FedEx has been jerking me around most of the week, rescheduling packages almost every day. The arrival of Ultra Magnus from Hasbro Pulse nicely coincided with me taking the rest of the week off, though, so I'll have plenty of time to enjoy him! Yay!

So, we've gotten a decent Ultra Magnus (Siege) and a slightly better Magnus (Kingdom) but this is the first truly excellent Ultra Magnus by Hasbro, in my estimation. There just wasn't enough in the budget to do the Leader-class attempts proper justice, but at the Commander-class price point, they absolutely hit a home run. This toy easily rivals the Masterpiece toy by Takara, and actually manages to surpass it in a few ways.

He comes in the package strapped down with stretchy rubber ties at the legs and arms and body, and actually uses up maybe two-thirds of the box. His accessories are tucked off to the side, wrapped six ways from Sunday in liberal amounts of tissue paper and tape. Hasbro really doesn't want you getting into this at all. I had to use a chainsaw. There should be thirteen parts, all told—seven blast effect pieces, two launchers, two missiles, two rifles, and his head antennas. (The antennas require a one-time assembly and you don't need to pop them off for transformation.)

I don't really collect the backdrops, because who needs all that cardboard laying around, but the background for Magnus is nice and big. It depicts one of the Autobot shuttles from The Transformers: the Movie, being pelted by Decepticon laser fire (orange laser bursts, though, tsk tsk), as Hot Rod's shuttle already launches in the distance. (Wait, Ultra Magnus, Arcee is still out there!) It's big enough you could probably display several toys in front of it, if you were so inclined.

The very first thing Hasbro wants you to do is kill Ultra Magnus. Right off the bat, the instructions show how to dismantle the toy, removing his arms and legs to simulate the damage he took when four of the Sweeps d̶r̶e̶w̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶q̶u̶a̶r̶t̶e̶r̶e̶d shot him a lot, which resulted in his limbs popping off neatly at the connecting points. (You have to partially untransform the arms to get them off, which I think helps prevent you from slipping them off accidentally.) The instructions don't specify this, but his head is on a ball-and-socket joint, so it pops off as well.

Shoulder launchers go on the shoulders, weirdly enough, and the missiles are just cute little knobby things (pretty much exactly the way they looked when he was launching them at the jail cell bars in "The Killing Jar"). He's got his regular rifle (painted a slightly purpley silver) as well as a slightly smaller rifle painted in the same color (it's a match for the gun on the Transformers: the Movie weapons model sheet assigned to Wreck-Gar, not that he carried a gun in the movie at any point).

The stackable yellow-orange blast effects are the same mold as the ones that came Siege Omega Supreme and Earthrise Sky Lynx, and there are enough parts to build one really big blast (airbrushed with grey paint) and still have two smaller ones. They will fit on the tips of his rifles (whose tips are clear plastic and unpainted) or can go inside his shoulder launchers if you yank the missiles out. I feel like an opportunity was missed to be able to use the blast effects as an intermediate piece between the launchers and the missiles, so you can simulate the missiles being in mid-launch.

He has zero battle damage paint, no places on his body to mount blast effects, and no places to mount Weaponizer parts. He also doesn't have a pelvis mount for a Tamashii figure stand, as has been the design standard for years now—I imagine he would be far too heavy for it to support his weight.

He does come with his own Matrix of Leadership (he's just borrowing it until Hot Rod is ready for it), and his chest opens exactly the way it does in The Transformers: the Movie. The doors are spring-loaded, so as soon as you swing up the T-bar in the center of his chest, the chest panels pop open on their own. On my toy, it was stuffed in there upside-down, but you can remove it and mount it properly. There are visible springs and hinges on either side of his chest windows in order to accomplish this, but they're not completely awful. His chest windows are translucent red, which is correct to the way he's colored in animation.

The Matrix is the same mold as the one we've been getting since Earthrise, so it's a little tiny in his hands, but it's also got to be able to fit into the chest compartments of Optimus Prime, Hot Rod, etc. (One of these days I want a lumpy Scourge toy that comes with a Matrix! Make it happen, Hasbro!)

Magnus himself is a big, beefy boi. He's nine inches tall, which makes him scale correctly with Earthrise Optimus Prime, Kingdom Rodimus Prime, etc. He's significantly bigger than Kingdom Galvatron and/or Cyclonus, however (about two full heads taller), and I always pictured Magnus as being the same height as both of them. But, a smaller Magnus couldn't turn into a car carrier big enough to actually carry cars. The Siege or Kingdom Magnus toy has a perfectly fine robot mode, and they're a bit smaller, so they tend to scale better with the Decepticon characters, I think.

His eyes have a light pipe function, but the eyes still read as blue even when you're not holding him up to a light source. The eyes on other toys (like Studio Series Blurr) tend to read as black, so I'm glad about this.

Articulation is very impressive—he's got spring-loaded ratcheting shoulders (shades of the G1 toy!), soft-ratcheting elbows, a swivel waist, spring-loaded ratchets for the hips and knees, and the all-important ankle tilts. The truck wheels are recessed into his feet and don't touch the ground. His hip skirt panels swing out at the back, either side, and the front to allow leg movement. His hands are sort of Masterpiece Lite, with index fingers that can bend at the base and middle joint, while the rest of the fingers move in tandem at the base. The thumbs don't move. His thumbs already create sort of a C-shape so you can plug the guns into his hands without messing around with the position of the fingers.

Yeah, the shoulders are a little wide. There are a lot of layers stacked and folded up inside those shoulder joints. Masterpiece did it a bit cleaner. However, this toy managed to successfully hide like 98% of his truck kibble in a way that even the Masterpiece toy did not. Masterpiece cheated the back of his skirt as well as parts of his backpack, but this toy comes very close to matching the illogical cartoon design of his robot mode—a white truck cab that somehow becomes a red-colored backpack with random silver panels. There is a *little* bit of the white-colored cab and its windows in evidence, but it's subtle, especially compared to the Masterpiece toy. They really did a good job maintaining a lot of fidelity to his animated look.

Transformation is an elaborate 43-step process in which you turn the entire toy inside-out. The whole truck cab is just inside-out panels made out of parts of the backpack and robot chest. The arms extend similar to the Masterpiece toy, with the forearms opening and coming down and closing around the robot fists. It's all quite similar in premise to the G1 toy, but with many more vanity panels to help hide the robot upper legs and such. The rear wheels can be repositioned so they actually touch the ground.

Truck mode is about 12.5" in length. He's based on the cartoon colors, which means he's got the red-colored bumper. He has all the correct functionality to accept four mid-sized Autobots for transport. The ramps fold down so cars can drive up onto the lower platform, and the arms can unlock and swing down to allow access to the top platform. The gap for the lower platform is about 2.5" wide and maybe 2.25" tall, so any vehicles than that would have to cheat and slip in through the side, or ride on the top. I was able to fit the Studio Series versions of Kup, Blurr, Hot Rod, and Arcee all at the same time. (The only thing this toy is missing that the Diaclone-era toy had was little divots for the car wheels to rest inside of. They were present on Magnus' shoulders and forearms.)

The launchers now mount on the outsides, not the front of the trailer, because Magnus got a slight redesign before he appeared in the movie proper. The rifles can mount to the sides of the trailer (using the holes in the robot elbow joints). The rifles each have a clear plastic tab that go unmentioned in the instructions, but the Wreck-Gar gun seem to correspond to the rectangular slots in the top of the truck cab, so you can mount it there if you want to. I'm honestly not sure about the other rifle. You can slip blast effects over the tips of the smokestacks.

The truck cab (by itself it's about 4.5" in length) has clear windows, but the cab interior is mostly stuffed full of robot parts. The back of the cab (where the smokestacks are attached) is red, so they did cheat slightly. The cab isn't meant to come off per se, but it slides forward on a track so that the cab can turn a little to the left or the right with respect to the trailer. It does pop off with minimal force, if you really want Magnus to develop a split personality. (There was no season three episode where Huffer offered to tow Ultra Magnus' trailer. Because Huffer was dead.)

I have read some warnings from people online whose toys are experiencing stress marks from the blue-colored locking tabs on the toy. I have not experienced this personally, but I suspect people are perhaps just being too rough with their toys.

On Tuesday, October 17, 2023 at 5:14:44 PM UTC-6, Zobovor wrote:

> as well as a slightly smaller rifle painted in the same color (it's a match for the gun on the Transformers: the Movie weapons model sheet assigned to Wreck-Gar, not that he carried a gun in the movie at any point).

I kept questioning myself and second-guessing whether this was correct. I finally fired off a question to Evan Brooks and he confirmed that it is, in fact, the "break glass in case of emergency" gun that Magnus pulls out of the shuttle console after they crash on Junkion in The Transformers: the Movie. So, I got it wrong. Statistically, it has to happen SOME of the time..

Zob (seriously, this is, like, my new favorite toy ever)

On Tuesday, October 17, 2023 at 5:14:44 PM UTC-6, Zobovor wrote:

> The rifles each have a clear plastic tab that go unmentioned in the instructions

Oh, figured it out. The rectangular tabs are meant for weapons storage in robot mode. His large rifle plugs into his butt plate and the smaller gun plugs into his back.

Zob (carry on, citizens)

If anyone missed this (I only saw SS Magnus on shelves once at GameStop), HobbyLinkJapan has the Takara SS-119 Transformers Studio Series Ultra Magnus up to order now for 89.99 before shipping and other costs. Still better than the minimum $140+ US that ebay sellers are charging.

This may be the last time I see this one available at retail.

https://www.hlj.com/ss-119-transformers-studio-series-ultra-magnus-tkt91850

In your opinion, is this an upgrade, downgrade, or sidegrade, compared to the MP?

On Monday, February 19, 2024 at 6:20:32 PM UTC-7, CodigoPostal wrote:

> In your opinion, is this an upgrade, downgrade, or sidegrade, compared to the MP?

Masterpiece did a better job with the shoulders in robot mode, but Studio Series was able to more successfully hide the vehicle panels in robot mode. So I don't think one toy is clearly superior to the other. I think I'm more impressed with the Commander-class toy, given that they were able to essentially give us a miniaturization of the Masterpiece toy at a more affordable price.

Zob (I really won't need to ever buy another Ultra Magnus toy, unless they do a G1 retro reissue in cartoon colors)

Thanks! There's a great KO of the MP, apparently, that's about the same price as the Commander-class, so it'll be a struggle to decide.

Zobovor wrote:
> Zob (I really won't need to ever buy another Ultra Magnus toy, unless they do a G1 retro reissue in cartoon colors)

And with that I cancelled my preorder. Because I was thinking if I hold out long enough they may do a Commander Class Magnus in toy box art colors. I would love a silver bumper and white chest shield and stickers.

CodigoPostal wrote:
> Thanks! There's a great KO of the MP, apparently, that's about the same price as the Commander-class, so it'll be a struggle to decide.

The Commander wins just by not having that butt flap the MP does. The MP overall has the better robot and vehicle modes, but that butt flap killed it for me.