Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)It's great to see some Transformers cars come out as die-cast vehicles. Since the cartoon in the 80s, collectors have wanted to see these sitting besides other movie Matchbox, Johnny Lightning, Corgi and other manufacturers on the shelf vehicles, so good on Hasbro for doing this. Would also love for Hasbro to release the original 80s Japanamation versions as well. At the moment the ones available are all from one of the two movies. The Optimus Prime semi cab is probably the best of the small number of characters released, although Ironhide is very well done as well! There is no scale written on the packaging but I would guess it's 1:55 (1:64 is your standard mass produced Matchbox and Hot Wheel sized car). I own a lot of the Matchbox 1:64 Convoy trucks and Optimus is slightly taller and longer than those cabs. There's really not a lot of difference, if you only have 1:64 scaled vehicles in your collection, these Transformers cars won't look out of place.
You can also get Optimus in a two pack as well as this single. Surprisingly in the stores it is actually cheaper to buy them singly but as they leave the physical stores and are only available online, he may be cheaper to obtain that way, especially if you want the other characters as well. The packaging is great too by the way, if you are a collector who likes to keep your vehicles in their original packaging you can see the entire vehicle, including the undercarriage without opening the blister pack at all.
It's really only the fact that Hasbro chose the cheaper option of making these out of plastic that lowers the overall rating. The plastic makes them a lot less durable than your typical Matchbox and other brands vehicle and considering Transformers fight each other and are involved in a lot of action scenes, you'd think this factor would have come to mind when Hasbro thought about how kids would play with these. Not that I'm too sure how attractive these are too kids when you consider they don't transform at all into robots and you can get key ring sized actual transformers for around the same price on the shelves next to these in the stores. These vehicles sort of remind me of that scene in the old Tom Hanks movie Big, where upon seeing a prototype for a new toy that is a robot that changes into a building, Tom's character (who is really a 13 year old kid in an adults body) tells everyone, "why would a kid want that when there are so many other robots that transport into cool stuff like planes, cars etc". Anyway what I'm getting at is I think these appeal more to people like me who are collectors, which is why it's a little bit silly that they're made out of plastic as that's why a lot of collectors aren't buying these.
Optimus is incidentally the only vehicle that has been released as a die-cast car outside of this range, you could get the truck in a limited edition pack of the Transformers Movie Hasbro Die-Cast Titanium Figure Optimus Prime which was sold in Big W (Australia), Target (USA) and probably elsewhere. That die cast semi looked slightly better and is also more durable, made of stronger titanium plastic than this, you might want to investigate that one if Optimus is all you are after. It doesn't have a picture of the robot underneath on the undercarriage though.
Of course you can't buy Optimus without also buying his arch nemeses Megatron as well!
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Transformers 2 - Figure - Mini Vehicle Performance Optimus Prime
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