25 Years of Transformers

For Christmas Sarah got me the 25th Anniversary Optimus Prime reissue that was released several months ago here to commemorate the 25th Anniversary of Transformers this year. Like previous U.S. reissues of Prime they had to shorten the smokestacks to comply with new safety laws. I couldn’t have that and ordered some replacement longer stacks for mine. This reissue is a little different than the others in that they made the red and blues lighter and the trailer is also a light grey instead of a dark grey. It has been said it was to help make Prime resemble closer to the cartoon colors. One final change are the autobot symbols on the shoulders are now pre printed instead of stickers. I didn’t mind the changes since it makes it another variation to the 4 other Primes I already own. 🙂

The set also comes with a reprint of the 1st Transformers comic and a DVD with the first 3 episodes of the original cartoon series. Overall I think it is a pretty cool set of one of the greatest toys to come out of the 80’s. I am still appreciative that my dad bought me an original Optimus Prime as a kid. It has always been one of my favorite toys and it was well played with.

Here are some pics I took of the new prime and a comparison shot with my 25 year old original.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here are some pics of my original, New Years Prime (blue eyes and cab window), and Pepsi Prime.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is only one other Prime with this mold I would still like to add. That would be the Generation 2 Optimus Prime. The cab on that one closer matches this current reissue, but it had a black version of the trailer.

Finally I wanted to include a couple of the old commercials for the figure. The first is the original Diaclone japanes commercial. Diaclone are what the toys were originally called before Hasbro saw them and repackaged them as Transformers here in the States. Because they were so successful here they were then also repackaged in Japan with the Transformers name as well.

The second is the U.S. 1984 commercial and then finally the Generation 2 commercial.