Posted October 26, 2016 at 2:01 am

The year was 2001!  Transformers Beast Machines, the toyline, was not doing so great!  And so a bunch of tail-end product was shuffled into the next toyline as store exclusives.  A toy of Beast Wars/Machines Megatron as a robot that transformed into his Giant Head Spaceship Thing, But With Legs was eventually released at KB Toys as Robots in Disguise Megatron Megabolt.  The back-of-the-packaging bio recast the toy as not Beast Megs but as RID Megatron, the redubbed Gigatron from the Car Robots anime.  

I bought it, because, like, it was a BW/M Megatron toy I was worried we wouldn't otherwise get, and tried to personally ignore who the toy was "officially."  

I'm not good at this.  It bothered me.  I am anal retentive.  

Yeeaars later, Japan finally imported the series, sort of, but, like, on some weird nobody television station and released a bunch of Beast Machines toys in extremely limited numbers.  And so the toy that would have been Beast Megs was finally released as himself.  But he was, again, extremely limited, which made him both hard to find and expensive, and I was much poorer then.  I sucked it up and shrugged.  My Megatron Megabolt was close enough.

BUT I WAS STILL SECRETLY REALLY BOTHERED, YO.

Anyway.  I decided recently that this hole in my otherwise pretty comprehensive Beast Megatron collection was something I now needed to plug.  Easier said than done.  Once again, extremely limited production run.  Even if you have the money, you can't buy what isn't available to buy.  My pal Robowang grabbed one off eBay earlier this year while I was lax in searching there, and for a pretty good price, if I recall.  Like, it was listed under a typo or something.  Anyway, he got one.  He keeps it in his bathroom.  I think he does this to taunt me.

Finally, after checking eBay for "Beast Wars Returns Megatron" every other day for several months, another one popped up, and I grabbed it.  It's mine!

Megahead Megatron is a robot that transforms into a head with spider-legs -- y'know, like Mr. Freeze in New Batman Adventures.  If you roll the spider-legs-head thing along the ground, the wheel-gears on the underside open and close the mouth (and launch the missile out of the mouth) while the spider legs articulate up and down.  It's pretty awesome.  It's hard to not like a head with spider legs.

In robot mode, Megahead Megatron is.... very back heavy.  The whole spider-leg-geared contraption is an indivisible unit unto itself, and it's gotta go somewhere.  It goes on the back.  The robot mode's legs are a series of multiple ball joints, and you can imagine how well that goes.  If the ball joints aren't tight, he's gonna collapse like a marionette.   The balljoints on mine are thankfully stiff, but he's still a balancing act.

The head mode's missile launcher is springloaded to flip over the shoulders of the robot and land on the robot's head, giving Beast Wars Megatron's head a Beast Machines Megatron helmet and facemask.  This is also pretty neat.  There's magnets involved.  I don't think toys can afford magnets anymore these days.  Or springloaded missile launchers.  And certainly not both at the same time as the geared spider leg contraption, anyway.

The huge difference between this Megahead Megatron and the US release Megatron Megabolt is the red was swapped out for purple.  The silver plastic is also a little more purple.  And although the Japanese-release Beast Machines product mostly didn't alter the American paint operations at all, this guy has a new set of paint operations -- the teeth on the giant spiderleg head are now painted white.  It's a good addition.

Undocumented feature: Head mode fits on top of Fortress Maximus really nicely.  Fits even better if you pull the balljointed spiderlegs out.  

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