MP-36 Megatron

Masterpiece Megatron

"Peace through tyranny."

"Megatron combines brute strength, military cunning, ruthlessness and terror. Aches to return to Cybertron to conquest after destroying all Autobots on earth. Plans to possess all Earth resources. Incredibly powerful and intelligent. Fires nuclear- charged fusion cannon. Can link up interdimensionally to a black hole and draw antimatter from it for use as a weapon. No known weakness."

Megatron has always been on my top list of the nobility of evil characters (or just simply baddies?). He always had insanely convoluted plans to steal, capture or rule over something, somewhere, for whatever purpose - mostly increasing his own power. He also had a massive nuclear powered Fusion Cannon mounted on his forearm. Frank Welker as his voice. Oh, and it was pretty neat that he turned into a gun himself that the henchfolks fired at their feeble enemies.

At long, long last I was in the possession of a figure that was like taken out of the legendary G1 cartoon, articulated and complex, to be put on a pedestal at home! I honestly haven't been this excited about any item in years now, as I've been about MP-36 Megatron. I've been giggling, shown it to my colleages both in person and in the nonsense photos I've taken of him in various situations. What has been really wonderful is that enough of my coworkers have also seen the magnificence of this toy.

Specs

Strength      **********
Intelligence  **********
Speed         **********
Endurance     **********
Rank          **********
Courage       **********
Firepower     **********
Skill         **********

The robot form

Of course, as soon as I got home with him, I took out Soundwave with his accessories. For some twisted reason I was highly amused by Megatron pointing around with a true-to-scale version of himself in his gun form. Time traveling and/or parallel universes ftw.

His different faceplates were pretty handy. The serious face was maybe the one that I saw getting the least use on his head, as the angry and the evilly cackling ones were much more fun and better for posing around.

My younger daughter (aged < 2.5y) liked the laughing Megatron most. "He's happy. He's laughing - muahahahaha!". I took this as a very clear sign of my part of raising a child going just fine at this point.

His energon mace was more fun than I had thought, with the freely hanging chain and the somehow articulatable chain. Greetings from the episode two More than meets the eye, part II, the Sherman dam!

The pistol and the damaged face combined with the damaged chest plate were of course taken from the movie itself, I just happened to miss the target at this point in history, the beaten and almost defeated Optimus Prime.

As a funny and nerdy little detail the head behind the faceplates had the same face construct that the viewers saw for a couple of short seconds in the movie.

His Mind Control Helmet was also something that was going to wait for a later time for better posing. That was a pretty interesting choice for an accessory, I thought.

Maybe I said this the last time or maybe I didn't, but the blade of the laser sword could be detached and inserted into the pistol for a shooting effect. That was quite fun, too.

Soundwave

Naturally I had to put my both large Masterpieces to stupid poses together. That's what I got them for in the first place.

A meeting or ai scene from the '87 movie: "Soundwave, play back Laserbeak's findings!"

At some point I realized that Megatron was about a head/helmetful shorter than the posable Lego Darth Vader figure. As they both had a similar weapon at hand, I took a few nonsensical dueling photos. Being burdened by very little in the smartness department I took my photos against the light and this last one was the only one I could consider sharing. Some other time, then.

Walther P38

Everyone has been saying, yelling even, about the MP-36's transforming process being very complicated and very time consuming, especially on the first run. Considering that transforming Soundwave took me a relatively amazing amount of time when I first did it, I knew this wasn't going to be nearly as quick nor easy.

Thanks to the real world -based scheduling and such I started on Wednesday evening. Then I progressed a bit in the early hours of Thursday, then finished it up after work and whatnot on Thursday evening. The instructions were at worst almost useless, because the tiny B&W pictures (with the component(s) in question marked in grey) weren't too clear in all the cases and all the descriptions and hopefully helpful hints were in Japanese. I used two youtube-videos and a screwdriver (+) to get me through this show.

This process took closer to ninety minutes, which wasn't little, even if you forgave me for a bit of wasted time with the start/stop and context switchings.
Still.

Oh. my.

It was insane. And when you attached the stock and the silencer (this one very loosely and badly so that it didn't get stuck and even broken (or breaking other bits)), it was even more insane.

A case of order-delivery process

21.8. - Searching

In the final days of August I got inspired and started searching for a new element to my collection of weird junk. Being a tightwad of sorts I just checked the BBTS' price for a reference point (they also had eyewatering S&H prices and even more importantly, they were legally obliged to visually ruin what I wanted with a couple of orange pieces of plastic, which did not inspire me either). Next on my list I checked the Japanese 'zon but I hadn't got an account there (I had this weird idea of the European UK/DE Amazons syncing but maybe I had created my accounts so long ago I had just forgotten) and the prices in the East were over 2x over the ones shipped to the USA (also ruined with excess plastic pieces in the country of origin).

Within my own continent the German and British stores had suspiciously cheap artifacts listed. The explanation was that they were the not-so-obediently-licences-things kind of things. Damn.

Still, the collector bug had bit me and I ended up thinking seriously how bad the difference between a knockoff and an official piece were. The end result of my studying was that no, not bad at all. If nothing else, this could provide me with a sure and absolute answer to the question "Do I want to own the official version despite the price tag?" and if that answer was going to be along the lines of True I could just order one and this one could be donated to the Project Assistants for playing. Or I could bring it to the office as decoration!

28.8. - Placing the order

After wasting some more days pondering and changing my mind I gave my written orders to the German Amazon and started waiting. Of course I could've ordered the exact same thing from ebay as well, I just had not thought of it. Perhaps I thought, in the back of my sick mind, that this could prove to be less of a hassle in practice, in vain, as I was 100% certain of having to pick up the phone and call the customs office for item codes.

I pixelated the example pic just for the fun of it, even an eyeless person would recognize this

Waiting

The box had started its journey on the 30th and I was perfectly prepared to wait for about twenty days before anything of importance was going to happen. Of course I was refreshing the "track package" view a number of times per day just in case my order pinged at a checkpoint somewhere along its route. Every single time it was the same: no updates.

11.9. - Reception

On a Wednesday morning I arrived to work as usual, turned on the lights, started the coffee machine, being the first one in. Stumbled to my workstation half-awake and found a surprising cardboard box on the corner of my desk! It hadn't been stopped by the customs, even as I was so sure it was going to be in their clutches for a painfully long amount of hours while the bureaucracy grinded forward. Not that I was complaining, no no no.

11.9. - Deboxification

Of course I had to open the actual box right away, immediately, stat! I was giddy as a schoolboy, as Dr. Jones put it. On the topmost blister we had a set of spare faces, a key to Vector Sigma, a mistreated alternative chest plate, the mind control helmet, a laser dagger/sword, a pistol, an energy mace with a posable and a freely floating energy chain, a flight stand and a silencer. Giggle giggle.

Following the packing order the bottom blister had Megatron himself with his forearm-mountable cannon. I may have chuckled out loud for the nth time in a short time. Luckily I was still alone at the office, the hour being indecent and all, so I didn't get any odd looks.

Oh yeah, there was also an instruction booklet, but 98% of the textual content was 100% useless for me, as I didn't understand a single character that was not from the Latin alphabet %)

At some point, while I was detaching the Fusion Cannon that I had just quickly installed on his forearm, you know, to see if it fit, I accidentally pressed on the button on it. It had come with batteries installed! Again, I may have laughed out loud, after being briefly spooked by the unexpected sound effect.

In the mode 1 the cannon played out the transforming sound, it had both the sounds of transforming into the robot form and into the alternative mode.
The mode 2 played a Megatron quote from the Japanese version of the cartoon, it had a set of five, obviously I didn't understand a word. After reading what they were I could almost get them. Now the world was just missing a Frank Welker sound chip...
Mode 3 played the firing sound of the Fusion Cannon. Kaboom! KABOOM!

Muah!

The minion of MP-13B

Deficiency of my cassette collection

When searching for MP-02 I was grumbling about that Soundwave only coming with five out of six of his most important cassette minions, as Ratbat was solely bundled with the black version (MP-13B). This summer I realized that someone could sell just the individual minicassettes and started searching. Before long I found myself in ebay and of course someone was offering a Ratbat for mere 8€ (incl. S&H).

A couple of weeks later

The guesstimate for delivery was almost three weeks in the future, so I wasn't really holding my breath. Then, two whole days before the first day of the timeframe I noticed a padded envelope on the desk next to mine. I obviously assumed it was for a colleague, who occasionally had worked there. My well-intended idea was to take it to him, as I had seen him in the café area a while earlier, so I rechecked the recipient's name and oops, it was for me instead!

The bells in my head were still silent, because as I said, I wasn't expecting to get my order delivered in at least a week. Only when the bubble-wrap revealed a small, magenta-coloured transparent plastic box, I got super excited. Of course I showed the thing happily around the office, only Tuomas from IT knew to appreciate my shoppings. Oh well, at least I wasn't the only one who thought it was cool!

Ratbat

"The road is my dinner plate." 

"Has no friends, only business partners... his only allegiance is to himself. Refuels by plunging his mecha-fangs into new cars' gas lines -- the better made the car, the better the gasoline tastes. Maximum flying speed: 104 km/h. Carries two radar-guided, free-electron lasers that detect the presence of an object as small as a fly. Wings contain mechanical sensors for locating fuel sources. Has 30cm wingspan that can enlarge to three meters. Wings are vulnerable to artillery."

In the old Marvel comics Ratbat was the baddie who told Trypticon what to do, bossed / scared the fleshlings on the Decepticon's paradise island resort and who knows what else. Sadly I've forgotten so much over the years, and as I gave away my pretty-well set up collection of the comics (those that were translated to Finnish in the late '80s - early '90s) about an eon ago, I couldn't really refresh my memories.

The great overseer of fuel consumption, the minion of the Comms Officer of the Deceptions, the sixth minicassette minion. That was it, now this part of my collection was complete.

Specs

Strength      **********
Intelligence  ********** 
Speed         ********** 
Endurance     ********** 
Rank          ********** 
Courage       ********** 
Firepower     ********** 
Skill         **********

The toy

A slightly bothering little detail was that the cassette container was coloured like a charged Energon Cube. Or maybe it worked nicely with the nature of the character. At any rate, I was certainly not going to order more stuff just to get a clear plastic box for him to keep the set looking uniform.

Cassette form

As all the other minicassettes, the Masterpiece Ratbat was wonderful. Funnily enough, now that I was rechecking these photos, I noticed that the shape in the front face of the cassette looked like a skull.

Bat

Because Ratbat's body was pretty small compared to the massive wings, the transforming process required while forming the torso the outer edges of the cassette and the center piece were to be rotated around and bent over a few times. It was gorgeous!

"What is your command, commander Ratbat?"