Right at the beginning of 2025, the final wave of Transformers: Legacy United hit stores in Canada. The interesting thing about it was that it was a sort of “apology tour” wave, consisting of re-releases of figures that were previously really hard to find, either because they were exclusives, or just had bad distribution, figures like Cosmos, Galaxy Shuttle, and Tarn. Studio Series Rise of the Beasts Optimus is technically in a whole other toyline, but the fact that he released at the very same time means he feels like a part of this initiative, too.
Anyone that says they saw this guy on store shelves is a liar.
See, despite being one of the leads in the 2023 blockbuster film, Optimus’s Studio Series toy came out as a Buzzworthy Bumblebee release, exclusive to Target and Toys R Us, and like many high-demand exclusives, immediately sold out everywhere, and basically went straight to eBay.
The version you might actually get to see in stores.
And so, a couple years later, they’ve finally given the figure a normal, unchanged Studio Series release, one I’m happy to belatedly own, because honestly, I really liked his role in Rise of the Beasts.
As the kids say, “big mood.”
The writers basically said “what if we do the aggressive Murder Prime characterization, but make the audience understand why he’s like that?” In the film, he’s been stranded on Earth for 7 years, when it was supposed to be a pit stop, which I imagine is like being stuck in an airport for a few days, enough to drive anyone a bit loony. And that’s *before* his surrogate son gets killed in front of him.
Optimus Prime, and the terrible horrible 48 hours.
Basically, he’s really going through it for most of the movie, and it makes for a compelling character arc. And, you know me, I’m a fiction-first kind of guy, that’s enough to make me want the figure.
Robot Mode
A svelte guy.
So, this figure has an interesting conceptual history, beyond the “rare exclusive” thing. Originally, he was going to be a simple retool of Studio Series Bumblebee Movie Optimus (reviewed here, and again here when he got a fancy repaint), which makes sense, because his character model in Rise of the Beasts is just a slight tweaking of that movie’s design. But somewhere along the way, the figure’s designers, Sam Smith and Yūya Ōnishi, realised they could stretch the retool budget and just make a whole new figure, and so that’s what we’ve got. Apparently his chest windows and his truck wheels are shared with Bee Optimus, and nothing else.
This is the fancy Takara repaint of Bee Optimus, so don’t judge the paint apps on the new guy.
So, what’s the advantage of this? Well, for one thing, he’s way, way more screen-accurate in his robot mode. I always liked this Optimus design, basically just taking the standard G1 design we all know and love, and giving it a layer of realistic machine detailing overtop. It’s funny, because initially, he looked wrong to me, like his torso was too long, his proportions a bit odd, but, no, go look at a character model, this is more or less how he looks onscreen.
Complete with depression!
All the things that are off are tiny details, like his waist being a bit too thick, or his shoulder smokestacks a bit big, but it’s impressively close to his onscreen design. It’s just that I’m used to looking at the blockier, less-correct design of the Bee Movie Voyager.
The ideal, and the reality.
By the way, this new guy’s the same height as the old one, i.e. impressively tall for a Voyager, but a lot skinnier, funny enough.
Towering over his teammates. I should really just get Rise of the Beasts Bumblebee.
Uptop, his headsculpt is a land of contrasts. On one hand, I feel like a lot of the details on it, particularly on the mouthplate, are a bit too “soft,” and could have used some sharper sculpting. On the other hand, they managed to give his face a sad, mournful expression, which is *incredibly* appropriate for this character in this movie, so they get full marks for that.
Another big mood.
As is usually the case with live-action movie designs, there’s no way a mainline retail figure is ever going to be able to include the ludicrous amount of color they give them onscreen, and so Optimus here really only hits the highlights of his CGI model’s colors.
We can’t all be Premium Finish releases.
Fortunately, they manage to make him look decently colored on his own, which is all you can ask for. He’s mostly that typical Optimus red, blue and gray, with a couple shades of silver to add some variety to him, and white Autobrands on his shoulder. Curiously, they added a couple yellow squares to his waist that he doesn’t have on his screen design, but I’m not complaining.
He fits in well with your Procession of Primes.
In fact, the deco artist deserves some kudos: A big challenge with the way his Rise of the Beasts design remixed his colors is the fact that his whole midsection’s colored metallic gray, and some figures, like his mainline Rise of the Beasts Voyager, wind up turning this into this big ugly field of unpainted gray plastic.
Yeeesh. I heard this is supposed to be a good figure, but I can’t get past the vast fields of gray.
But they managed to add enough dark silver on this figure, as well as that bit of extra yellow, to not make him look too plain.
“What is UP with my waist?”
His build quality is where things start to get weird. Maybe I’m biased, knowing how they basically made him off of a retool budget, but he feels very….strange in hand. I think a part of it is quite a few of his joints feel looser than they should. His shoulders, his elbows, his hips, they’re not critically loose, he can still pass the “stand on one foot” test, but they don’t feel as tight as they ought to.
Now that I said it, he’s determined to show me how tight he can be.
It’s his waist that’s the strangest thing, though. See, he’s one of the few Transformers to have an “ab crunch,” a piece of articulation where he can bend at the waist. But that comes at the expense of his waist being able to snap together, and it feels like you can bend him a bit too easily. He also just feels lighter than Bee Movie Optimus, like you can tell he was made from fewer parts.
“Fewer parts just means more speed!”
On the other hand, he is, at least, very well articulated, maybe even a bit better than Bee Optimus in some respects. On his bottom half, he’s got omni-directional ankles, knees, thigh swivels, multi-directional hips, a waist swivel, and, while it may like to come undone a bit too easily, he does have that ab crunch, which, again, is usually reserved for expensive high-end figures.
“Um….hi?”
His hips also have little side skirts on joints that let them fold out of the way, which is neat, but on the other hand, kicking his legs forwards exposed the very odd way his hips are constructed, which I’ll have to convey with a photo.
Why yes, this is an extreme closeup of Optimus Prime’s weird crotch. What of it?
Uptop, he actually has double elbow joints, wrist swivels, and a multi-directional neck that can look up and down. His shoulders, though, are a little odd, and, in fact, have the same specific limitation as Studio Series 86 Hot Rod. They can swivel forwards and backwards, but his arms can only spread out in a shrugging motion, he can’t, say, hold his arms in front of him and tell you the fish was thiiiiiiiiiis big. I think that’s the only bit of articulation the Bee Movie version had that he doesn’t.
For example, he has to block his peripheral vision to do this pose.
For accessories, I thought they’d skimped out on him, until I actually checked the movie. Okay, granted, he doesn’t come with his big axe that he used in a bunch of fight scenes, they packed that in with Studio Series Optimus Primal instead, for whatever reason. But his two other accessories are his other movie weapons. First, he has a stubby little gray cylinder with tech detailing on it, meant to be his hand-blaster.
“This is it? This is all the firepower I get?”
You open his arm up, flip either fist away, and peg it into the nub that’s left behind. It’s kind of puny-looking, but then again, the movie cheats a bit by having his whole forearm expand whenever he uses it.
It may look small, but it packs a punch.
His other accessory is a curved Bayverse-like wristblade, which you can peg into a tab on either one of his forearms, or get him to hold like a normal sword.
“I wonder if you could….take faces with this?”
“I have the power” yadda yadda.
It’s got a blue tab on the outer edges that’s meant for storage, but there’s also some little pegholes on his forearms that you can peg it onto, instead of squeezing it into the slots next to his wrists.
He loses a bit of reach, but it’s a little more out of the way.
You can also stash both accessories on his backpack, in a non-canonical, but convenient feature.
Maybe they were back here all along, and he schlorps them into his body whenever he needs to summon them onto his arms.
The reason I thought they’d skimped out on his accessories is because I remembered he could summon his blaster or his sword on either arm in the movie, but what I didn’t realize is that he never once uses double blasters, or double swords, so technically, him coming with one of each is correct!
Onscreen….
….And in the plastic.
And while he doesn’t have any 5 millimeter ports on him, he’s got 5 millimeter fist holes, so you can always give him extra accessories, if you like.
Including an axe to take on Scourge.
Transformation
The more things change, the more they stay the same. The interesting thing about this guy’s transformation is that in the abstract, it’s the G1 Optimus transformation, with the usual added waist twist you see in most modern updates. Fold the legs back, tuck the arms in, fold the head away.
You get the idea.
Of course, the devil’s in the details, and there’s a lot more going on here, involving fold-out panels, splitting legs, and the like. Interestingly, his sword accessory is actually a load-bearing part of his altmode, fitting between his legs and helping fill his truck bed in. I think it’s a bit easier of a transformation than Bee Movie Optimus, but he does lose that interesting trick his predecessor had of building a cube out of panels.
Truck Mode
One of the very few good angles.
Whoof. Okay. So, there’s an elephant in the room with this truck mode, but just give me a second. From the front, he’s a well-sculpted approximation of his movie truck mode, with the extra bars on the grill, and other new details, even if he’s not the exact model of truck as the film (but neither was Bee Prime).
Eh, close enough.
He’s got nice shiny silver detailing on his truck front, painted on windshield wipers, a slick silver stripe, wheels with painted rims, the works. Sounds good, right?
Hiding his flaws by staying in the back of the convoy.
But then you look at it from any angle other than the front, and see what they did with the legs on this guy.
Ack!
Now, I’d seen photos in advance, and I thought maybe it wasn’t as bad in person, but no, it’s really bad.
The view from the side doesn’t help.
Basically, he’s got this big, ugly blue pile of exploded robot leg hanging off of the back of his truck mode, with the rest of the truck bed being this kind of withered mess of inner leg and robot foot, with his wrist-blade stashed in the middle of it.
It was kind of unfair to bring VNR Optimus into this comparison shot.
Like, the truck bed tends to be the weakest part of a lot of Optimii, but this is way worse than usual, and way worse than Bee movie Optimus, which at least flattened everything out. It’s something I’m stuck on, because it’s basically impossible to ignore from any angle, including the front! It’s a real mess.
He’s about to face off against Scourge, but….
….Instead, they both bond over having atrociously bad truck beds.
Anyway, at least the rest of the truck mode holds together nice and tight, and can roll with no problem.
“Punch it, Prime!”
It just….looks bad. For other features, you can store his stubby little gun on the left side of his Robot Leg Mess, because what’s one more thing to add onto the pile of junk? You can pretend it’s a thruster or something.
He can go very slightly faster than Bee Movie Optimus because of it.
One thing he can’t do: Pull any kind of trailer. There’s no hitch back there! Every other modern Optimus at least attempts to have a useable trailer hitch back there.
They feel bad for him, so they’re not pulling trailers, and only being photographed from the front.
Overall
Well, I’ll say this: I’m glad I didn’t pay scalper markup for this guy back when he was a rare exclusive. I mean, it’s never worth paying scalper markup, but in this case, it really isn’t. The thing is, he’s not all bad. He’s got a great looking robot mode, one that’s nice and poseable, has fun accessories, and does a good job of being the guy from the movie.
And makes an excellent rival for Scourge.
His only robot mode problem’s kind of an odd handfeel, owing to the strange circumstances of his creation. But then his truck mode is just such an unfinished mess that it completely kills the vibes of the thing. So, basically, he’s half a good Transformer. Here’s where I’m at with my recommendations: Studio Series Bumblebee Optimus is unquestionably a better figure than Studio Series Rise of the Beasts Optimus, so if you already have him, don’t bother with this guy. And if you don’t have a Reboot Movieverse Optimus at all….see if you can get the Bee one for a decent price before you go after this one. And if you *must* get the guy from the newer movie, be prepared to never transform him, and basically just have a one-mode action figure instead.
All this insulting the boss is making them twitchy.
Still, I can say this: Regardless of how compromised the figure is, I’m glad Hasbro went out of their way to make him more widely available than he was, and this whole initiative to put guys like this out there again is admirable.
Also admirable: Pepperoni interrupting the shoot to remind me that it’s time for her dinner.
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