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.)