I can certainly say that I’m not an apologist for Transformers: Age of Extinction for all its plot holes and nonsense. But one of the things I can appreciate from the movie is Galvatron‘s design, not the character or his motivations, just its design. That said, its transformation is also nonsense, basically breaking down into particles to go from vehicle to robot and vice-versa.
On the plus side, the same nonsense also gave toy engineers freedom on how to approach the transformation process, as you can see from Shartimus Prime‘s review way back when:
As explained in the review, the figure is mostly a ‘shell-former’ where the truck bits unfold as panels and collapse as a backpack in robot mode. The same was also true for his counterpart Optimus Prime figure from the same line as his transformation didn’t make a lot of sense too. Fortunately for Optimus, though, he had a much better representation come Transformers: The Last Knight though the same can’t be said with Galvatron over here since he just disappeared from the story.
I guess Hasbro wanted to have a second take on Galvatron and decided to put him up as one of the upcoming Studio Series releases. From these images, it does seem that a good chunk of the front of the truck still turns into some backpack in robot mode. But it appears there’s more going on with the torso and the legs than just parts hidden under the truck shell. He still does appear flat though, which was also an observation on the first figure.
Consequently, Hasbro designer Sam Smith has made several posts over on his Instagram account explaining more behind-the-scenes info on the creation of this new Galvatron figure, including comparisons to the actual model used by ILM. You could just read the caption for his full explanation.
Finally, we get some packaging art which just reuses the same Galvatron illustration from the original Age of Extinction release.
While I’m mostly an Optimus Prime collector, I might give this guy a purchase. You can only do so much with its design, but it sorts of, kind of, works in this figure. No release or pricing information has been available for SS-90 Galvatron as of this post.
