Not sure how many of you had the Missing Link Optimus on your radar, but I got mine yesterday and...what a trip. Gonna steal some of my own thoughts that I had written elsewhere.
Before this released, the pictures and everything they showed lead me to think this was going to be a really neat piece and it is. But in hand it's also so much more and it's really hard to describe.
My first Optimus Prime was a G1 figure that a friend gave me. It was missing a leg, his hands, and was paint chipped to hell and back. It was, by all accounts, trash but it was all I had and I loved it. My parents hated it so much that they got me the set that was part of the G2 line, with the black trailer and voicebox. I really loved that figure, but even at 6 I wondered why it was different than how he was in the movie. And here we are, some 30 years later and I'm holding the thing 5 or 6 year old me imagined his Optimus Prime could be. It's a really surreal experience.
Transforming it was so familiar but also strangely new. I didn't have to take his hands out of his chest and plug them in, he didn't stand like a lump, his arms can hold the weight of his blaster. This release comes with a Matrix, something I was always baffled he didn't have, and plugging it into his chest was this weirdly special moment. We've had many Primes with the Matrix over the years, but there was something very special about putting the Matrix into the chest of this specific Optimus.
The only other time I've really had this collecting was Haslab Unicron which was basically a thing I put on holiday and birthday lists to the letter (it even had the shuttle), despite having no idea it wasn't a real thing.
If you have any love or affinity for the old G1 Prime toy, the Missing Link release is a real treat.
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