Yayabee at The Arker has posted images of a new Trans­form­ers 2 toy. It is an auto­bot that appears to have an alt mode of a Antonov An-225 air­craft — inside it car­ries a very small Opti­mus Prime. The AN-225 is a Russ­ian craft that matches the rear wing and under­side design of the toy as well as car­ry­ing a space­craft on top, though it has two addi­tional engines and the nose cone appears dif­fer­ent. It also has sim­i­lar­i­ties with the C-130 Hercules.

Whether this char­ac­ter shall appear in ROTF is debat­able — it is plau­si­ble that the Auto­bots board the craft (maybe at the Bone­yard) to travel to Egypt, but it doesn’t make sense for a Russ­ian plane to be there. Another angle is the craft is orig­i­nally sup­plied by the com­bined UN force in a bid to help fight the Decepticons.

SPOILERS ARE IN THIS POST. Post­ing scans of kids col­or­ing books doesn’t seem like a suit­able past time, so I don’t intend to do it too often. But today there are some scans of the new Revenge of the Fallen col­or­ing book that have hit the inter­web. Within it there are the usual robots that can be col­ored in but, more inter­est­ingly, a much sim­pli­fied sto­ry­line for the sequel — includ­ing the pre­sumed finale.

Spoil­ers after the break…
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A reader at the Shoot for the Edit forums has posted a trans­la­tion of a French TF2 arti­cle that con­tains some spoil­ers. Specif­i­cally it appears to reveal the start and end of the movie in a very vague man­ner, before out­lin­ing a few scenes involv­ing Shia, Bum­ble­bee, Skids and Mud­flaps and Agent Sim­mons, John Tur­turro. The mag­a­zine sug­gests that Tur­turro also voices an old Trans­former that loses parts with every move — undoubt­edly this is Jet­fire, whilst Bay out­lines his thoughts on the bick­er­ing twins which come across like some sort of mechan­i­cal jar jar binks.

Set: Egypt, in front of Kheops Pyra­mid, stands an ancient 30’s palace built for King Faruk’s guests.

At “Action”, Shia runs through the yard, stops at the doorstep and hits the door with his shoul­der. Megan Fox, John Tur­turro and Ramon Rodriguez come next and hurry inside the building.

Shia heads up, shout a few words at an imag­i­nary Bum­ble­bee, and gets in. Three cars, the Camaro, the red TRAX and the green BEAT, start quickly and stop a bit fur­ther away to look out. The three vehi­cles are dri­ven by black-suited (and thereby “invis­i­ble”) stunt­men behind the smoked glass.

At the end of the day, the crew moves to the third and small­est pyra­mid, Myk­eri­nos. John Tur­turro, back as always angry agent Sim­mons, has to climb up a few stones. This hasn’t been done for 30 years: Too many acci­dent occurred and Egyp­tians had for­bid­den it. Tur­turro will try to run from an imag­i­nary Decepticon.

Michael Bay says: “I had the idea of these two stu­pid Trans­form­ers, Skids and Mud­flap. They’re twins who can’t stop bick­er­ing, but they do heroic things at the begin­ning of the movie.

Bum­ble­bee, on his side, has become more seri­ous. He doesn’t want to leave Sam’s par­ents’ garage. There is also an old Trans­former, who loses screws and bolts at every move. And it’s John Tur­turro voic­ing him.”

The movie will start at Gyzeh, Egypt, long before pyra­mids were built, and will end at the same place nowa­days, with a huge fight between Auto­bots and Decepticons.

It’s said that we’ll learn in the movie how pyra­mids were built. Does it involve any Transformer?

TF08 have posted pack­ag­ing shots of the Side­swipe and Ram­page toys, includ­ing their biogra­phies. An inter­est­ing point to note is Rampage’s jack ham­mer mode — a sort of third con­fig­u­ra­tion, pos­si­ble movie appear­ance of a giant crush­ing pneu­matic drill?

Ram­page

The stink of diesel fumes and hot tar fol­lows Ram­page wher­ever he goes. His treads are packed with metal shards stripped from his vic­tims and the count­less scratches cov­er­ing his chas­sis are tes­ta­ment to hun­dreds of bru­tal bat­tles. He lives to pound his ene­mies into sub­mis­sion and thinks of lit­tle else. His idea of beauty is the sight of sun glis­ten­ing off the raw edges of shred­ded Auto­bot armor.

Side­swipe

Side­swipe was built to fight. He is sleek, fast, and accom­plished in bat­tle, focus­ing on his enemy with absolute atten­tion. His blades are a shin­ing blur as he leaps through the air, twist­ing to avoid enemy fire. Con­vert­ing from vehi­cle to robot at blaz­ing speed, he uses every trick in the book to get close to his oppo­nent and put his pow­er­ful swords to work.

The toy video reviews are prov­ing pop­u­lar and more and more of them are pop­ping up, here there and every­where. This time its a review of the green Skids Deluxe class toy by Dl3anksak47, he has also posted other video reviews on his YouTube chan­nel:

More gal­leries of the Leg­ends class Opti­mus Prime & Mega­tron, Deluxe class Skids and Side­swipe and FAB Long­haul and Side­ways have appeared online. No big reveals — although Bum­ble­bee does sport some new pop out canons that can be used in both robot and alt modes (via TFW005).

Opti­mus Prime — Leader Class
Mega­tron — Leader Class
Skids — Deluxe Class
Side­swipe — Deluxe Class
Long­haul — FAB
Side­ways — FAB

A dis­cus­sion over at Michael Bay’s forums, “Shoot for the edit” started after an inter­view between Frank Welker and TFW2005 was posted by a fan, along with a plea to the direc­tor, specifically:

TFW: Have you been approached at all for any fur­ther work with the fran­chise, either with the movie (Sound­wave?) or another incar­na­tion, such as Trans­form­ers: Ani­mated?
Welker: Well it is a lit­tle too early to be spe­cific but I will say yes and no. No, I have not been approached by the movie folks but yes I am still involved in the franchise…more on that later.

Michael, I can under­stand your choice in terms of Mega­tron, and I know you’re prob­a­bly ready to mur­der the next guy who brings up the topic of orig­i­nal voice actors…but please, please allow Frank a shot at Soundwave’s voice. I’m risk­ing get­ting banned by Nel­son (again) just to ask. His par­tic­i­pa­tion in the fran­chise really does mean that much to a load of fans out there.

I swear this is the last time I will ever bring this sub­ject up until the movie’s release.

To which Michael Bay responded positively:

I think I’m going to pur­sue Frank on Sound­wave.
Michael

For those not in the know, Frank Welker voiced both Mega­tron and Sound­wave in the orig­i­nal ani­mated series, he also reprized his role as Mega­tron for the recent video game.

Via TFW2005 and eBay we have more images of the Bum­ble­bee and Sound­wave toy pack­ag­ing, this time giv­ing us their char­ac­ter descrip­tions, and another oppor­tu­nity to pur­chase the toys. It also reveals that Soundwave’s pro­jec­tile is the Decep­ti­con Ravage.

Sound­wave

eBay Auc­tion

Sta­tioned in orbit above Earth, Sound­wave swiftly taps into every satel­lite in range. Within min­utes, com­mu­ni­ca­tions, data traf­fic, weather infor­ma­tion, and high-resolution spy pho­tog­ra­phy flood his sen­sor net. The spill of data fills him with plea­sure, and one by one, the humans’ sys­tems come under his com­plete con­trol. From his seat on high, he is in a posi­tion to con­trol the des­tiny of mankind with­out their knowledge…or to run their civ­i­liza­tion into the ground.

The pack­ag­ing also reveals that the pro­jec­tile that Sound­wave can launch is in fact Rav­age! Note the text above the bot­tom right configuration:

Bum­ble­bee

eBay Auc­tion

Hav­ing cho­sen to stay with Sam after the end of the bat­tle for the AllSpark, Bum­ble­bee made arrange­ments to stay close to hm at all times. It’s been a pretty good deal. He gets reg­u­lar detail­ing, and as much high-grade fuel as he needs. Plus, he gets to spend time with Sam and Mikaela. His vocal proces­sors still aren’t fully up to snuff, but he and his friends com­mu­ni­cate just fine. IF he ever misses the action of bat­tle, he can always give Iron­hide a call and go Decep­ti­con hunting.