Avoiding the Boxset. Shattered Glass Megatron

So, yeeeeaaahhhh…..

Sure I said after doing the  Botcon figures from 2012 that I would get about going through the  Shattered Glass boxset and then promptly followed up by doing Rodimus….  Weeeelll, I’ve done it again.  Megatron here was Rodimus’ bag buddy and therefore isn’t a part of the box set.  That all said though, after I finish this review, I have no other Shattered Glass characters to do except the box set.

See?  The silver lining.


Oh, I have Driftpool too.

Megatron here is based on the Japanese Superlink (Energon to our English speaking friends) Galvatron, with a nice little newly sculpted head.  The head is based on G1 Megatron protoype images and the design used in the first Transformers advert, which I think is a pretty cool little touch, so it looks a bit different to your normal Megatron bucket-head, but still Megatronny enough.

Incidentally, if you have the Energon Megatron, you will find it a fair bit larger than this toy, as the Energon one was significantly scaled up from the Superlink toy.  Why?  Probably to match Optimus a bit better.  Personally I think the larger toys looks a bit tacky.  Moving on to THIS Megatron, let’s learn a little bit about him.

So, Optimus was a librarian and Megatron a mathematician.  Odd that he has all those lasers mounted on his shoulders and his firepower is only 9.  Interestingly they have dropped some commas for full stops, so that makes a nice change but overall this is a reasonably well written bio.  I will say this though, I really like that artwork for him as it seems to capture his personality (i.e Charismatic, humorous, intelligent and obviously a ‘bot in control) rather nicely.

And now for the toy.

This dude is fat.  There is no way around it (or him).  I suspect that is why I am not fond of the Energon version of this toy, it’s just too damn large.  As you can see, his colours consist of the grey, black and red, with blue being for his lasers and weapons. It works together well and homages the source material satisfactorily.

His sculpting is ok, nothing too sensational and most of it is just panels and the like that would be visible in robot mode.  The lasers and wing laser things that are in the translucent blue plastic are nicely done though and look similar enough to G1 Galvatron’s barrel.

He still retains the spark crystal which on mine is remarkably clear.  As much as I liked this way of keeping the insignia, in execution, it often didn’t come out as well as it should have.  This one though is pretty darn clean.


The head sculpt is well done and seems remarkably human to me for some reason.  If a tad on the small side.  The original toy had a crown type head going on, so I guess that increased his head size somewhat.



His eyes are a bit large for my liking, but I do like the detail on the back of the head and the paint and colours match well.

Weapon wise, Megatron comes with a cute little version of, well if this were the Unicron trilogy, I’d say himself.  However this is no the Unicron Trilogy, so it must be something else.  Nonetheless, it is a little tank that is in the same shape as Armada Megatron.  If my memory serves me correctly, I believe this tank has been referred to as ‘Rumbler.’  Although I can’t remember where I read that.

It is black plastic but does have a surprising amount of paint on it.  I didn’t expect that to be honest, but in reality it would certainly need some.

Underneath the tanks has a couple of panels that fold out to clip over Megatron’s arm.

It clips on in much like a fusion cannon thing.  It can go on either arm and from the back of the tank, his sword can be attached.  The sword sits cleverly in the nose of the jet mode and needs the tank to connect and get it out.

And like the lasers on his shoulders it’s a nice translucent blue plastic, with the added bonus of some nice sculpted detail.

I think, all things considered that it looks reasonably decent on the arm.  The problem lies though in the fact that the barrel of the tank is so long that it gets tangled up with the rest of his body if you attempt to have him swish the sword around.

All the electronics for Megatron were stored in the tank, but this being the TFCC version, they have been stripped down.

Megatron himself has some reasonable articulation in there, but most of it is hindered by his chunky size, but the large feet do aid him in dynamic poses.  Oh and those wings hanging off the back.  Crikey they stick out.  You can give him a powered up mode (which was the gimmick of the Energon Decepticon) where the ends of the wings open up, but in robot mode it’s pretty useless as all lasers point up or down only.

This is the extent of his knee movement and thigh lift,  although it’s pretty good, the large lower legs effectively negate the look of a bent knee.  And Laser wings.  They work better in vehicle mode.  The Heroic Decepticon insignias are all cleanly painted.

Transformation is simple, the wings flip around, head looks down, legs fold up and that’s it.  That’s why I am not too fond of the leader sized version of this toy and he transforms into a rather fat looking jet.

And the tank just sits on the top of the plane.  His legs become massive massive jet engines and well I suspect he would need them, because aerodynamic this guy ain’t!  I do like the landing gear he has been supplied with.

In this mode the powered up weaponry looks a bit more useful.  Not much cooler, but useful.

Underneath the jet is a whole lot of folded robot.  I have always disliked the way the robot head is ‘hidden’ for this toy, it’s just turned around and looks bad.   But really, this toy is kind of naff anyway.  A doofy chunky robot and a doofy chunky jet.

Even though the Energon series had less of a connection to Minicons, they still included Minicon ports on many of the figures.  Rumbler is connected to Megatron by four minicon ports and Megatron has a couple of ports for the energon weapons that the Omnicons could make from energon as well.

If you really wanted to, you could really arm this guy up to the teeth.  That is kind of cool!  

So there we have it.  Really this toy is a little bit silly, but cool at the same time.  It expresses the power of Megatron well enough, the colours work well and the head sculpt is an inspired idea which I really like.  I think overall that Funpub did a fairly good job with the colours and even the personality with Megatron here and for that I say bravo.  Ideally though, this isn’t THAT great a toy for Megatron, but it was an official Megatron at the start so there you go.

I wouldn’t exactly hunt this guy down, but having him makes me glad I do have him for going against my Shattered Glass Optimus, but as a stand alone figure I wouldn’t bother or get the original.