| GALVATRON
PROJECT #169
CLASSIFICATION: REPAINT
BASE FIGURE: GALVATRON (G1)
MATERIALS USED: ACRYLIC/ENAMEL PAINTS, REPRODUCTION LABELS
FIRST APPEARANCE: THE TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE
"You cannot stop me...I am Galvatron! I
am your destruction!"
Preamble: Galvatron is, as far as I'm
concerned, one of the absolute coolest aspects of the Transformers universe.
Long before Hasbro decided to start cranking out
repaints-of-Megatron-called-Galvatron for every single toy line, the original
Galvatron was insanely powerful and powerfully insane. He was dangerous
because he was unpredictable. He was effective because he was obsessed.
And he was awe-inspiring because you never knew who or what he was
going to attack next. He's always ranked among my favorite Transformers
characters.
Unfortunately, the Hasbro toy is pretty dissatisfying.
It's a reasonably good likeness of the character as he appears in The
Transformers: the Movie, but the colors are horribly wrong. My
guess is that the toy's predominantly grey color scheme was based on an early
character design (perhaps intended to more closely evoke Megatron), before
they settled on the purple colors used in the movie and subsequent episodes.
This was one toy that badly needed his cartoon colors.
Galvatron is the largest toy I have attempted to repaint thus far;
though I did not find its size particularly daunting, the simplicity of the
toy's transformation belies the complexity of his inner workings.
Construction: The first step was, of course,
to disassemble the toy. Galvatron's made up of something like 90 plastic
components, including several small, black tabs designed to enable his ratcheting
joints to click. Some of them are infuriatingly small (the ones in
his forearms are smaller than a toenail clipping). This is one toy
I do not recommend leaving unassembled for extended periods of time; I stopped
in mid-project for a few months because I'd ran out of paint, and after I
came back later to work on him, I'd completely forgotten how to rebuild his
arms. It proved an interesting challenge, to say the least.
I ended up painting just about all of his exterior
surfaces, except for the lower battery cover and surrounding parts (which
aren't visible in robot mode anyway). I mixed up some flat purple with
some glossy blue (checking to make sure they were both acrylics first) to
produce a semi-gloss paint that pretty closely mimics the plastic sheen of
your typical G1 toy. I repainted his head, arms, gun sights, the front
half of his chest, his pelvis, and leg guards with this color, while the
rest of him became grey, with dark grey knees, shoulder components, and the
housings for his treads. His cannon barrel was originally molded in
semi-transparent, glittery orange plastic, so I painted it a solid orange.
Finally, I painted up some red stickers and used them where appropriate
(cutting them to hexagonal shapes for his knees, which sort of makes up for
the fact that they're not molded correctly).
Most of the time, Galvatron's purple in robot
mode but grey in cannon mode. (Watch the animation closely and he actually
changes colors in mid-transformation.) I compromised by painting the
rear half of his chest grey, which becomes the top of the cannon mode. The
only other real problem was that his Decepticon symbol needed to be right
on top of the seam on his opening chest panel, so I just cut the symbol in
half horizontally. For the eyes, I just did what I've been doing for
years--slipping a cut section of a tech specs decoder behind his eyes effectively
changes their color from orange to red, and still enables them to glow when
you press his trigger.
Comments: In case you were wondering, I
deliberately reassembled him incorrectly, with his sandcastle crown on sideways.
This actually goes a long way to improving his appearance, bringing
the shape of his head a lot closer to the cartoon model, which makes me wonder
if the toy was designed to be put together this way in the first place.
Addendum: Since I completed this
project several years ago, it has spawned numerous imitators, both from the
fan community and official sources. In 2005, Takara reissued the original
Galvatron toy, and produced a version in the original toy colors as well
as an anime version that looks strikingly similar to my version.
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