforms by bunching up into this pentagon-shaped thing, and then you tear his arm cannon in half and plug them into the ends for wings.  It's a little complicated and messy the first time you try it, but on the second tries and beyond it gets pretty simple.  The learning curve is fairly short.

And of course the comic book comes with it.  If you don't own the comic book, pick up the toy just to read it, dammit.  (Or here it is on Comixology.)

It's another year of Transformers and Halls and Fames!  And yet again, there's a Beast Wars guy in the fan-selected nominees!  I'm gung ho for 2010's Dinobot and I enjoy 2011's Waspinator, but I have to tell you, Beast Wars Megatron is genuinely my favorite Transformers character of all time.  And once Hasbro let us know that even though they auto-inducted "Megatron" for the first year of the Hall of Fame, it didn't mean we couldn't fan-nominate the young upstart who took his name, traveled into Earth's past, and blew off Optimus Prime's head!

So I'm voting BW Megs.  There won't be a storyline or anything pushing for him this year like I did for Dinobot, but I just thought I'd let you know the voting has begun.

(Though if Sky Byte wins instead, I won't be pissy or anything.)

I got United Tank Megatron shipped to me along with my Windcharger/Wipe-Out, but the deluge of Prime toys that happened shortly thereafter kept me from talking about him until now.  Priorities, man!

I got Tank Megatron for a few reasons.  First, I've never owned the Classics-era Deluxe tank Megatron toy.  They kept on redecoing him as Megatron, and I didn't need another Megatron.  So this was a new toy to me.

Secondly, on the tail of the first reason, a character who isn't Megatron shares these colors.  Late in Generation 2 there was a "Hero" Megatron toy that was purple and blue and orange in black camo.  I own it, in fact!  ...even though it's broken in places and missing some accessories.  It was one of my first BotCon purchases.  But in Europe, that toy was released as a different guy called Archforce.  All they did was modify the sticker on the underside of his chest that said "MEGATRON RULES" to say nothing at all.  (I love that sticker, by the way.)  This new Tank Megatron doesn't have any "MEGATRON RULES" on him, so that says Archforce to me!  Sweet, an Archforce toy.

And most importantly, the thing just looks damn pretty.

Reviews of the toy were not very favorable, so I knew I wasn't getting a spectacular figure.  He's not bad or terrible.  He's sort of in the middle there.  Most people seemed to hate that Megatron didn't have two proper hands.  His cannon arm was actually a gimmicked propeller-spinning thing, commonly called a "rotate blade."  You fold out his cannon in front of his wrist and press a lever on the arm, causing the thing to spin.  There's no hand on that arm, so folks got annoyed.   I've got plenty of Megatrons with two hands, and my mental picture of Archforce doesn't demand a number of hands, so the gimmick doesn't bother me.  Besides, I love rotate blades.

He's a pretty toy who I can easily repurpose as an obscure dude I don't own.  I should probably throw a G2 symbol sticker on him.

We'd sort of guessed that there'd eventually be a Voyager Class-scale Megatron toy of his Transformers: Prime design. Hasbro probably wasn't going to leave his only representation a Deluxe inside of a multipack. But we had no news of such a toy, no catalog listings or stolen test shots or anything. Until, that is, he suddenly showed up for sale across the ocean at Argos. Usually when we hear news of a toy, it's six months in advance. The lead time between learning about Voyager Megatron and him being for sale was no more than a few hours.

And since I've been anticipating a larger Megatron toy for basically forever, and the multipacked Deluxe still being a no-show, I was willing to ship one from over there to here. I'm mad like that. I asked my Twitter followers for assistance, and a dude named Tricky ended up being my very awesome helper. He's part of a podcast called The Nerdsphere Network, by the way. Go check it out.

Because the leadtime was so short, hopefully nobody  had it in their heads too long that he was going to be gloriously shiny silver like the usually-airbrushed stock photography.  No, Megatron is mostly a matte french gray.  Some of his plastic is caramelly, like his feet, knees, hands, and fusion cannon.  The difference between the gray and the caramel seems a little too pronounced in some photographs, but in person the effect comes off a lot better.  It varies his colors up a bit without requiring paint or using a color too divergent from what he's supposed to be.

The reason I love this Megatron design is his robot mode, and this is where the toy shines.  He's wide yet slick, a balance of monstrous and sophistication.  Other than a lack of a waist joint, there's enough articulation present to get him into most poses that I'd want.  Some Megatrons look kind of dippy while raising their arm up in the air to aim their fusion cannon, but not this guy.  The open palm helps a bit, but I'll let you in on the real reason.  The tops of his shoulders are actually separate from his biceps, and are suspended above them on struts.  This not only helps him look better when his arms are going every which way, but they also help keep his pointy shoulder kibble from clipping his back kibble as you move his arms around.  That would be a real problem otherwise.

The vehicle mode is... sufficient.  It's a little bulkier than I'd like, but I'm not sure any better could be done.  Megatron is a big bulky dude, and he somehow extrudes himself out into a thin, sleek jet.  The toy renders the jet much more thickly, with the legs obviously hanging underneath, and his shoulder spikes tufting out from under his wings like armpit hair.  He's 80% fuselage and 20% wingspan.  It's unfortunate.  But it gives me a great robot mode, so at least the better mode is the one I wanted most.

The Voyager Class toys in this line are called Powerizers.  This is because they have electronic lights.  Megatron's fusion cannon is where Megatron keeps his electronics, and there's a Mechtech-like gimmickry engineered into it as well.  If you push in the plunger in the back, segments of his sword swing forward and into place, in theory becoming a single blade.  In practice, it's tough to get the sword parts to align properly in both configurations.  You can force the sword into a good configuration one end-point or the other, but never so it's at a satisfactory alignment in both.    When the plunger is pushed all the way in, a light inside the cannon turns on and shines into the back of the blade, lighting it up.

Megatron also comes with a handheld blade weapon that pegs into the top of his wrist while a grip slips into his palm.   I think this is just an extra accessory for funsies.  I can't find anything like it on his character model in either modes.

Long story short, major digs for Megatron.  His toy has gravitas, which is what was important to me.  His vehicle mode has less gravitas, what with the whole stubby wings deal, but it's not a dealbreaker to me.  Plus, hey, light-up fusion cannon!  And it doesn't make horrible sounds like the original Galvatron toy!

Oh man, those sounds.