Ultra Magnus

Ultra Magnus is one of those popular robots, who often appears in the Transformers universe, but, to chagrin of many fans, as a direct redeco of Optimus Prime aka. Convoy. And so he did in the Revoltech line, being a Friendly Shop exclusive. Yes, he’s just a repaint. But to do him justice, this is one of the best representations of this character I’ve ever seen.

Ultra Magnus is often represented as Optimus Prime’s twin brother, which gives Hasbro a good excuse to exploit this albino Transformer. Thankfully, this time he is exploited by Kaiyodo, with great results.

There are many armourless toys of this character, but they just don’t feel like Generation 1 Ultra Magnus, which this toy depicts. This one not only does, but also is based on his comic appeareance. In the show Magnus never took off his battle suit so that kids don’t mistake him for Prime. However, Dreamwave’s G1 comics were intended for older fans who had no problem in differing the two.

Ultra Magnus takes a major part in War and Piece story arc in which Earth based TFs return to Cybertron only to find it ruled by Shockwave, Magnus being one of his law enforcers. At one stage of the story, Magnus disagrees with Shockwave on how to handle the Earth Autobots, so Shockwave supposedly beats him to death and leaves to kill Prime. UM survives the encounter at the cost of his armour being destroyed and when he appears to aid Optimus later on, it is revealed that he dons a white copy of Prime’s body. And exactly this form of Magnus is represented by this Revoltech.

What can I say, I’m not a great fan of Pat Lee’s Transformers, but they fit in the Revoltech line perfectly. Magnus just looks fabulous, he’s sharp and definitely has some character. He almost looks alive. Even if this design doesn’t immediately suggest his comic persona is capable of actually transforming into a trailer cab, it has some very cool details which make it somewhat more realistic (if you can say so about Lee’s way of drawing robots)

And now to show you how big he is (sorry, I didn’t have Yotsuba when I took the pictures yet), my Nokia 6120c…yes, that’s armoured Ultra Magnus on the screen ^^

I find it quite interesting that this is one of the very few Revoltech that have their arms designed to be bent a bit outwards without the ability to squeeze them any closer to the torso. It’s not a tragedy, but this may prove a bit unhandy when trying to do some poses where our Autobot is supposed to hold his hands and arms as close to each other as possible. Also noteworthy, the head and neck are double jointed so they can imitate movements of pidgeon’s head 😛

Legs are shown just so you can see the nice details applied there. And, they are designed to work with the base of Revoltech stand, if you ever happen to have a spare one.

I must say, I’m quite impressed by the Revoltech joints and how hard it is to tell where the separate pieces begin.

Magnus comes with some accessories, which include an Ion Rifle with rotating handle, and 4 extra hands, which include a pointing hand, an opened one, one to hold the rifle…and some weird looking one.

With his design and accessories, Ultra Magnus can achieve various cool looking poses.

“Um, if I can propose something, let’s just blow this planet to tiny little bits and forget about the whole war thing, ok?”

If I didn’t knew better, I could almost swear he’s trying to copy one of Sailor Moon’s poses…

Ok, I think the weird hand thingie needs some explaining. Many Revoltech accessories are designed to interact with other toys from the line, and this one isn’t exception. What you want to do is you plug the hand from one side to Magnus and to Prime on the other end, so that they can shake hands like brothers sometimes do. I was almost sorry I didn’t have Convoy while taking these pictures (they’re about a year old ^^)

Some of you could probably see this coming. They both are action figures and yet they are so different that I recently lost any reason to compare them as toys competing for your wallet’s insides. Still, they look good next to each other on the shelf.

When I was preparing these pictures I wasn’t interested in full-time collecting of Revoltech and so the piece you see here was borrowed from a friend collector. However, now that I actually began collecting them I wish I had this toy, I just find so much more unique and interesting then Convoy. A word of advice, should you spot this guy somewhere, don’t hesitate and get him, there’s no way you’ll regret it.