Transformers Year of the Monkey Optimus Primal Platinum Edition Review

To commemorate the 20th Anniversary of Beast Wars as well as celebrate the Year of the Monkey in Asian culture, Hasbro decided to release this Platinum Edition Year of the Monkey Optimus Primal figure. This figure is a redeco of the Supreme Class Robots in Disguise (Beast Machines) Air Attack Optimus Primal. Lets check out what we have.

This box is big. As with the other Year of the Animal lineup, the boxes are white with a painting of the figure on both sides and accents in red with a modified autobot symbol that looks like a monkey face. There are some nice foil printed outlines on the front cover.
Opening the flap, you see a really large Optimus Primal figure and a small blurb about this special edition item.


On the back you see a painting of Optimus in robot form. This one is not foil outlined. Not much else on the box.

As a Supreme class figure, you will notice that this figure is BIG. It is so big that I will do a size comparison now. He is approximately 29cm tall. Here he is next to deluxe Bumble Bee, Voyager Megatron, Leader Ironhide, MP01, a 3.75" figure, and a coke can.

As you can see, this version of Optimus Primal is now using Primal Prime's color scheme, with lots of red and blue. With all this red and blue it looks like Optimus Primal is trying on a Superman costume. The Year of the monkey autobot symbol is on the armor here. There are some unsightly screw holes on the front of the arms here and the forearms are clear red plastic. There are lots of molded in fur and robot details all over which look great. It is a little unfortunate that the monkey bum is stored behind his head.

The mold itself looks like it was unchanged only the colors are different and it still retains all the fancy features of the original mode. Lets see what it can do.

Pushing the button on his chest turns on the electronics and plays 3 sound samples. While the chest is on, you can press the head and it will make him say 2 more sounds. And finally and most annoyingly is the Air Attack flight sounds it makes when you deploy the jets. It makes 2 annoying jet sounds, a high pitched one, and the low pitched one when you point him downwards. It really takes a while to get him to stop making sounds by putting him down.

He also has a Energy Bolt disk launcher on his abs, which shoots out this blue disk. And also a punching gimmick where you turn the upper arm and it springs back but it doesn't work very well.

Articulation is not bad, since he doesn't have a lot of kibble. his head can turn left and right, cannot look up or down. The arms can go all the way around, and out at 90, but the armor gets in the way. Elbows at 90 degrees with a bicep swivel. And it has a wrist swivel and hands with articulated individual fingers so you can do all sorts of hand signals.

He does have an ab crunch, but make sure you open the abs first. And it also has a waist swivel.

The legs go forward 90 and back 90 and outwards 60degrees. The knees are double jointed and fold all the way back. There is no thigh swivel. The feet and point up a bit and back a bit and can rock side to side but no swivel

In Gorilla mode, he has 2 stances, a more upright stance which looks normal from the front but has a strange silver abs sticking out of his butt, or a lower gorilla stance which makes his butt look better but the front abs looks really strange. In either mode, there is a lot of robot leg kibble on the back.

This mode looks largely the same as robot mode except missing the knees, a new head and some other minor cosmetic changes. The chest has some chest hair molded into it and a faint maximal symbol.

The chest sounds are the same as before, pressing the head will make it talk. It still retains its punching gimmick but the armor prevents the elbow from bending. You will have to unlatch the armor to bend the elbows.

His head turns a little bit, and his feet can now turn but lost the tilting and cannot point up anymore. All other articulation is the same as before.

For a size comparison, He is 19.5cm tall and here he is again next to, MP01, a coke can,  Waspinator and Chopshop and a bumblebee.

This figure is big, has good articulation and the mold is pretty good, but the Colors are pretty wacky and the arm armor gets in the way of both modes. This set is hard to recommend as it costs way too much for this figure, you can probably buy the old version for about the same price or less and it will have better color representation. For this price they should have at least added more voice clips, add a poster, collector cards, coins, hologram stickers or something!