Takara MP-44 Optimus Prime Transformation Sequence

Community Note: I know I’ve been lazy and I haven’t livestreamed in a few weeks now. But this coming Wednesday I will be doing a livestream around 7pm EST where we will discuss all things MP-44. I will transform him, demonstrate the articulation, show off the knee joints, and go over how the sound chip works and play the Peter Cullen clips.

Figure Note:
Stop-Motion Transformation of Takara/Tomy MP-44 Masterpiece Optimus Prime v3.0. This is a
great figure. The articulation is astonishing. It’s not without its flaws, however. The knees have a bit of an issue as assembled (see below) and the whole thing requires quite a bit of parts-parking to free up clearance for the big head flip-around. But they did a splendid job of capturing the proportions of the cartoon Optimus. A lot of you prefer Magic Square’s version (in no small part because it’s so much less expensive) and that’s a great figure, but it doesn’t quite have the right cartoon proportions. MP-44 is quite the puzzle bot, but I’m actually quite fond of complex transformations - and they give me something to really chew on for these videos. Hopefully this video will be a useful guide to owners of this figure. Take note, a lot of the parts-parking in this sequence is entirely necessary. For example, if you don’t have shoulder butterflies extended out, then you cannot do the head flip - when you put them back in they lock onto the flipping chunk. In the other direction, if you don’t put the little shoulder tabs down into the chest (they end up under the windscreens) then you cannot do the head flip. And so forth. A big advantage this figure has is the incredible articulation. Look around online and you will see some amazing poses people are doing for him. He can kneel like a samurai, he can do the superhero landing pose. Amazing articulation. Also the trailer and accessories are way cool.

Knees:
I had to disassemble and repair the secondary knee joints. You see, the secondary joint is one of those ratchet joi..