megatron is a pretty bad ass dude...
bit of a tendency to cut and run, and not so good at choosing lieutenants... but savage, merciless and cruel nonetheless...
in comparision, prime is a bit of nancy.
its like that whole "no kid wants to be luke skywalker thing", prime is cool, but he is the robotic equivalent of a farm boy...
megatron has a big cannon... mounted on his arm
he transforms into a gun, which is too large for any transformer (including metroplex, the uhm,... city-sized transformer) to actually use... in terms of the G1 toys, the scaling's a bit off...
and the G1 toy's robot mode does look clunky and lame...
i think this, and the fact that he transforms into a gun, maybe partly to blame for why so many of my friends had their own optimus prime... he transformed into a truck, with a lil' scooter and a robot (with missles and a bendy bit) in the trailer...
but megatron is a bad ass mo-fo, and transforms into a godamn gun...
BOOM!
so, obviously i was a little concerned when, having had a bit of a ruck with prime and essentially fallen off a high balcony, he was thrown outta the back of astrotrain as deadweight in deep space...
astrotrain says there was too much weight...
i say astrotrain wasn't trying hard enough!!!
then along floats unicron, and remodels our apparently 'unhealthy' bad ass mofo into galvatron...
some kinda megatron-sqaured, well there was a grid involved...
and galvatron, yeah... he's pretty bad-ass...
once more with the shoulder cannon, he even transforms into a cannon...
quite a bad-ass one too, as he manages to atomise the newly crowned decepticon leader, starscream (who else) with one neatly placed shot...
he's clearly got some issues, and for what he may have lost in mercilessness he has easily gained in brain-bubbles...
he's some kind of deep allegory as he struggles to directly take on his own creator/god, even though this omnipotent being is capable of interfering directly with his inner workings...
and that takes balls...
now, i was too young to realise that this transformation, and indeed the movie were all part of a cynical marketing ploy... a smoothly executed ploy, much less rushed than the year on year compulsory brand expansions we're plagued by now...
but it was plausible. whilst the toy version of megatron was quite lame, and definitely dated, the animated megatron was truly timeless...
galvatron seemed a reasonable update, more streamlined, more colourful and with angled pointy bits on his head... definitely more futuristic...
the animated galvatron (occaisionally needed a darker face) was one you definitely felt was going somewhere... and if not equal to his predecessor, at least more fit for the job than starscream...
but somehow with the toy, the impossible was achieved...
it was actually worse than the original megatron toy... pointy head bits gone and replaced with crenellations that give the look of a crown...
he transforms into a gun... straight out of some disco-nightmare barbarella...
i mean really, what self-respecting leader of all things evil would transform into such a lame retro-future zap gun?!
so we learnt that it was probably better to play G1 transformers without the leaders (don't get me started on ultra magns), pretend like they're on some sort of secret mission, or they've been kidnapped or something...
we learnt that the more 'futuristic' the transformer, the more likely it was to have some kind of nodule on its head...
we learnt that some transformers were just better left drawn, or animated, as cheap production limited our leaders awesomeness...
through this we learnt that galvatron always stayed a lil' quirky...
and of course, it was galvatron's 'issues' eventually brought about the end of the world...
but that's a different story...
one in which bad-ass megatron, and crazy mo-fo galvatron exist at the same time...
and that, is the way i like it
