Year of the monkey -Optimus Primal revealed!

[Paul Agnew]

Awesome. Great figure and rockin' deco (probably awfully priced though). Doubles as something of an Air Attack Primal Prime, so who am I to complain?

[Bladestorm]

Can't say I like this guy at all. The colours and design just make him look angry more than anything - something I don't really relate to any Optimus.

Admittedly I'm a truck not monkey kinda girl but I don't mind Beast Wars/Beast Machines. However I don't think I'd want this guy near my truck collection even if he was discounted as cheap as YOTG Optimus is...

[griffin]

Wow, I don't think I've ever seen you say that about a toy before Griff

Is it the toy in general, or the colour scheme? I hunted down this guy after messing about with a friends' as I though it was kinda cheesy with the jet sound effects. I won't be touching this one though, those colours. Man what are they thinking????

I must be the odd one out this time, as those colours look cooler than the original to me.

I've never owned this toy, is there anything particular bad about it?

There isn't anything *worse* about this toy than other Beast Machines toys or BM Optimus Primal toys, but considering its size and cost, it wasn't significantly better than the smaller ones... making it more disappointing for its price (and the expected cost of this Zodiac version).

Between the three BM Optimus Primal toys (Deluxe, Voyager, Supreme), this Supreme sized one probably was the best engineered of the three, but for a biped gorilla to turn into a biped robot, there isn't much originality you can get from each later one (it's the sixth gorilla-to-bot if you also count the three from Beast Wars).

Are there any good post BW season 3 Optimus Primal toys? I don't have any BM stuff and all I keep hearing from people is how terrible everything from that line is so I feel like I should never buy anything from that line.

A good BM Optimus Primal.... not to me. The Deluxe was terrible, the Voyager was bad, and the Supreme was okay-ish.

The entire Beast Machines toyline was love or hate, with its surrealistic designs. Usually at least one mode would look good or realistic to sell the toy, but this series had odd looking animal modes and odd looking robot modes... but fortunately there were some good vehicle modes from the Vehicons.
I particularly liked the two Jetstorms (Ultra and Deluxe), and Spy Streak... and most of the others in the vehicle modes. The two Megatrons were disappointing though.

[Verno]

Just sitting here waiting for Verno to see.....

Don't worry, he's already had his vent on TFW.

Yeah, I didn't have anything nice to say (here) so I didn't say anything

I've been very disheartened and negative of late. This news didn't improve my mood.

[Zommael]

I owned the original version of this toy back in the day - which was released in RID, not Beast Machines, although it was designed for BM - and I always felt it was a good toy for a number of reasons. It's more play-gimmick laden than most collector-focused toys, but those gimmicks are at least interesting, and it does have some features that are normally popular with collectors such as individually articulated fingers.

For those reasons, this probably will be one I look out for, though I'll be sale-waiting if its a bajillion dollars from Myer. He will be Primal Prime in my collection.

[griffin]

I owned the original version of this toy back in the day - which was released in RID, not Beast Machines, although it was designed for BM

Yeah, when Beast Machines was axed early, there were several toys that didn't get released until a year or two later - That Optimus Primal, Megahead Megatron, Bruticus, Battle Unicorn, and Cryoteck I think.

[Zommael]

Yeah, when Beast Machines was axed early, there were several toys that didn't get released until a year or two later - That Optimus Primal, Megahead Megatron, Bruticus, Battle Unicorn, and Cryoteck I think.

I'm pretty sure Battle Unicorn was actually released in BM, but the two different versions of Megabolt were released in RID, as was Cryotek. Bruticus was released in RID, but I'm not sure if it was actually finished at the time BM ended (the toy has no spark crystal, for one thing, and is below even the low standard set by BM in terms of construction) but rather was so far along Hasbro couldn't afford not to release it.

[griffin]

TFwiki claims that Battle Unicorn was released to stores before the line ended, but I don't recall that. I remember that BBTS organised a special run of the toys from Hasbro a year or two later, hoping to cash in on being the exclusive source, but then getting stuck with them for several years even after heavy discounted.

This was a list of unreleased toys that weren't part of the Transtech line that would have been the second year of Beast Machines.

[GoktimusPrime]

Are there any good post BW season 3 Optimus Primal toys? I don't have any BM stuff and all I keep hearing from people is how terrible everything from that line is so I feel like I should never buy anything from that line.

As griffin said, Air Attack Optimus Primal isn't much better/worse than most other BM toys. IMHO Beast Machines toys are really nice action figures/toys, but poor Transformers. From a craftsmanship POV some of there's a lot to admire, and some of the figures are actually quite gorgeous. If you look at even just the Deluxe Class Optimus Primal figure, it features an incredible amount of detail in the sculpting, such as rippling muscle fibres throughout the body, and even a brain that floats inside the head! The airbrushed paint ops on the armour plating is also exquisitely done. There's a painstaking amount of detail and attention put into a lot of BM toys, but having said that, they are just downright weird looking^highly stylised. A lot of the BM Maximals suffered from having beast modes that were too stylistic; to the point that it became difficult to immediately identify what they were meant to be. Hasbro even felt the need to tell us what the beast modes were! Look at Buzzsaw's card -- it actually says "Wasp" underneath his name. They needed to tell us this, because otherwise it just looks like some kind of generic looking bug-monster pooping out a slinky onto an orange lump. Oh wait, that's exactly what it looks like! Little wonder that Buzzsaw and many other BM Maximals were horrific shelfwarmers. Despite what anyone may think of the live action movies, at least most of the toys have immediately identifiable alt modes. It's not as if Age of Extinction Bumblebee's card has to say, "Muscle Car" on the front. Sure, the GM name and logo appear on the back of the card as part of their licensing thing, but we don't have to be told that it's a muscle car. It's immediately obvious.


Beast Machines toys peg and shelfwarming at a Melbourne fan meet in 2001


Beast Machines toys still massively peg/shelfwarming at a Sydney fan meet in 2002

Having said that, Air Attack Optimus Primal was one of the better ones. His beast mode is obviously a gorilla. But he does suffer from another one of BM's great afflictions; a wanton disregard for toy scale. Bringing in a sense of toy scale was one of the greatest legacies of Beast Wars, with the introduction of standardised size classes. Beast Machines used this too, but they didn't seem to care which size class that they put certain toys into. AA OP is a Supreme Class figure, which is not to scale with any other BM toy except for Supreme Cheetor, who's easily one of the worst Transformers toys ever made in the entire history of the franchise. So he's a nice enough figure for stand alone play, but his grossly disproportionate toy scale means that you can really play him alongside most other BM toys. There certainly isn't any Megatron toy that even approaches his size for him to fight, none of the Vehicons do. Okay, G1's Fortress Maximus has this too, but that toy is also a freakin' playset, not just an action figure! AAOP isn't a play set; he's just huge for the sake of being huge. These Supreme Class toys in BM were the precursor to some of the big oversized toys that we've seen in recent lines, like Leader Class Bumblebee etc. Still... at least these toys can transform and had decently complex enough transformations, unlike some of the non-convertible or simple-former figures that we currently have in RiD2015.

But yeah, the BM toys were much like the cartoon, and the entire BM series in general... pretty decent in their own right, but just really bad as part of Transformers. BM might've been a more palatable series if it'd never been associated with Transformers.

[Zommael]

TFwiki claims that Battle Unicorn was released to stores before the line ended, but I don't recall that. I remember that BBTS organised a special run of the toys from Hasbro a year or two later, hoping to cash in on being the exclusive source, but then getting stuck with them for several years even after heavy discounted.

This was a list of unreleased toys that weren't part of the Transtech line that would have been the second year of Beast Machines.

I had always heard that Battle Unicorn did end up being released as part of BM, but regardless, I believe that the BBTS release was at least released with BM branding. I actually owned a Battle Unicorn at one point, but I can't remember if it came in BM packaging or if I got it loose or what. A big part of it warehouse-warming at BBTS was probably to do with Hasbro re-releasing the toy as Magna Stampede as part of Universe within the same timeframe.