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Optimus Prime

Transformers Legacy United
by yo go re

Technically, isn't every Transformer animated? Even the "live" ones are still CGI, not physical machines the humans interacted with.

When Optimus Prime crashed to Earth with the rest of the Autobots, he didn't really know what it meant to be a hero. He spent most of his time in space dreaming of glory, but it wasn't until he was first faced with the terrible decisions that inevitably come with leadership that he finally understood. He became a true hero - a being who does what he does not for glory and fame, but because no-one else can do it.

That's the text from the original 2008 figure, because Hasbro didn't have enough tokens available to make ChatGPT write anything for this version.

The more Animated figures get updated for Legacy, the more insulting the 2022 Bulkhead looks. I know (now) that that one wasn't technically an Animated figure, but Prime Bulkhead looked even less like that toy somehow than even the Animated did. But this figure takes even more cues from its source material than Prowl did. This isn't an Animated Optimus who's been G1-ized, this is just a new Animated Optimus.

Every chunky, angled line of this figure is a direct update of Derrick J. Wyatt's design. The only TFA Prime I had was the Deluxe Class two-pack, with appearances of the Voyager Class mold being limited to Motormaster and Toxitron, so technically this is a new toy for me no matter what. If you compare this to the actual cartoon model sheets you'll spot some differences (the elbows and legs should be thinner, the tires on his legs should sit lower, etc.), but it's all minor stuff that doesn't detract from the overall appearance. You could drop this figure into a 2008 collection and it wouldn't seem immediately out of place.

Prime is armed with his big axe, with its translucent blue energon blade emitting from the silver tech and red head. There's a hole in the back where you could plug in a flame effect if one had been iuncluded, and the handle can extend for double-handed poses. It's a tight fit - not in the hands, in the handle itself. There's enough friction to make sure it won't fall out to its full length when you don't want it to. The toy moves at the neck, shoulders, biceps, elbows, wrists, waist, hips, thighs, knees, and ankles. The wrists are balljoints, which is nice, but the ankles only tilt to the sides, not forward or back, and the swivel joints at the shoulders and waist pop out of place any time you try to turn them. Which is especially a problem since you have to use them to change him into a truck.

To convert him, fold the feet down, crack the outside of the shins open and fold them up around the upper legs, open the forearms to tuck the hands away, turn the arms over (put the arms back on after they fall out), fold them up, tip his ribs out to the sides, swivel the waist around (put the legs back on after they fall off), click the arms in place, fold the back plate up over the top, push the front windows into place, and raise the legs to the back.

The vehicle mode is just as Animated-influenced as the robot: the giant cab, the odd grey bumper sticking out the front, all that. The way the robot's feet fold up over the rear of the truck is really not good, like it was the absolute last thing they thought about at the end of the design process. The lights on top (remember, Optimus got this altmode from a future fire truck, not a future tractor trailer) are packaged separately and need to be plugged onto the roof. The axe can technically be stored in this mode, but it just lays horizontally across the back of the truck, so it looks pretty stupid there.

If the goal of the various "Legacy" lines was to make all these disparate characters look like they were all from the same universe, Animated Optimus Prime fails that test: he's just too blatantly "Animated" to look like he's sharing a universe with, say, Scourge. But if you want an Animated Prime, he's a surprisingly great stand-in that won't cost you secondary market prices.

-- 08/20/24


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