I didn't order these guys when they were first made available. I forget the reason why. I think I was already pre-ordering some stuff that day, and I figured I'd just pick them up when I found them at Walmart. But that didn't happen (there is currently a serious glut of R.E.D. Knockouts) and then Hasbro Pulse recently restocked and I figured I'd better just get them.

Plus, we were back-to-school shopping today, which is never any fun, so it was nice to come home and find a box of toys waiting for me on my doorstep. It's officially Purple Decepticon Day!

GALVATRON

So, there have been various non-transforming Galvatron toys over the years. There's the tiny Takara SCF version, of course, but there was also the highly coveted nine-inch Super Hybrid Model sold at BotCon Japan in 1997, the Robot Heroes version, the Titanium Series three-inch figure, etc. This is the largest one that's specifically modeled after his cartoon appearance, though. Freed from the confines of having to transform, how close did they actually get?

Well, for one, the colors are off. In accurate animation, Galvatron tends to appear in a blue-purple color. Now, obviously his specific shade does vary somewhat depending on what episode you're watching, but the deep purple they settled upon might be accurate to some appearances (like "Carnage in C-Minor" maybe or "Five Faces of Darkness") but not his Toei appearances (like The Transformers: the Movie or "Webworld") which I consider the gold standard. Also, like the Kingdom toy, the dark grey of his cartoon model is being interpreted as black. This is not correct. While it's true that black colors on some of the G1 toys were realized as grey in animation (Wheeljack, Thundercracker, etc.) that doesn't mean all grey cartoon parts need to become black toy parts. The sides of his hip panels are black for some reason, too, and there's no world in which this is correct.

Color problems aside, it's a very good sculpt. He stands at about 6.25" in height. The helmet prongs have the correct size and position, the upper chest has the right geometry, the feet are rounded instead of the squared-off boots we tend to get a lot of the time. All the really hard sculpting issues were handled well. There are a handful of things I would have liked to see (the red squares on the center helmet spire are not painted, and he's missing the red panels on the tops of his shoulder pads) but these are minor things.

He's got very good articulation, with a double neck joint, shoulders that swivel and pivot, a bicep swivel, double elbow joints, wrist swivels, an ab crunch, a swiveling waist, universal hip joints and swiveling mid-thigh joints, double knee joints, and ankles that both swivel and pivot. I dislike how his knee guards are attached to his upper legs, since they should move in tandem with his lower legs. The guards also block the movement of his upper legs a bit, so shifting that piece to his knees would have enabled a wider range of leg movement.

His arm cannon is incorrectly mounted to the side of his arm rather than the front of the forearm, probably just to enable a greater range of arm movement. The arm cannon is glued in place and is not removable. The cannon barrel also has an extra piece at the tip to attach blast effects, so it doesn't look quite right.

His accessories include two extra weapon-grasping hands, two clutching hands, a Matrix-on-a-chain for him to wear on his neck, two fuschia blast effects (a long, narrow blast and a short, fat blast), and a translucent smoky backdrop with green painted grid lines representing the animated background that appeared during his creation scene in the 1986 movie. What a fun and silly idea for a physical accessory. It's also only about 4.75" by 3.75" so it's too small to serve as, say, a backdrop for toy photography. But, it's cute.

It's a good Galvatron figure, certainly, and for about $20 it's eminently affordable. I imagine we might eventually get a more accurate version from Super7, but it will be like fifty bucks, and will probably come with, like, a martini glass and a fat Unicron costume he can wear so you can reenact Galvatron's absurdest moments. Until that time comes, though, this is the best non-transformable Galvatron figure we've gotten.

SHOCKWAVE

I would say that, objectively, Shockwave is a harder character to get wrong.. His cartoon model was, essentially, a drawing of his G1 toy, with almost no creative liberties taken for his design or proportions. He's been celebrated less frequently as a non-transformable toy—aside from the Action Master and Robot Heroes figures, I can't think of any.

This version of Shockwave is about 6.5" tall at the ears. He's a cartoon light purple rather than the dark purple of the G1 toy. He has a creamy, almost pearlescent grey as his secondary color, used for his upper legs and feet and hands and elbow joints. His backpack is realized as a separate piece that plugs into his upper back with two Hero Mashers style pegs.
His articulation is about the same as Galvatron's, including a slight ab crunch. The round pieces embedded inside the sides of his torso, to which his arms are attached, seem to be separate parts and may be designed to enable his arms a greater range of motion, but I honestly can't tell. They wiggle a little, but they don't seem to want to move and I don't want to force the joints. The purple rubbery hose is permanently attached from his back to his left arm, and is flexible to allow for most poses.

In addition to his opaque grey right weapon-grasping hand and his opaque grey gun-arm, he also has an opaque grey closed fist, a translucent purple copy of both fists, and a translucent purple gun-arm. Lots of Masterpiece-style options! No left fist available to reenact his introduction from "More Than Meets the Eye" part 1, however.

He's also got two fuschia blast effects (both of them similar, but not identical, to the skinny long one that came with Galvatron) as well as a gun-mode Megatron accessory. Shockwave never carried Megatron in the cartoon, though it's likely he would have been one of the Decepticons entrusted with the task back on Cybertron. A little tiny gun-mode Shockwave would have been more screen-accurate, but I don't totally hate the idea. And you can always put it in the hands of canonical characters like Starscream or Optimus Prime or Soundwave.

This is a great action figure. I'm much happier with him than with Galvatron, but that's possibly due to the fact that I'm very picky about Galvatron's design and colors.

I'm envisioning a future, several years away, when we have a whole, huge slew of assorted characters from R.E.D. and it's kind of an exciting concept. RIght now it's a very small collection, sort of trundling along at a snail's pace, but even Marvel Legends and the Star Wars Black Series started out small. I do generally like where this line is going, but I wish they'd get there a bit faster.

Zob (would buy this toy again in Constructicon colors)