Generations Power of the Primes Leader Optimus Prime

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Power of the Primes Leader Optimus Prime

There's not been a Leader Class original Optimus Prime toy in Generations before: the cab only Classics, Combiner Wars & Titans Return toys were all Voyagers while the Classics 2 Pack, Reveal The Shield and Thrilling 30 Orion Pax were deluxe. The only Optimus with a trailer in the Generations line is Titans Return Powermaster Optimus Prime, clearly modelled on the original 1988 Powermaster Optimus Prime but missing the original's cab turns into a robot gimmick going straight from cab & trailer to Super Robot. This irked some people at the time and has led to at least one third party solution.

Straight out the box Optimus Prime is a leader sized version of the familiar 1984 robot. But even here there's bits that don't feel right: grey panels on the outer side of the arms and legs mar the appearance and indeed turning the toy side and to the rear on you discover he's nearly entirely grey on the side & reverse of the arms & legs as Adam@16bit.com's photos show. So straight off the bat this is a toy whose robot can only really be front on. The arms are especially annoying as there's a grey portion on the upper arm above the shoulder joint. Worse still the fists are grey: they've always been the same colour as the legs, usually a variant on blue, for 1984 Optimus Primes. The fists are grey because they're part of the lower arms which are painted red on the exposed surfaces: why not make them a separate piece in blue, on the same sprue as the legs & head and in the bargain give us a rotating wrist, sadly missing on this toy?

Articulation: ball jointed head, rotating shoulders that raise out & up to the sides, bicep swivels, bending elbows, universal hip joints with high thigh swivel beneath them, bending knees and ankles that bend forward at the bottom of the leg and forward, back & to the sides at the foot. As well as the lack of wrist swivels there no waist swivel either.

Optimus has two accessories: his gun and a matrix.

The gun is nice, possibly my favourite bit of the toy. Looks a lot like the original Optimus gun with an extra 5mm handle half way down. The barrel is a 5mm hole so you can plug extra weapons into the end and there's a pair of 5mm holes either side of the rear of the gun. It can be held in his hands or plugged into 5mm ports on the outside of his forearms. Personally I'd have put these on his upper arms so the super robot could use the Powermaster shoulder cannons!

The matrix is modelled after the movie matrix with a silver surround that unfortunately he can't hold, and a clear blue core, painted orange over the outside that glows when held up to the light. The core has the same proportions as as a Titanmaster head, Primemaster or Combination enigma so lots of odd swapping can be achieved as shown in these tweets: one, two & three. The Matrix fits into Prime's chest: open his cab windows and you find underneath..... another set of cab windows? Right ..... Open those too and there's a slot in there for the matrix. Manoeuvring it in is somewhat tricky though and is somewhat easier when the cab is removed and in vehicle mode without the second set of cab doors and rim of the body obscuring it.

Prime's cab is released by pushing down on a button on the rear of his waist and pulling the cab out. Once removed it's obvious that the cab has it's own arms and the blue flatbed forming the rear of the body is also a pair of legs: Leader Optimus Prime has Powermaster Optimus Prime's power up gimmick. Fold the legs down off the back of the cab: they're tabbed into the sides of the yellow rectangle. This reveals the smaller robot's chest. Rotate each leg 180° at the thigh and fold the feet out. Fold the chest down, fold the super robot head in and fold the smaller robot head out. Fold the chest back and fold the head onto the body. Unfold the arms and fold the hands out. Pull the gun apart and place one in each hand.

Oh dear, it's Orion Pax, Optimus' form pre Optimus Prime as seen in the Transformers Cartoon episode War Dawn. Cards on the table: I'm a Marvel Comics fan, in particular the UK version, where there's no Orion Pax so I'm not particularly fond of this aspect of the character. But Cartoon fans are equally entitled to their toys as are Comics fans, more so as it's arguably better known in most markets, so I'm not opposed to Orion Pax toys existing. I can see what they're getting at here: Orion Pax is remade in the cartoon to become Optimus Prime, in a similar way to how Hot Rod becomes Rodimus Prime or Megatron becomes Galvatron. But I'm not really liking the figure. They've done his curved form some justice here but that's going to cause trouble in a minute. Articulation isn't bad: head leans forward & back and turns, but isn't ball jointed. Arms are ball jointed at shoulders and bend double at the elbows. Ball jointed hips, thigh swivels and bending knees.

I think one of my big problems with this mode is the rest of the super robot, the vehicle's trailer, just sits there doing nothing. No base mode, no weapons platform, it's either the trailer or the empty chested super robot. Titans Return Powermaster Prime might have had a poor base mode but at least he had one!

Orion Pax becomes the cab of the vehicle mode. Unhitch the head from the body and fold it and the chest forward. Fold the arms up at both elbow joints and fold the fists in. Swing each arm back 180° at the bicep and fold the arms over where Orion Pax's chest was. Fold the feet down under the legs, turn each leg in 90° at the thigh swivel and tab the bottom of each leg together. Fold the super robot fake chest halves out to the sides and back to form the sides of the vehicle with the window parts then folding down to become the lower sides with their attached wheels.

From the front, great, and as I've hinted it's much easier with less obstruction to get the matrix in and out in this mode. From the sides and the back, a complete mess with the arms and Orion Pax chest & head hanging out the back of the cab. It feels like no effort has been made to conceal them. There's some indication the forearms for Orion Pax should tab onto the back of the chest: slots on the forearms match tabs on the back of the chest. However this does nothing to improve the look of the vehicle. Hopefully the trailer will:

Start by folding the exhaust pipes back into his shoulders.

Fold the knees forward about 20° and the hips back by about the same amount. Fold each foot forward 90° at the top ankle joint and back 90° at the rear ankle joint. Fold the sides & rear of the legs, made up of grey panels, out to the sides of the leg. At the first joint fold that up 90° so the second third of the folded up panel is level with the first. The third third is pointing down: fold the side of that forward 180° then fold the entire panel towards you 180°. Then fold the entire panel assembly forward & in 90°, meeting over the front of the legs to form the roof of the trailer.

Raise each arm up 180° to the sides: there's a grey flap at the top of the shoulder that will lift up to allow you to do this. Rotate each shoulder 180° so the grey rear of the shoulder and the truck strip panels faces forward. Fold the bottom of the truck strip panel down to cover the hands. Raise each arm 90° out to the sides and fold out a panel from the side of the arms to sit along the side of the fist. Fold the panel on the bottom of the arm down 90° so it's flush with the panels on th side of the arms. Fold the body panels the shoulders are connected to forward 90°: the arms now point forwards. Fold the arms down to the sides as best you can before folding the body shoulder panels in a further 90° so the shoulders are in front of the chest. Tab the panels folded out from the rear & sides of the arms, now both on the sides of the vehicle, into slots on the panels from the legs. Peg the gun halves into the roof. Fold down the trailer hitch from the front of the vehicle and hook into the back of Orion Pax's head.

That was a nightmare. A whole load of panels that need to be folded in the right order or you'll stress something trying to do the next step. But was it worth it? In one word: no!

To be fair the basics of the trailer is right with the silver sides complete with stripes and Autobot symbols. But there's far far too much red on the front, the top of the super robot's chest, and the top, the front of the robot's arms. This last part is particularly vexing as the robot's arms were spoiled by having trailer panels hanging off two sides of them and now the trailer is spoilt by the arms being exposed. Neither mode is right, compromised by the other. The original Powermaster Optimus Prime had the super robot arms exposed at the front of the trailer but that kind of word, more so on the Japanese version with the retracted fists. Functionally it's poor as well. There's holes in the rear of the roof showing a compartment inside but the trailer door, formed from the super robot feet, don't want to fold down to form a ramp and when you do get them open what looks like a big space is irritatingly too small to get a Legends sized car in. Trailer does have a pair of 5mm holes on the roof, for mounting guns on, and four Titanmaster pegs.

This toy is a mess. It works if you want a large Optimus to look at front on or possibly an Orion Pax. The Pax compromises the vehicle's cab and the super robot and trailer compromise each other. The grey on the super robot arms stands out a mile and the grey fists is unforgivable on a toy of this size.

Effectively this is half of the gimmick they didn't stick in Titans Return Powermaster Prime done with a 1984 Optimus Prime and it hasn't worked at all. It almost feels like Powermaster Prime has been split between two toys, one in Titans Return and one in Power of the Primes with neither quite working properly.