GALVATRON (ROBOT HEROES) PROJECT #489 CLASSIFICATION: REPAINT BASE FIGURE: ROBOT HEROES GALVATRON MATERIALS USED: ACRYLIC PAINTS FIRST APPEARANCE: NONE IN THESE COLORS (SEE BELOW) "My power is everything; defeat is absurd!" Preamble:  In 1986, Hasbro released a new Decepticon leader toy to replace Megatron, the second in what would ultimately become a long line of successors.  He was called Galvatron, a clever name that owes its origins to medical science—to galvanize is to stimulate with direct-current electricity, and Galvatron is armed with a weapon that produces this effect.  While the animated film The Transformers: the Movie  and subsequent cartoon episodes did a fairly good job of advertising the existence of the toys, the animated appearance of Galvatron was inexplicably purple in color—a far cry from the basic, industrial grey of the original toy.  The reason for this change is not known to me (other than purple being a color typically used for Decepticons), but the change to the animated design came too late for Hasbro to reconcile it with the toy, which was apparently too far into the production process.  Had the animation studio and the toy manufacturers been more in synch, Galvatron, as he appeared in animation, might have looked more like my painted Robot Heroes project (and the doctored screen shot to the right). Construction:  I ended up with an extra Robot Heroes version of Galvatron after getting the two-pack with Sunstreaker for another project, so I thought it would be fun to paint up Galvatron into his original Hasbro toy colors.  There's nothing inherently wrong with his cartoon color scheme, of course (and, indeed, the grey colors go a long way towards making him look more like an updated version of Megatron).  I went with a fairly strict reading of the original toy's colors, which included giving Galvatron orange eyes (the original toy had an electronic gimmick in which his eyes flashed, and the same plastic used for his orange arm cannon was also used for his eyes and the inside of his head). Comments: The original colors for the Galvatron toy ended up serving as the basis for his appearance in Marvel Comics—though due to the limitations of the four-color printing process, grey more or less translated to light blue.  So many subtle shades of color from the Transformers toy line ended up being rendered as the exact same color in the comic book.  (Thundercracker's toy was blue and Skywarp's toy was black, but due to the way blue ink was used to represent both colors, just try and figure out which one was which when they appeared during the Marvel Comics run.) This Page Created 3/8/2012 Last Update: 3/8/2012 ©2012 Inspiration Studios Transformers and Robot Heroes are trademarks of Hasbro, Inc. Galvatron fights to lead the Decepticons!