In the fast-paced modern world of Transformers figures, this 2021 release is an oldie now, but he’s an oldie with some recent relevance, thanks to his currently-on-shelves re-release in Legacy. I’d always meant to pick Galvatron up for my ‘86 movie shelf, but Kingdom deciding to market to me directly by updating the entire Beast Wars cast meant my figure-buying budget went to them, instead, so I’m belatedly getting around to this big purple people-eater.
Lord of the Vector Art.
Even so, I wound up with the older Kingdom version, and not the Legacy one that’s out there now. Why? I managed to get a deal at TFCon (thanks to Loco for finding it), where a vendor was offloading the Kingdom version for cheap.
A huge, noisy, gray creature.
Regardless of how I got him, I’m glad to have him. Despite his importance as a character, Galvatron’s had a rough go of it when it comes to new figures of his Generation One iteration.
That third mode isn’t even official! (Universe 2.0 Deluxe pictured)
The old Universe 2.0 Deluxe figure from 2008 was an overcomplicated mess, and his 2016 Titans Return Voyager was similarly rickety, to say nothing of all the weird compromises it made for the line’s Titan Master gimmicks (though its retool, Super Megatron, reviewed here, fixed all that).
Such unpleasant vibes, that I couldn’t be bothered to pick him out of storage for some comparisons.
This Kingdom version already had a reputation as being the First Good Galvatron, so I was eager to check him out.
Robot Mode
His shoulders stand proudly high up!
To get it out of the way, this is the “fixed shoulders” version. Basically, there was an assembly error on the earliest Kingdom releases, where his shoulders were installed backwards/too low, and it was really difficult to fix. Later releases of the Kingdom version fixed this, as did every future redeco, so if you’re thinking of getting the Legacy one, don’t worry about it.
He scales well with his fellow Unicronians, but at what cost?
So, the other big thing, the recurring issue that’s haunted the Leader-class, is one of size. In Galvatron’s case, he’s about the height of a tall Voyager. To do a quick check against his contemporaries, Galvatron’s the same height as Kingdom Cyclonus, slightly taller than Studio Series 86 Scourge, is dwarfed by Kingdom Beast Megatron, and is exactly one head taller than Legacy Laser Prime.
He’s also slightly taller than Kingdom Rodimus Prime, funny enough.
But photos don’t really do this guy justice, and once you see him in person and handle him, he actually feels chunkier and more substantial than you’d expect. He might not be the tallest Leader, but he’s dense, thick, and has a real sense of weight and presence to him.
And not a single hollow gap is visible!
Going back to Legacy Laser Optimus Prime for comparison, that figure felt anemic and stripped-down (admittedly, having to come with a battle base on the same budget will do that), whereas Galvatron’s got a bit of that Kingdom Rodimus Prime energy of having more budget than the figure needed, and so he’s got way more engineering and quality going on than his size would suggest.
My best attempt at that Post-Reformatting Pose.
At a glance, he nails the look of his Generation One cartoon appearance, including the round, flared legs, the four-pack of abs, and the little pillar behind his crowned head. But if you ask me, some stuff’s a bit off. The treads behind his forearms are a bit big and unwieldy, and the towers beside his shoulders are a bit too tall, giving him Laser Prime’s peripheral vision issues.
These two can’t even see each other.
See? (Also, I couldn’t see that his rear pylon had drooped).
Plus, he kind of gives the impression of being squatter and wider than his more svelte-feeling animation model. Still, he’s mostly correct, and he manages to look both Galvatronny, and imposing on his own merits. I think one thing is that I have a tendency to load him up with his accessories (more on those later), when leaving everything except his shoulder cannon off of him makes him look a bit more lean, and less squat.
Crazy, but handsome, a classic problem.
The whole thing’s topped with a very nice, almost chiseled-looking headsculpt. Something about the crown and face makes me think of a non-existent Masterpiece figure. Again, it feels a little bit off from his animation model’s design, like how Studio Series 86 Kup didn’t quite nail the specific proportions of his face, but I like what’s here, and it feels a lot like the Marvel or IDW Galvatrons, more than the Sunbow one (appropriate, as he’s got a Marvel repaint in Generations Selects).
Fighting his sister in another timeline.
“What shade of purple is Galvatron, anyway?” seems to be something the designers of these figures can’t agree on (it doesn’t help that the G1 toy wasn’t even purple). I will say, the violet that he’s mostly cast in feels like it needed more of a blue tint to match his appearance in the animated movie, but it seems to match screen grabs of the actual cartoon better, so who can say?
“Fools! Galvatron can be any purple he wants! Nyeh!”
Outside of that, he’s also cast in light gray, with bits in black, red, metallic silver. The best use of that silver paint is on his face, helping pick out its features. There’s a light purple Decepticon symbol on him, too. If I’m going to get extremely, extreeemely pedantic vis-a-vis screen accuracy, they’re missing a bit of red on his shoulders and waist, and his goatee ought to be a darker grey, but, like, I didn’t notice until I checked screenshots, so, who cares. Buncha nerds, that’s who. He feels painted enough as it is.
He wears his scars with pride.
So, because this is the Kingdom version, he also has some battle damage on him, which was an odd choice, because they’d otherwise stopped doing that early into Earthrise. But, honestly, in this case, he wears it well. He’s got light purple wear on his chest and forearms, and my eyes read it almost more like cell-shading than wear and tear, and adds some nice contrast. I’m less fond of the black smudges around his ankles, they look like he stepped in dirt, but they’re kinda hard to notice. And so, if you’re looking at the modern Legacy version, they literally just removed the battle damage, and made no other changes, to my knowledge.
*Stock laser cannon sound*
Like I mentioned earlier, Galvatron feels like he had more budget put into him than he needed for his scale, and that translates into him being very well-articulated, with a lot of little extras. He’s got the expected ankle tilts, manages to have swiveling wrists despite them also needing to fold away for transformation, and has a ball-jointed head for extra expressiveness. Most importantly, he’s got bicep swivels, so, unlike Titans Return Galvatron, you can position his arm cannon both at rest at the side of his arm, or ready to shoot on top of it. That being said, those oversized treads behind his upper arms are legitimately a pain.
He’s about three seconds from tearing them off.
It feels like his arms and torso are constantly bumping against them when you pose them, to say nothing of the fact that they don’t really have a good locked-in resting place. On the upside, the unusual weight of the figure, combined with his generous heel spurs, means that he’s nice and stable on his feet.
He’ll thank you not to point out how droopy his blast is. It belongs to Rodimus, anyway.
Of course, being Galvatron, he’s got his all-important arm cannon as an accessory. The base is silver and black, and the cannon itself is clear orange, with an interesting bit of deco inside it, a kind of frosted finish closer to the base. Again, it’s so satisfying seeing it go in the right place, compared to his Titans figure, and have it be able to swivel around. Less satisfying is that the port it goes in on his right arm loose and floppy…Which is what I would have said, had I not realized, mid photo-shoot, that you can actually lock it into his upper arm, by fitting a specific ridge right below the peg into a specific groove on the peg, which made me like the whole figure much better. And if the cannon can’t quite go where you want it to, you can always move it down to his lower arm.
He’s about to square up on me for almost slandering his cannon.
Those are two of seven weapons ports total, a bit less than I’d hoped for.
Is he shooting a pair of pistols, or nyoom-ing a pair of model ships around?
Next up, he’s got two fairly large gray guns, which aren’t based on any previous Galvatron stuff, but, for some reason, are both shaped like the spaceship Unicron provided him with in the Animated movie. I have no idea what the reasoning here was, since there’s a proper Unicron accessory pack (with a clear purple repaint of this guy) with a more accurate, painted one that fits on the stand.
They look kind of Railgun-esque when combined.
No matter what they’re supposed to be, he can hold the pair of them as duel pistols, or peg them together into one big gun. You can also stash them on his back, on a pair of rectangular pegs on his back-spire-thingie, and I kind of like what they do to his silhouette.
He got a little insecure about his height.
Next up, he has a more characterful pair of accessories in the form of a Matrix of Leadership, and a chain to keep it on.
For when you want to unsuccessfully threaten a god.
The chain is a solid gray piece, made out of slightly flexible plastic, with a 5 millimeter peg on the end, for the Matrix to go on, though it’s also compatible with anything else in the War for Cybertron ecosystem that has the right kind of weapons port.
The Matrix didn’t work, so he’s going for a more direct approach.
As for the Matrix, it’s the same-looking as the ones that came with Earthrise Optimus, Studio Series 86 Hot Rod, Kingdom Rodimus Prime….you know, if you’ve been keeping up with modern collecting, you probably have a pile of these by now, though, apparently each is actually a different sculpt just cast from the same CAD. In Galvatron’s case, what makes his unique is that it’s not got a translucent core, it’s painted solid blue instead. Mine’s also got a kind of ugly production scar on its orange parts, so I immediately decided to swap it out for one of my pile of others.
“Ugh, can I get a replacement?”
That led me to discover that surprisingly few of these Matrixes actually have a 5MM-compatible port on the back, a lot of them are too big. Earthrise Prime’s fits, Hot Rod’s is too large.
Clockwise from upper left: Netflix Optimus (fits), Kingdom Galvatron (fits), Studio Series 86 Hot Rod (doesn’t fit, too big), Kingdom Rodimus Prime (doesn’t fit, too small).
Transformation
Whoof, this guy transFORMS. It’s a shockingly ornate conversion, with what feels like 7000 steps, none of which are immediately visually obvious. It’s definitely another example of them flexing their budget, especially considering there’s a torso-inversion trick there strictly to let them replicate the fact that that bit just kind of changes color in the animation. It’s funny, some years ago I briefly had a Fanstoys Sovereign (Unofficial Masterpiece Galvatron) on loan to me for a review that’s lost to the internet, and that figure was also ludicrously complicated for something that felt like it ought to be simple, but everything about that guy was miserable. This Kingdom guy’s weirdly complicated, but in a fun way. It’s a well-thought-out transformation, where everything has a place to tab in, and something relevant to do. The only tricky bit was getting the drum-shaped piece his head fits into open and closed, it took some prying.
Galvatron’s Trick (requires some effort).
The one that surprised and impressed me at the end was the chunk of his pegged-together lower legs coming out and rotating downwards to form a rear leg for his alternate mode. I had zero clue that there were transformation parts hiding there.
I thought his transformation was over.
Nope!
One last tip that I missed a few times while transforming him: There’s little tabs on his lower-torso-panels that are meant to plug into the cannon’s drum-shaped body, to lock said body into place.
Cannon Mode
An altmode that’s safer than a realistic gun replica, unless you’re Starscream.
As usual, Galvatron changes into a laser turret on Tank Treads, or rather, a pile of parts pretending to be one, supported by two legs in the front, and one in the back.
His minions are flying really slowly to keep up with him, out of politeness.
It’s kind of nothing, but it’s an accurate kind of nothing. Its proportions are a little more blocky and less exaggerated than the film and show’s design, but it still looks menacing.
In the animation, he was a bit more swooshy.
One tiny detail that amuses me is at the base of where the laser barrel plugs in, it’s sculpting meant to resemble a molded-in Toy-Accurate Galvatron Head, since that’s where it went in the original transformation.
In an alternate timeline, Starscream managed to dodge, and counterattack.
For features, beneath both those tank treads (with molded and painted wheels!) and the rear leg, there’s little rolling wheels, though their effectiveness is a bit limited, since ground clearance on this guy’s not the best.
They make me imagine him very slowly rolling around with a stock squeaky wheel noise.
You can also reposition the treads and read leg to elevate the laser turret, though it doesn’t feel like this was intentional, and you need to kind of balance him on his tank treads.
Makes me think of some kind of bird, really.
For accessory integration, the back half of his laser cannon (you need to remove it during the transformation) can stash behind the fin on top of the turret. Meanwhile, you can plug those two grey spaceship-guns of his on the sides of the turret’s central body, to add more firepower to the whole thing.
Yo dawg…
Finally, you can dangle the Chain with Matrix off of his orange barrel. Funny enough, while in robot mode you just loosely drape it around his neck, in this mode, there’s a dedicated peghole on the bottom of the drum to keep the chain in place.
Insert Chain A into Slot B.
Overall
The big problem with an immobile alternate mode.
My biggest takeaway is that everything about Galvatron is meatier and more substantial than I was expecting, and that you can see where the budget went. He’s got a robot mode that’s more imposing than pictures would suggest, a surprisingly complex transformation, an alternate mode that’s….accurate at least.
“AIM ME!!”
Without question, this version is definitely the best Galvatron by a long shot. It’s still an open question if any Leader-class figure’s really worth their new, inflated prices, but he does feel more worth it than Laser Prime did. Truthfully, he’s got just enough jankiness going on with him (his weird treads that get in the way, for one thing) that I side-eye his value, but less than his wave-mate, though Kingdom Beast Megatron and Siege Ultra Magnus are still the winners when it comes to “modern Leader with the best value.” Still, if you can score a cheap Kingdom one with fixed shoulders, like I did, definitely do so, it was worth it. And if you’re thinking of picking up a Legacy one, and are comfortable with the pricetag, you’ll get a figure that’s just as good, and much cleaner-looking.
When the god is less intimidating than you expected.
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