In an odd bit of irony, Hasbro has made Transformers Optimus Prime toy that turns from a big-rig into…a pistol?
Who thought this up, and is it a really obscure joke?
So, uh … Optimus Prime transforms into … Megatron? I’m confused.
Oh! No. He just transforms into a completely random configuration that also happens to be capable of shooting Nerf arrows.
[sub]Seriously, what is that thing supposed to look like? Someone couldn’t even be bothered to phone it in and was just leaving messages on the machine with incoherent mumbling.[/sub]
Off to Cafe Society with you.
if it is a joke, it’s certainly a gift to Letterman. Might be NSFW if you’re sensitive to playing with plastic …
Wow. Jokes aside, they really put no effort into make the transformation process interesting at all, did they? “Spirit of Transformers,” my ass.
It’s a automatic transformation, designed for durability. This isn’t a complicated toy. Pull a lever, it flops over.
There’s also an Optimus Prime and Megatron Nike Sneaker transformer.
And a tank that turns into Optimus that turns into Megatron!
As opposed to the Unicron I have that takes half an hour and an instruction manual? If I were a kid, I’d take the one touch gun.
I’d go with the even simpler ones…the Jumpstarters, where the vehicle to robot transformation consisted of…pulling them back and letting them transform themselves. And transforming them back was just folding them at the hip.
On the other hand, there was Double Dealer, who was by far the most obscenely difficult Transformer I ever owned. (I never had Unicron…I can certainly see him being worse. At least Double Dealer came with all the parts he needs.)
You and I are very different. The more complex the transformer, the more fun it was to transform. The magic of them–for me and my friends at any rate–was just how cleverly they were put together to create such dissimilar objects. I hated Go-Bots because they all transformed pretty much the same way–pop down the legs, pop up the arms, reveal the head. Bo-ring.
I loved my Omega Supreme (which wasn’t terribly difficult to transform, but it still took a little time–and it walked!) and that Six-Shot transformer that had six separate transformed states…that was amazing (even if it was plastic and not die-cast like the early ones). There was a real beauty in how well those things were thought out and engineered.
I agree. The really good Transformers, you felt a sense of accomplishment when you figured out how to transform them. And even once you figured it out, it was complex enough that transforming it was actually doing something. You could spend a good deal of playtime just transforming back and forth and marvelling at it.
You clearly played completely differently than I did. For me, Transformers were action figures, not puzzles. Long, difficult transformations took time that should have been spent on the stories.
There were a couple cool ones with complex transformations - Jetfire, Megatron, Double Dealer - but the real neat ones were simple to transform* - Prime, Grimlock (and probably the other Dinobots, but Grimlock’s the only one whose transformation I can remember), Soundwave, the early tapes, the Decepticon jets, the Combiners…
- We’re talking on the level that pulykamell complains about it - fold down the legs, slide out the arms, flip up the head. Add a few body parts and accessoriess for the ones that aren’t the Minicars.
About the only sense of accomplishment I ever got from transforming a TF was not snapping off Double Dealer’s wings the first few times I changed him from vulture to rocket carrier.