Daddoo

by David Willis on May 3, 2011 at 5:13 pm
Posted In: Blog

It's Optimus Prime's dad!

The live-action Transformers films have been making the craaaaaaziest stuff super-mainstream.  Not that I’m complaining, no.  It’s actually crazy in the awesome way.  Kids know who The Fallen is. That is absolutely insane. And suddenly it’s gonna get kinda Sentinel Prime-y up in this bitch.

A Sentinel Prime was just in Transformers Animated, to be sure, but he was a far cry from the original concept of the character.  Such as it was.  Since, well, the original Sentinel Prime wasn’t really anything more than a namedrop.  He was mentioned in a list of Primes once or twice in the old Marvel Comics.  He’s the guy that preceded Optimus Prime as bearer of the Creation Matrix.  His job was to die offpanel so that Optimus could gank his jewelry and become important.   In Transformers Animated, that definitely wasn’t the case.  Sentinel Prime was Optimus Prime’s buddy/rival.  The jerk friend.  A contemporary.  And, I might add, my favorite character in the series.

But in Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Sentinel Prime seems to be back to his roots.  He’s the former Prime, the one that preceded Optimus, and he’s gone missing or whatever and I guess his ship’s on the moon.  He’s the shipwrecked guy everyone saw in the first teaser trailer, beardin’ it up.  We learn more about him in IDW’s prequel comic series, Foundation, where he’s a father figure that marched the planet into a new Golden Age and set up Optimus and Megatron as co-rulers of the planet.  But Megatron knew Sentinel liked Optimus more, what with knowing that he was a Secret Prime, and so, well, war happens.  (How Sentinel Prime ends up on a ship on the moon hasn’t been covered yet.)

You may need Scotch tape to pull this off.

So, woo, yeah, I was excited about a toy of Sentinel Prime.  Like The Fallen, he’s a character that builds the history and mythos of Transformers.  And he’s in the first wave!  And Target employees don’t often read street date notices on case assortment boxes!  Or they do and, dude, who the hell cares if some nerd has his $50 toy fifteen days early.  (Sentinel’s DPCI# is 087-06-2294, btw, if you want to chance it.  That’s right.  I just typed that from memory.)

But oh lord, this toy.  This toy.  I spent an hour trying to get him into vehicle mode last night.  And what a really fucking awesome vehicle mode this would be, if it were a bit easier to get into!  It’s a friggin’ fire truck.  Fire trucks are awesome.  Especially ones with all the little nozzles everywhere.  The attention to detail on the fire truck is great.  …if you can get the damn robot mode into it.  Picture the most annoying Transformer you’ve ever attempted.  This guy might be worse.  I tried again this morning, meticulously examining each step along the way in the instructions, and still it was not incredibly enjoyable.

The instructions have gone through an overhaul.  Instead of a series of Illustrator drawings or whatever, a series of photographs are shown.  Which, you would think, would be an improvement!  In some respects it is, but… it’s also pretty damn incomprehensible at times, regardless.  Some of these photos are reeeeeeeeeeeeeeally tiny, and it’s hard as hell to discern how things are supposed to be oriented in such tiny pictures.  In a toy such as Sentinel Prime, where an arm rotation being a fraction of a millimeter off can cause disaster, this is a real annoyance.  Nothing like holding the instructions right up to your damn face, trying to figure out which side of the forearms are supposed to be facing which way, via an image of the toy in half-transformation that’s probably no more than an inch tall… not a good time.  Not a good time.

Seriously, what the heck is this thing supposed to be?

And, yes, after a half hour or so,  you finally find out exactlyish where everything’s supposed to go, and all you have to do is fold the big silver lid on the top of the truck down on top of everything, sealing it.  Ahahahaha.  No.  It doesn’t want to stay there.  The lid doesn’t want to seal.  And it’s not because you friggin’ missed a step, it’s just that the tabs are too shallow.  And so it pops up at a slight angle like a bad Tupperware lid, giving you an eternal peek at the casserole inside.   This is your reward for your time spent.

Anyway.

Sentinel Prime comes with two handheld weapons.  The first is the “Primax blade,” which is a double-bladed sword.  It folds in half and can store under the aforementioned silver lid in truck mode, if you want the lid to shut even less.  Sentinel also comes with a big Mechtech shield thing.  If you press a button on the face of it, it springloads out into an X shape.  It can store underneath the truck or mount on the top front of the truck, combined with the Primax blade in some unholy configuration that I don’t understand the purpose of.

There are electronics, which are neat.  If you press a button on Sentinel Prime’s sternum, his mouth opens and he says, “I AM SENTINEL PRIME!” in a voice that can vaguely pass as Leonard Nimoy if you’re forgiving.  In vehicle mode you press a button on the roof of the fire truck and sirens blare.

He will spend his time in robot mode.  And when I decide my life is too happy, I will attempt to transform him, to knock myself down a few pegs.


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