| MEGATRON
PROJECT #186
CLASSIFICATION: REPAINT
MATERIALS USED: ENAMEL PAINTS, CUSTOM REPRODUCTION STICKERS
FIRST APPEARANCE: "MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE" PART 1 (THE
TRANSFORMERS)
"I am Megatron, leader of the Decepticons! You
will do exactly as I say!"
Preamble: It took me several years
of searching for parts, on and off, before I was finally able to assemble
a complete, unbroken Megatron toy. I'd gotten the toy second-hand from
a friend when I was a kid, but it didn't have any accessories. Some
years later, I managed to snag his weapons at BotCon for a couple of bucks,
but by this point the toy's arm and chest had both broken off. Extensive
repair attempts to the toy just compounded the problem, because the 15-year-old
plastic was too brittle (and Megatron isn't the most durable toy in the world
to begin with). Eventually, I started hunting for a second broken Megatron
toy, and once I got one (for $1.75; not through eBay, obviously) I
was able to combine the parts from both toys and ended up with a complete,
unbroken Megatron toy for less than five bucks.
Originally, I hadn't intended to paint the toy,
but after I finished my Optimus Prime
repaint, I realized that I really wanted him to have a counterpart for my
display shelf. (Besides, the new Megatron parts had some pretty bad
chrome wear, so he'd have needed a new paint job no matter what.) This
was also a good excuse to make a custom label sheet for the toy. I'd
already had a pretty good experience modifying Delta Star's reproduction
stickers into cartoon versions for the five Dinobot toys, so I figured I
could do the same thing for Megatron as well.
Construction: First, I designed new
stickers for Megatron's chest, abdomen, and back. They were the same
shape as the original stickers, since I used the original stickers as a model,
but I designed them to include the details Megatron has in the cartoon show.
(They ended up printing with a purple tint for some reason, so I ended
up just cutting off the relevant details. And drawing new ones after
losing them in the carpeting.) The Hasbro toy actually had stickers
all over its body, mostly on the insides of the arms and legs, but Megatron
doesn't have these details in the cartoon so I skipped those stickers.
Next, I peeled all the existing stickers off the
toy and disassembled it. All the die-cast metal parts (his feet, upper
legs, and the framework that comprises his head-and-arms assembly and the
not-quite-so-shiny chrome parts (his arms and chest) became light grey in
color (only took a couple of drops of black paint to an otherwise pure white
batch) along with his helmet, gun barrel, and the inside panels on his arms,
which were originally red. His face is a very slightly lighter shade
of grey. I painted his lower legs a dark grey, painted his pelvis black,
and the middle sections of his arms became red.
The only really tricky part was keeping track
of all those stupid screws. There are something like 50 of the little
buggers holding Megatron together, all in assorted sizes and lengths, and
each one goes in a very specific place. I got tired of having to search
for them after dropping one for the seventeen billionth time, so I finally
stuck them all to a big piece of tape. (I really need to stop working
near thick carpeting.)
I suppose that technically this project constitutes
slightly more than just a repaint, since I did have to scrape away at the
plastic on the inside of his legs and upper arms a little bit. This
was the only way to ensure that I could actually transform the toy without
scraping off little flecks of paint everywhere. (I also left part of
his fusion cannon mount unpainted for the same reason, since the cannon is
designed to slide into place and it's a rather tight fit.) I didn't
bother painting his fusion cannon or the rest of his accessories since they
were already black and shiny and I didn't want to waste the paint.
Everything else got a fresh coat of paint, though. Even the screws.
(Yeah, I'm meticulous that way.) Oh, and I also added a couple
of drops of super glue to the tabs on the inside of his legs, which raised
the little bumps to help him stand up a bit better.
His weapon mode isn't quite accurate to
the cartoon, since he's one of those characters who changes color when he
transforms (his pelvis is black in robot mode, but grey when he's in gun
mode). I usually display him in robot mode anyway, so this isn't really
a problem. (Right now I've got my Heroes of Cybertron PVC Megatron
figure sitting on the stock and silencer accessories that are transformed
into gun emplacement mode. What supreme irony!)
Comments: Some of my projects, like
this one, have inspired other fans to improve their toys in an effort to
more closely match the media depiction of their choice. David Willis,
for example, painted his Megatron
toy into the color scheme from the UK comics. (Mockery is truly the
sincerest form of flattery.) |
 |
