Say ‘Megatron’ to most people, and chances are they’ll either mention his notorious slaying of Optimus Prime in the 1986 Transformers animated movie, or his more modern incarnation as the contents of a cutlery drawer after Uri Geller has had his way with them, in Michael Bay’s various attempts to murder the very concept of cinema.
For me personally, my immediate reaction is shame.
The scene is early 1985, in my beloved grandmother’s bungalow in the market town of Thrapston. “What do you want for your birthday, Alec?” this ever-kindly old lady asks of the twitchy child sat on her lap, relentlessly fiddling with his by-now fistless Optimus Prime. “I’ll buy you anything. Just whisper it in my ear.”
There is not even a moment of hesitation. “I want a Megatron”, I whisper. Then, louder: “he turns into a real gun!”
She recoiled, horrified. The shock and betrayal in her eyes will stay with me always. Her mental image of her sweet, innocent grandson destroyed in an instant, by his covetous desire for a killing-tool. I did not get that Megatron, needless to say. Even other family members, who had an altogether more accurate sense of the little oik I really was, were unable to obtain one for me later, due to limited distribution in the UK. Indeed, I never even clapped eyes on that toy until the early 2000s.
And herein lies the origin of it all. The absence of that toy, that awkward, generously-crotched silver robot which transformed into a startlingly accurate Walther P38 pistol, stayed with me for decades. Gratification denied, a forbidden fruit forever out of reach.
Something I often wonder: if my grandmother had bought me a Megatron, perhaps I wouldn’t have a cupboard full of plastic robots 39 years later. Instead, the mystery and the want chased me down the years. Once, as a young adult, I finally had a small measure of disposable income, finding myself a Megatron was one of my first ports of call.
There are a number of reasons People Like Me have shelves full of toys from their childhood. Rank nostalgia, naturally, which ties in neatly to the vain attempt to recapture a more carefree time of life while labouring under the heavy burdens of adulthood. But another is obtaining the things we were not allowed as children: a lingering fascination (and perhaps even resentment?) that grows bigger in the mind with each passing year. Unfinished business.
Megatron, the toy, compounds these factors because it is a such a singularly strange and darkly compelling item. Notoriously, no (official) modern toy of Megatron turns into a gun, because, well, obviously. But in the early 80s, even a corporate giant like Hasbro was making it up as they went along, and so a replica firearm (including silencer and scope) was stuffed into stockings across the globe in 1984 and 1985.
God knows I don’t want kids walking around with something they could use to rob their local Tesco Metro, but I do think something is lost when the leader of the evil robots transforms into literally anything else. There is nothing more sinister than a gun: a tool designed for one purpose and one purpose only, which is to say death.
In the years since that original toy, Megatron has been a tank, a spaceship, a car, even an alligator - but nothing else screams pure, thrilling, transgressive evil like The Gun. That is his appeal. That is why I craved one as a child. That is why my grandmother looked at me like I’d just sprouted horns and a forked tail.
That is why I have a worryingly large collection of toy robots now. Because I wanted something I couldn’t have. Until, years later, I could. I’m sure many other robot-likers collections’ have a similar origin: belatedly indulging the unindulged.
And as for the Megatron toy itself, which I imagine is what you’re really here for? (The newsletters won’t all be this long or indirect, promise - here I’m still teasing out where I want to go with it).
I think it’s excellent, genuinely. Oh, it looks absolutely ridiculous, no question there: bow-legged and trigger-groined, spindly and thin and a far cry from the beefier baddie of screen and page.
The great discrepancy there, by the by, is down to Megatron’s animation and comic model being based on an ultimately unreleased but altogether less ungainly prototype of a different Japanese gun-robot toy. One in which the trigger-schlong very sensibly folded upwards instead of standing proud.
But the toy we did get is a marvel in its own right. Pictures don’t convey how surprisingly weighty it is, with copious metal parts and thick, glossy plastic - yet also how oddly delicate. The handle opens like butterfly wings to become those wide, thin shins, while the head and arms balance precariously from a thin metal armature that needs aligning just so against the torso. ‘Japanese design’ (for, to summarise the history, the original Transformers were effectively a grab-bag assortment of disparate Japanese toys coalesced into a single line by an American toy company) conjures up images of elegance and minimalistic style. In a way, Megatron is that: he has the aesthetic and materials of high-end 80s hifi equipment. But he’s also a weird, experimental oddity that would fail every safety test going today.
Not only was a robot that turned into hyper-real killing tool given to six-year-olds, it was also one whose transformation felt like surgery. No wonder that most second hand vintage Megatrons invariably come with at least one arm snapped off its fragile mounting, or whose knees helplessly collapse like a middle-aged man after a marathon. If I had, after all, been given one for my birthday in February 1985, it would have been nothing more than silver and grey shards by March 1985.
(And yet even butchered specimens can command a reasonable price - as more and more intact Megatrons gather dust in folk like me’s Forever Collections, only the broken dregs remain for the desperate Johnny-come-latelies).
It is the delicacy of Megatron that makes it so pleasing, and so curiously effective as a nostalgia-seeker’s initial white whale. It feels strange, precious, rare: a bizarre idea realised with strange fragility. Plus, of course, it turns into a gun. To this day, having owned a Megatron for years, it still feels like something I’m not supposed to have. It is dangerous, it is delicate, it is precious. It is everything I wondered about and coveted from 1984 to 2002, and it feels so terribly, excitingly wrong that I own it now.
But, of course, it owns me.
Opening image by the peerless Geoff Senior, from the Marvel UK Transformers comic. Photos are all my own.
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