Tets goes to "The World of Transformers"

A Transformers 35th Anniversary Exhibition.



15th of March 2019 Opening day!

Today I hauled my butt out to Ikebukurou (twice in 1 week!) to go to the Parco Museum to see this gallery they had set up.  It only really grabbed my attention when I saw the (catchy) artwork advertising it in the elevator when I went to the Bumblebee cafe.   Boy am I glad I went!

Once again preparations began early, with pants selection:

Luckily the morning wasn't as bed comfy as before, so I was able to arise and wander off a little earlier from my house.

Knowing the gallery is in the same building as the BB cafe, I had no trouble finding it and when I first spied it, I was a little disappointed.



It cost 700 yen and at the counter looked a little sad. I prepared myself for feelings equal to my BB cafe experience. i.e nice but not exciting.

Luckily it was
More than meets the eye!  (Collective groans go here)



Looking at the sign out the front, it actually says please do not take pictures, BUT everybody was, so I thought, why not.  However this brought up one little thing that I found a tad annoying.  More on that later.

Thinking that photos were no-go, I snapped this quicky with my SILENT camera on my phone (only used for taking pictures of toys by the way ladies and gents, nothing more sinister than that).

However I soon saw a dude snapping away happily and though, OK. Let's do this.  Afterall, I'm partly here to spread the joy.  SO I forked over my yennies and waltz in, phone in hand, not expecting a whole lot.

To build photo confidence I took this one of the first wall you see.  They had some toys set up and some mildly interesting artwork there advertising the Parco thing.  It was cute.


I then turned and looked a bit more and

OH

MY

GAWD

What I beheld with my eyes was wonderful!

They had character art stickers all over the walls, dotted with more character art behind casings.  I like the G1 art for the boxes, so this was loverly! 

This case was opposite one above.  Looking at G1 toys always makes me happy.  Yes, even when it's G1 Ironhide.

The room looked like this.



There was another little area around the corner from this as well, but it wasn't as large.

The artwork for Prowl, Mirage, Hound  attracted my eye and I went for a closer look, half expecting them to be prints sourced from Transformers Legacy  Note, don't go to Amazon.com to buy that book as it's currently at 300 bucks or some crap...

However I was pleasantly surprised when I saw that the artwork was the ACTUAL ORIGINAL artwork.   You can see the paint textures and stuff in there, BEAUTIFUL!

Have a look at Kickback in that above picture and you will see the sunburst thing is kind of over his wing a little.  Also, check out the outline on Prowl and you might be able to spot the brush strokes/dabs of paint.

On top of that, they also had a bunch of toys set up in various sections.  To keep this post in some order(ish), I'm going to keep art photos together and toys bits together.

So here's some more art pictures.

They had the back of box battles with some explanations of why they had characters in them and the general timing as well.  None of the individual art had any notes aside from the name of the character.  Nor artists names that I saw.  Art was broken down by series as well, which made sense.

I love the following Headmaster art!  The Headmaster robots are so big compared to the vehicles, it looks almost comical!

Truly it was cool, looking at all this great artwork!

They also had a bunch of toys set up in display as well.  I suspect someone's collection judging by the amount and variety.  I saw my very first Black Zarak in base mode today.  I see why the gold is so much contention, it was very swirly!

A thought hit me, above there is a boxed G1 Grimlock, despite it not being a "Bommander," the print on the box looked a little dark and made me wonder if it was a KO.  There's many Dinobot KOs and they look pretty damn close.  I even saw some in Mandarake being sold as G1 and they were fakes, well at least the Grimlock box had him as "Dinobot Bommander."

Nice bit of Grandus and Metrotitan action going on there.  It was really great seeing such a variety of toys!

They also had a little sign in book.  Considering how I arrrived just a few hours after its first day opening, I didn't expect much to be in there, but people were having fun with it, I liked this little Optimus picture.

Most of the comments were things along the lines of  "G1 is the best!"  "I love Transformers" etc etc.

Aside from toys in the display cases, they had original logo mock up artwork.



They also had a few niceties in that they had prototypes and wooden mock-ups.  As well as original design pictures of Galvatron.  Really nicely drawn in pencil on that thar paper!

I was really entranced by that!!

Going along, I also found some prototypes for Godmasters/Powermasters.

They had Getaway, Joyride and Doubledealer.  DD looked fascinating to me as the vehicle mode looked a bit smaller than I remember.  They also had a couple of Aerialbots, Combaticons, and Crosshairs with a derpy sticker face.  Also, check out the hand drawn stickers on Getaway and "Recing" (understandable mistake if you know Japanese phonetics).




There was also this section, with some of the head sculpts carved in wood and looking awesomely BIG.  Predaking still looks rather dull though.

Oh and there's a proto Sixshot, made of wood.  Looks cool and old at the same time!

I think that's about it for the displays and general artworks.  I didn't want to take pictures of everything because that could ruin it for others.  Unlike happy snappy camera woman (again, I'll complain about that later).  They did have a movie section with some dioramas set up.  Some of which they've used at the Tokyo Toy Show and I know I've seen them before.  As well as a case with MPM Bug Bumblebee, a Siege toys display as well as a case holding MP Convoy Ver 3 and MP Bumblebee Ver 2 in it.  Convoy looked awesome, with his round head plugged on.  Bumblebee looked tiny, but not as bad as the original pictures had him looking.  Erm, I mean, in "hand" it looks a lot better than the pictures...

I love Flywheels\Skytread and want one NOW.  Shockwave looks pretty nice too!

They also had around the corner a Studio Series section.  Gotta admit that SS Optimus from the BB movie looks very nice.

They had a dude dressed up as BB walk through soon after I arrived for pictures, which was cool.  It was a cool, large suit.  It walked by me, turned, looked, waved at me and we shook hands.  Wonder if it is the same person inside as was at the Comic-con?  It high fived a guy on the way down and posed for pictures with the punters.  nice, as it cleared out people so I could take some personless pictures.

Next to photo area with BB (by the MPM BB) was a Standee, which although hard to spot was made of carboard!  It was pretty impressive with flashy eyes.  A bit further on was a screen with an animated Bee designed so it could pat you on the head.  Very cute.

Then as you exited there was a little room with a door. You could see Bee sitting in the window, when you opened the door, he transformed as if he were hiding in a garage.

Bumblebee might be in the garage.  Open the door and see if you can spy him.

Then there was cabinet with various crossover toys, including the hatformers, phone formers, device label and stuff.

Then you could hit the gift shop.  They had some toys, like MPM Ironhide, MPM Bumblebee and stuff there for big bucks.  I was rather hoping to see some as yet not released in Japan Siege toys (Would have totally bought a fly wheels there and then), but no such luck.  They had some cool artwork mugs, card cases and acrylic prints done, but the card cases being 2000 yen and the acrylic prints being 10,000 put me off buying them.  I ended up getting a little acrylic G1 Convoy key chain thing.  Phew.  They also had copies of the book, which now that I think about it, might have new stuff in it.  I'll have to dig mine out and then hit up a book store for a good look later.

Them bucks!!

With my chian thing in my bag, I headed out to enjoy the rest of the day.

Space wise the exhibition was small, but value wise it was totally worth it.  I would actually go again!  I had a great time!

If you get a chance, or are able to go, this is

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

Now for the phone rant.

Just after I arrived, a lady arrived.  She whipped out her camera and started taking bloody pictures of EVERYTHING.  Fair enough, but it was like she kachick needed kachik  more than kachikkachik one kachik photo of every kachik kachik kachik thing she kachik took a kachik photo of. kachik.  I'm fine with this kachik, however kachik in kachik case you haven't noticed about  kachikkachikkachikkachikkachik the way I've typed this, the noise of her camera goingkachik off kachik every kachik two kachik seconds kachik was incredibly annoying.

If you're going to go like that people, at east have the decency to find a quiet camera app and use that.  Turn down the volume?  DO SOMETHING.  Or perhaps take a reasonable amount of pictures.  Normally I'm ok with this sort of thing, but damn, she was frikking ridiculous!

Luckily she left pretty quickly, maybe as soon as Bumble came from pictures, or my ears got used to it, so I was still able to enjoy the rest of the exhibition which was great.  I had a great day.

(P.S, sorry for the messy looking post.  I used to us Open Writer to post, but it won't do pictures anymore because of google changes, so I used the normal web browser thing for editing on blogger and it doesn't like lining pictures very smoothly. sad face)