A good story needs a good villain, and the Beast Wars version of Megatron was one for the ages.
A new character who had taken the same name as his Decepticon predecessor, he was theatrical, british-accented, seemingly cultured, but really brutish (David Kaye’s lovely voice-acting helped.)
He was a schemer, delighting in long term plans, but also a showman. He didn’t like getting his hands dirty, but unlike a lot of cartoon villains, would absolutely get in the trenches himself if he needed to.
Another one to file under “I didn’t have it, but my cousin did.”
Megatron’s second Beast Wars figure (after the alligator the show skipped over) was a big Ultra-Class line centerpiece alongside Optimus Primal, and was definitely another one of the all-time great Transformers releases, packed full of features and poseability. Strangely, his mighty T-Rex alternate mode was purple, and believe me, people have made Barney the Dinosaur jokes since 1996.
I saw this Masterpiece in person at TFCon once, and pictures don’t properly communicate how unnecessarily huge he is.
Since then, he’s received the occasional update here and there (which is a lot more than most characters that share a name with a popular G1 guy ever get) including a smaller Robot Masters release I had a look at awhile back. Most prominently, he’s got a ludicrously huge, ludicrously expensive Masterpiece toy, and like Dinobot, it’s also insanely complicated and prone to breakage. This new Kingdom Leader is the first time he’s gotten a modern mainline mass-release update that was trying to replicate his original Season 1 design, and, in the shadow of that Masterpiece, is challenged to do something similar at a price people can actually afford. Either way, I’ve been looking forward to this one.
(Also, the packaging calls him “Megatron (Beast)” complete with the brackets, which feels like a working name that no one bothered to change.)
Robot Mode
I believe this is what the kids call “an absolute unit.”
Right out of the box, this is a big guy (for me), with some real weight to him, too. While he’s almost the exact same height as Siege Ultra Magnus, he gives the impression of being larger, thanks to his presence, and he’s definitely a lot wider. I’m not one to complain about size relative to price point, but there’s something satisfying about getting to handle a Leader-sized-leader, y’know?
There’s another interesting bit of handfeel to him, too: His dinosaur parts are made out of a more rubbery, semi-flexible kind of plastic, and feel almost like reptile skin. There doesn’t seem to be a design reason behind this that I can clock, so I guess they just wanted him to feel authentic to the touch.
Touch him and see what happens, though.
Like the rest of Kingdom, Megatron’s aiming for show-accuracy in robot mode, but animal-accuracy in his alternate form, and his robot mode hews really close to the animation, within reason. So, the T-rex head and tail on either arm, and the pads on his shoulders look a bit different, his backpack of Rex parts is a bit bigger, but not crazily so, and the round pads on his thighs (with sculpted little guns on them) are a bit undersized, but outside of that…he’s really dead-on to his show appearance, in a really impressive way.
In person, this isn’t as unwieldy as it looks.
He just gives off the right vibes, and cuts an impressive silhouette. Again, his backpack of T-rex skin is a little bit bigger and messier than the pair of flaps the original had, but less so than I thought it would be.
A real sour-grape face.
The head, in particular, is 100 percent dead-on, and captures his personality perfectly, to the point where you can hear his dialogue coming from it. I just wish the helmet wasn’t unpainted purple at the back, but black all around.
Junior and Senior.
Speaking of that, Megatron’s got a lot of colors going on here. There’s multiple shades of purple, and while I think the purple on his robot parts are is a more vibrant shade of it than he usually is, he still looks right. Meanwhile, his T-rex bits feature more muted, lavender tones as their base. His robot bits have a bunch of dark grey, while his dino parts have green and beige tones, and his body’s got accents of silver, red eyes, and a tiny Predacon symbol on his helmet. The most amusing bit of deco is that the soles of his dino feet are white pads.
The boots? Rex hide.
There’s a lot going on here, and it’s hard to tell what’s painted and what’s cast in plastic. It really feels premium, like no colors were skipped, save for, strangely, the back half of his head again.
The obligatory VSX photo.
The original Beast Wars toy, and Robot Masters version gave Megatron flip-out heel extensions for his feet, which this version doesn’t have. Between that and his backpack, I was worried he’d be unstable. But that isn’t the case, and he’s startlingly good at staying standing. He can even lean forwards, and do a one-footed kick without toppling over. It doesn’t look like he should be able to, and yet he can. Maybe that extra weight helps.
He’s strong enough to do this without support!
Speaking of stability, they also went all-out on his articulation. He’s got ankle tilts, swiveling knees, lots of joints in both arms, a waist joint, and articulated claws on both arms. All he’d need is an ab crunch to feel like a Masterpiece, and even without it, he’s more bendy than I was expecting from a bulky-looking bot like him.
Megatrons don’t accessorize! Megatrons conquer!
The one thing he’s missing is any kind of accessory, though to be fair, the original just had a pair of firing missiles, and it seems the lack of accessories on this version let them pour all the budget into the main bot. One feature he’s really conspicuously lacking though, is that his tail can’t be removed from his left arm. Now, it couldn’t come off on the original toy, either, to facilitate a snapping-claw gimmick, but on the show, he could remove it, to use a standard hand underneath it, and both the Robot Master and Masterpiece gave him this ability.
The one (1) thing the Robot Master has that he doesn’t.
On this version, it’s not only stuck on, that sucker’s bolted and pinned really solidly in multiple places, despite still including a proper sculpted hand inside the tail. I assumed initially that it played some kind of load-bearing role in the transformation or something, but it doesn’t, and I really can’t see why they opted to leave it on.
Attempt #456 to convince Dinobot to get back together with his faction.
For gimmicks and features, he’s also a little bit threadbare, compared to the spring-loaded claws, missiles, and water-squirter of the original, but I don’t really miss them, and again, the money seems to have gone into his design, articulation and paint. One little feature he does have can be found on the T-rex head on his right arm, where, when you open its mouth, it’s geared just so to make a round gunbarrel emerge slightly, in the place of the original toy’s water squirter.
Say aaaaaaaa
I’ll admit, I do wish he came with an effect part or something, because if you’ve got one, it looks real good coming out of it.
He’s also got a couple of War for Cybetron-compatible mounting points on the soles of his feet, but is otherwise incompatible with that system.
Megatron learns to roller-blade.
Transformation
Megatron’s transformation is surprisingly not nearly as difficult or time-consuming as I thought,, considering he’s a shellformer that basically has his backpack unfurl and clasp around a folded-up robot body. After the first time back and forth, I basically had the whole thing down pat, though there were a few things I had to watch out for.
First of all, his robot pelvis needs to be plugged into a slot in the side of his robot torso when folding him up for Rex mode, and if it’s not snapped in, the whole thing won’t come together.
You need to make sure that black peg goes into that white peghole on his torso, or the whole thing won’t come together.
It’s hard to do so if you try it when the instructions tell you to, since it’s a tight fit, and by that point you’ve lost any good leverage for your hands, which forced me to undo a bunch of stuff and plug it in earlier in the process.
Secondly, his one real fiddly bit comes from making sure the hide on his Rex-mode back is securely pegged into a couple of upward-facing tabs on his hips, again for stability. But both of these are steps I figured out fast.
That black tab there needs to vanish into the purple hide above it.
The one thing I did need a warning about was the square panels on either side of his tail. While plugging them in, I accidentally “inverted” them, overextending them in the opposite direction they were supposed to go, and when trying to squeeze them back into their robot mode position, stress-marked one of them fitting it back the way it was supposed to go. Weirdly, though, the rubbery hide he’s made from seems to have a healing factor, and the stress mark has nearly vanished.
Apparently this rectangular panel can regenerate.
Oh, and going back to robot mode was intuitive enough, with me just needing to double-check via photos that I’d gotten his backpack right.
Dinosaur Mode
Look, let’s all just hum the Jurassic Park theme now, to get it out of the way.
Okay, this here, this is really nice. He’s not a feathered dinosaur. Instead, they’ve basically imitated the sculpt of a Jurassic Park T-rex, and they did so masterfully. He’s big, he’s weighty, he’s mean looking, and he’s got a remarkably clean sculpt.
There’s a new king in town.
Sure, he’s covered with seams and panels thanks to the transformation, but there’s basically no robot parts visible anywhere, save for a little bit around his thighs when viewed from below. Contrast this with Kingdom Dinobot blatantly having his robot legs hanging out…or, well, pretty much every other Kingdom Beast Warrior I’ve reviewed, all of which have visible robot bits, and it’s pretty remarkable.
Attempt #792 to convince Dinobot to get back together with his faction.
And it’s well-sculpted, too, with scales and ridges molded in all over the leathery hide that now covers all of him, along with a mean-looking face.
Insert your favorite David Kaye Megatron line here.
Funny enough, it’s so realistic (well, “realistic”) looking, that the sculpt almost clashes with the purple colors and solid-red eyes. Outside of those, he’s got a green stripe on his back, a beige belly, white painted toenails, painted teeth on his mouth, and even a tongue that’s colored a different shade from his skin.
Drink it in.
If I had any deco or sculpt issues, it’s that some of the green and beige just stops abruptly when it hits panel lines, while some it of fades out more gracefully, and I guess his fingernails could have been painted, too.
I kinda feel like they could have deco’d their way out of this.
Another remarkable aspect of this mode is that despite being a shellformer, he manages to be extremely poseable. Compared to how the original was nearly a statue, this guy can bend and move. His tail has two joints for back and forth motion, he’s got his robot-mode ankles and knees, forward-and-backward hips, his tiny rex shoulders can move, his jaws can snap, and, finally, he’s got a full range of neck articulation.
TFW most of your troops haven’t been released yet.
That being said, his neck’s a bit awkward, in that he’s got panels around it that like to come out of whack when you move it out of a specific, ideal resting position, but the fact that it’s poseable at all feels like a minor miracle.
The aesthetic sacrifice that had to be made for neck articulation.
In fact, I’d say that, considering he had to a) transform, b) transform into a specific design, and c) be poseable, they pulled this off basically as flawlessly as possible.
This right here, this is what Beast Wars is all about.
Again, he’s got no gimmicks, save for the effect part in the mouth, and the holes in the feet, but c’mon. He’s a big T-rex. That’s it, that’s the gimmick.
BLAUUUUGHH!
He gives you the good Dinosaur toy emotions.
“And what, precisely, am I supposed to do with these?”
Overall
Still waiting on the rest of his faction!
This is, without a doubt, the best Kingdom figure I’ve looked at so far. I think he outdoes the original toy, even, depending on how you feel about the importance of spring-loaded and water-squirting features. What this guy brings to the table is a perfect robot mode (save for the one really big oversight of the un-removable tail), and an unbelievably well-done T-rex mode. He’s accurate, big, chunky, poseable, stable, well-engineered, actually fun to transform, and everything works. He’s weighty, satisfying, and worth the Leader-class pricepoint. It’s just what this bad guy deserves.
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