And at long last, here we are, the original Decepticon instrument of destruction.
Even after going through this guy in his six individual components, it’s still a little hard to believe that this is a real Hasbro offering. The thought of finding this thing at Toys R Us, on a shelf, in a giant box, seems nuts, if I hadn’t done so myself last month. Before we get into any of the nuts and bolts of this thing, let me just tell you — even in the Age of Amazon (Like Age of Ultron with more toys), picking up a Constructicon box set at a retail store, 30 years after the original, gives me serious warm fuzzies.
Let’s deviate from our format just a little here and start with Canonball’s video breakdown:
Devastator was, and will always be, my favorite combiner. This is because I am a product of the first two seasons of the Transformers cartoon, and while Superion, Menasor, and many, many others soon followed suit, Devastator was the Decepticon’s true big gun. And his classic foil were the Dinobots. That’s a formula I still prefer today.
But Devastator didn’t really get his due until the movie. Started in production before most of Season 2, Devastator was the only combiner referenced in the movie, and while further adaptations have explained the other combiners were engaged in a concurrent battle fought at the Ark, there is no retconning Kup’s reaction of pure dread seeing Megatron give the order to merge. His much more suiting voice actor growled “Prepare for Extermination.” in such a collected, almost casual way, yet so intimidating, that I can recall it instantly with no context. And had it not been for a certain fight that directly followed it, I suspect the showdown Devastator had with the Dinobots would have been the event that stayed with me decades later. Seriously? Grimlock makes the greatest entrance in G1 history (til the next scene), and he and his Dinobots are dispatched in under 30 seconds. The recovery of unused storyboards has revealed that Ultra Magnus and a team of Autobot commandos would finally bring him down, while taking some losses.
So getting a new Devastator has a lot more riding on it than some repackaged Diaclone versions had three decades ago. This guy needed to fit the needs of a more demanding enthusiast base, with bigger and even more diverse Transformers collections than anybody would’ve ever thought of in the old days.
And overall, I think they did it. They hit the right notes, kept the important parts in place, and made just a few off-calls here and there, but none sufficient enough to take away from just how fun he is.
One of his absolute triumphs has to be the articulation. With functioning joints to mirror any production figure a third his size, Devastator can move freely and menacingly in most important poses. About the only improvement I could see here would maybe be a ball-jointed neck and possibly individual fingers. He hangs up just a bit at the knees, and I don’t know how they could’ve done it, but if there had been some way to incorporate a thoracic joint, he’d be better articulated than a Mattel DCUC figure. I guess now he’d be about even.
His size is a win for me as well, and that is literally no small feat. Billed as the largest combiner, and currently only second to Generations Metroplex and G1 Fort Max as biggest period, Hasbro certainly set out to get this guy as massive as they could.
Let’s take into account that Transformers scale is a joke. We can trot out that G1 line-art scale sheet as often as we want, but it doesn’t mean crap. G1 has blatant disrespect for scale in every regard, not just robot sizes, and sometimes not just in the same scene, let alone an episode or season. So most of us settle for a sort of ‘reasonable scale.” The Seekers should be bigger than the Autobot cars. Prime and Megatron should square up, etc. Since I refuse to give up on Masterpiece Grimlock, I have even relaxed my personal standards to some kind of middle ground between cartoon, toy, and scale sizes.
Devastator has me covered. With Ultra Magnus (who might even be too big for my tastes) coming up to his waist, he towers over any individual non-citybot with ease. With your average character coming up to his knee or thigh, I think he’s reasonably scaled for Masterpiece. Obviously, if you want more, the current Generations and Combiner Wars figures keep him looking absolutely massive. And if for some reason you think four construction vehicles should be as tall as a skyscraper, there’s always some legion class figures you can have him mix it up with. I blame Pat Lee for that last one.
Is there anything not quite up to the rest? Well, his hand coloration is off, which is minor bummer, but still one. Mine tends to want to bend at Long Haul’s knees, not his own, on occasion. And there is the Mixmaster foot weirdness. But, again, in the shadow of an almost 2-foot-tall figure, I see those as just, well, small issues.
Back to the question we posed in the beginning of this series: Does Devastator equal the value of six voyager class figures? I would say yes. If those voyagers could be had for closer to their old $20 price point, than unequivocally yes. But even in the neighborhood of a buck-sixty, he’s still decent. And at that price, I’m still open to picking up some add-ons to address some of that little stuff. And it’s certainly good enough to purchase, if for no other reason than to encourage Hasbro to keep going big. Trypicon, Scorpinok, Fort Max . . .
Thanks for joining us on this six-parter, and we’ll see you on the boards!
