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.
