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.