In late 1999 and early 2000, I lived in a building that was basically an l-shape structure with a McDonald's in there. I ate a lot of bad food and ended up with hundreds of Happy Meal toys like Optimus Primal, which (along with the LEGO items) I actually was pretty happy to get. The fast food toys of the late 1990s and early 2000s were generally quite good - the 1980s were largely on the cheap side with a few solid ones, but in many cases you got sizable pieces of plastic that felt like a decent thing during this later era.
The toy is not particularly large, but if you compare it to some of the $4-$5 Legends toys of the mid-2000s it's actually pretty well-made. In robot mode he's 3 1/2-inches tll and has 9 points of articulation. Granted they're for transforming, but knee joints? This is like some sort of amazing dream. Obviously it's not a great toy - but you do get a lot of the colors from the show and a little bit of paint. Primal has an orange "mask" on his silver head, with blue painted eyes. There's some brown on his clear orange arms, plus he has no problems standing or sitting. There are no accessories to speak of and the only real "option" comes in the form of wings that cover a gap in his back in beast mode.
Transforming the toy is easy - bend him over, flip over the heads, slide the wings over his back, and move around the arms a bit. To refer to the pose as awkward feels like the word is not given enough weight - in short the robot mode is standing on his hands and feet, and it's not pretty. The face sculpt is quite expressive but due to the metallic pale gold color, it looks like a sick, untextured 3D rendering of a Boglin. An uneven sneer on his lips give him a stunning amount of personality, but the body for this poor creature seems like somebody dismembered an ape and tried their best to put together some semblance of a simian simulacrum./p>
At the time these small cheap toys acted as a promotion for the show and the toy line, giving kids a sampler of the characters that really isn't satisfying. The Vehicons were more impressive than the Maximals, but time has proven these toys interesting as the smaller sizes are scale to the Generations Tankor released earlier this summer. How about that? They're pretty cheap and as such I'd suggest getting them if you have money to burn, because to most fans these won't provide more than a few minutes of fun before going to bins or shelves. I have a soft spot for quality cheap toys, and I feel that someone who is good with a paint brush could make something gorgeous from this silver-backed sculpt. Until then, he'll hang out here with Tankor and they'll fight with each other. It will be fun.
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