I can only apologise for the extended delay since the last one of these things. Matters have been truly torrid for me, in work and home life alike, and naturally an unpaid endeavour had to fall by the wayside for a time. But you don’t want to hear about that - you want to hear about OMEGA SUPREME.
Much of the enduring allure of Transformers for me is not down to its cartoon or comic fictions, which despite their sporadic highs, were generally at pains to eradicate all mystery and strangeness from the concept of shapeshifting giant robots from outer space. Plucky heroes and dastardly villains, eventually with a side-order of Space Magic to explain away any greater science-fictional complexities.
But the early toys were another matter. They did have their own narrative of sorts, but it was oblique - limited to the dynamic character artwork on the front of the box, a brief biography in the Tech Spec on the back, and above it the large painted artwork which showed an assortment of characters engaged in pitched space battle. Moments of cosmic splendour and destruction, frozen in time.
The frozen, silent nature of those images is a key part of Transformers’ initial allure - so vast, so strange, so alien. All Earthly elements removed, Autobot and Decepticon faces alike thoroughly robotic and impassive (unlike the far more humanoid screen and page depictions), thus removing that clear and easy Good vs Evil readability. This was not friendly American robots pretending to be the family Volkswagen - it was mythic, and it was unknowable.
Sometimes the toys themselves tapped into this same vein of unspoken, unexplained, entirely alien strangeness. The never-mentioned, ghostly white Optimus Prime tucked inside Ultra Magnus is a particularly enduring one, but the towering oddity that is Omega Supreme was a whole other echelon of enigma.
Quick bit of history: as with Jetfire, Omega Supreme is one of the toys released in 1985, the second year of Transformers, which was not truly a Transformer. Desperate to meet the-then bottomless demand for new toy robots but without enough of in its own drawing boards, Hasbro frantically licensed other Japanese toys for release in the West.
So it was that Omega Supreme was not originally a yellow, red and brown Autobot - he was the black, red and white Super Change Robo Mechabot 1, from (now defunct) Japanese firm Toybox.
This is why, in both appearance and function, he is so very different from his Transformers kin. Faceless, out of scale, centred around an electronic (and comically slow) walking/rolling gimmick and with a transformation which involves jigsawing together the many pieces of what is essentially a gonzo sci-fi train set, rather than a neat all-in-one shift from mode-to-mode. Oh, with and one hand that looks like an end-of-the-pier claw grabber machine, and the other a brutalist dildo.
Omega Supreme / Mechabot 1 is weird. He doesn’t make any sense. How to project character onto that faceless visor? Is he even ‘alive’ or just some kind of battle suit? If he is, how is his consciousness split between a tank, a rocket, a launchpad and a train track, none of which are actually physically connected? And exactly how big is he supposed to be compared to other Transformers? Are they supposed to ride inside a rocket barely bigger than they are? Or does it just deliver supplies between worlds, like some Cybertronian Evri?
And: he has no hands. How did he do, like, anything?
Most of all, if you don’t or didn’t own an Omega Supreme, exactly how did this toy even work? Flipping a little robot into car or plane or gun or cassette tape makes an instant and basic sense - dismantling a big robot into dozens of parts which are then put together in a completely different formation, and as four discrete elements, does not. Effectively, every transformation is like building a Zoid. On top of that, he was capable of different, battery-powered movement in both modes, which seemed like impossible witchcraft.
All we could do was stare at pictures and wonder. Omega Supreme is that back-of-the-box artwork mystery rendered in plastic form. He is alien, and most of all he is Robot. I adore him, because - despite having fleeting moments of his own in cartoon and comic - he still evokes that childhood wonder. What was this, how did it work, why does it seem so very different from any other toy I’ve ever experienced?
To compound the mystery in the UK, Omega Supreme was one of a great many early Transformers which never actually made it to this septic isle. The knotty rights situation saw a different company, Grandstand, snaffle up the Mechabot 1 license before Hasbro could. With full and cheeky knowledge that kids were watching and reading about Omega Supreme, they named theirs Omegatron - but wisely stopped short of cloning Hasbro’s brighter colours, and stuck to the black and red original Mechabot ones. (Due to this more Decepticonish colour scheme, they even characterised Omegatron as the baddest baddie in the whole world universe).
So, not only could we bite-size Brits not experience the mystery and majesty of Omega Supreme for ourselves, but we’d see this weird alt-universe version with a similar name, and be left to wonder whether this was the same guy and same toy or not, whether it counted as a Transformer, and if so why had an Autobot turned evil? Plus, of course, he was reserved for only the richest or otherwise most indulged of children, so was spoken of only in hushed tones.
Scroll on through a few too many decades of self-medicating with plastic, and the enduring mystery finally got answered with a re-release of the toy. Takara snaffled up the lapsed rights to Mechabot 1 and made Omega Supreme available as a Transformer in Japan for the first time ever, as part of their late-noughties Encore line. This was relatively easy to lay hands on in the West at the time too - though by now even the rerelease has become rare enough to demand £200+.
This meant that, finally, I could own an Omega Supreme, and answer all those ancient questions. I have had other versions of the character before and since, but they were styled after his altogether more sympathetic cartoon depiction. The original weirdo was something else entirely.
And y’know what? He was and still is a fabulous toy. He’s nothing like a Transformer (outside of concept), as changing him is an elaborate matter of assembling armour pieces and tiny clips. But it is so very satisfying to gradually build a large and very sci-fi robot. A little project, every time.
And the electronic gimmick is a pure delight. With a couple of AAs, the tank will trundle cheerfully around its ovoid track, turret rotating and flashing an angry red light. In robot mode, he can walk across the floor, though with a speed and shakiness that is eerily reminiscent of old Captain Tom performing zimmer-aided laps of his garden during lockdown. It’s preposterous - yet also an absolute delight to your toy robot come to mechanical life at the flick of a spine-mounted switch. Omega Supreme is robot, through and through, which is why I love him so.
Inevitably, his otherworldliness was defanged in his fictional depiction, granted a humanoid face behind that blank visor, and a heroic nature. The Encore re-release retrofitted a partial face into the toy to reflect this - naturally I wasted no time in removing it from mine.
He’s long been one of the prides of my tatty plastic collection - and I like him so much that even I stretched to picking up the rarer recolours that I usually try to talk myself out of. The blue and white Omega Guardian repaint is one I’ve always craved - not because it’s based on a brief appearance of alternate Omega units in the cartoon (which I never saw at the time), but simply because the colours suit the toy down to ground. It’s long been unaffordable, but a fellow collector recently pointed me to a bizarrely underpriced one in Japan.
I try to be all self-loathing about my collecting tendencies, but I’m absolutely over the moon about this one.
In short order, I then stumbled across a complete Omegatron for barely more than he cost in 1985 - usually he’s in the hundreds, as there are so many damned parts to be lost across the four decades since.
So now my Supremes are complete. A phalanx of Weird Robots, shuffling across my floor at the speed of a stoned stick insect. They are some of the very few Transformers I permit to remain out of The Cupboard Of Shame for long, as I (deludedly, no doubt) feel they have an aesthetic that makes them Interesting Objects rather than purely nostalgic toys.
These days, Transformers tend to be fairly homegenous - similarly-proportioned and engineered superhero figurines which can be tucked within loosely-aligning car parts. Omega Supreme is perhaps the greatest reminder of a time when Transformers didn’t yet know what it wanted to be. Unashamedly weird, enduringly odd, delightfully robotic.
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