According to Hasbro designer Sam Smith, the idea to do make "Concept Art" toys of characters who didn't actually appear in Bumblebee is all attributable to Megatron.
While going through ILM's CAD files, the design team discovered a nearly complete Megatron design - early test screenings featured a post-credits scene with Sector 7 discussing how the Autobots could never learn of "NBE 01," and then we'd pan over to see Megatron frozen in ice, to better tie the new movie in with the old ones. The scene got cut, but Hasbro was inspired. And so we now get the big guy himself!
As is the way with the Bumblebee robots, Megatron is designed
to look more like his recognizable G1 counterpart than the typical Boyformer mess. This is most apparent on his head, which looks like he's wearing a bucket rather than being just a loose conglomeration of pointy shapes. Remember when the first movie's design came out and there were enough complaints that they said they were changing it, and then it looked basically the same anyway? Good times, good times!
Megsy's body is less of a throwback reference than the head. The sculpt's got great detailing, lots of small pistons and gears and such, but there's nothing inherently "Megatron" about it. Change nothing, but put wings on the back and tell us this is Starscream, and we'd believe you.
Make the angled section on the chest a little wider and say it's Shockwave, and sure, that could be. This is a highly detailed robot, but it's just a robot, not necessarily a Transformer. It does help to remember what his role in the movie was planned to be, though: he was going to be standing perfectly still, and half hidden behind thick ice. Heck, the design didn't even have a back, because he was never going to be seen from anything but the one angle! So we can forgive ILM for deciding not to go nuts trying to homage the original. The head ends up tiny, though, and there's a lot of bulk around the pelvis; maybe some more silver paint instead of flat grey would have helped break up the latter?
The articulation is truly impressive. As Studio Series figures have drawn closer and closer to the level of 1980s fidelity
presented by the Masterpiece line, MP's remaining claim to superiority was its articulation, but now here's Concept Art Megatron being almost as good as those. Mos of it is what you expect - all the major joints that a Leader Class toy should have - but Megatron also gets some extras, like pectoral hinges that allow him to really point his arms (and by extension, the fusion cannon mounted thereupon) straight forward, or individual fingers with two joints apiece. Way to exceed all expections, Hasbro!
Converting Megatron is not an easy process. I got this figure back in May, and I'm still not entirely used to doing it without the instructions. Like all the other Bumblebee bots (except B-127 [and Ravage, I guess]), no altmode was designed for Megatron - once the plans for the ice scene were dropped, Travis Knight did want to add Megatron to the Cybertron scenes, but decided that would mess up the films' continuity (thereby meaning he's put more thought into that than anyone else who's ever worked on one of them). Even if that had happened, Megatron still would have never been anything other than a robot on screen, so Hasbro had to come up with an altmode for him.
They once again turned to Emiliano Santalucia to design something that looked like it used all the robot parts there were, and then those ideas were refined into the toy we've got today. Obviously it would be silly for movie megatron to turn into a gun, so we first get his most common alternate alt mode, a tank. It's a great design, very chunky, like if Michael Bay was directing a Metal Slug movie. The treads don't have working wheels beneath them, just flat tabs that keep them from resting directly on the ground, but the gun turret can rotate and the gun itself can raise or lower.
But while Megatron did turn into a tank in the second film, that wasn't his original alt mode. So Hasbro decided to make this a triple-changer, and gave him a jet mode, too.
The plane is not as good as the tank was; it's definitely the weakest of the three modes, and honestly feels kind of half-baked. It gets bonus points for not looking like a tank with wings, as these things often do, but a lot of that can be attributed to the Cybertronian style of random plates and shapes. It's very fiddly to get the pieces lined up for this mode, with the arms needing to be plugged in at an angle, the legs refusing to fit in place at all if you don't have the hips turned the right way (which the instructions are less than clear on), and the gun only attaches on one side and thus needs to hover in place rather than fitting anywhere securely.
In addition to homaging Movie Megatron's first two altmodes, making this one a triple-changer was also an intentional reference to an unreleased version of the character. I managed to find this toy on a week when Target happened to be having a sale on Transformers, but he's so good I think I would have been just as happy with him at full price as I am today. The plane mode may be a bit weak, but the other two are great, and even if the conversion process is beyond me right now, it's still fairly fun. Megatron may not be the total gem Sunstreaker was, but he's still an excellent Transformer.
-- 09/03/24
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