Series 1, pre-rub Optimus Prime MIB (blue variant)

This is item #4 that I flagged in 'The calm before the storm' post. I'm not posting them in any chronological order, and I just felt like posting about this one today.

This was another someone-showed-something-to-me-I-thought-hey-maybe-I-will-buy-it type of purchase. No, its not really that callous. A buddy collector from the UK have been conversing with me about TFs and I learnt about his sales thread (was more of a trades thread actually).

There I saw this nice MIB Optimus Prime, which made me think to myself "gosh, of all the Transformers I have amassed over the years, including doubles and triples of certain figures, the one thing I have not done is tried to upgrade my childhood Optimus Prime MIB with a mintier boxed specimen".

My childhood Optimus Prime - perhaps its time for an upgrade, no?

I talked more with my buddy and learnt that the Prime he had on offer was not just any Optimus Prime, it was a unique variant.

He described it so well, I thought I might as well quote him:

"I'll try and give you a breakdown of how the first Optimus Primes were released.

• Japanese Diaclone Battle Convoy - Light blue trailer parts, light blue roller, bloated accessories, metal plates in trailer.
• First Optimus Prime #1 - Dark blue trailer parts, grey Roller, bloated parts and metal plates. Diaclone mould cab.
• First Optimus Prime #2 - Light blue Diaclone coloured blue trailer parts AND Roller, non-bloated parts and no metal plates. Updated mould cab.

What's most interesting is that they came in a very early Hasbro box where the stock photography of the radar dish on the bottom of the box actually was not correctly cropped and appears on the front of the box right under the box art."

This was all very interesting to me, very new to me - the last one was a variant that I did not know about. While the bloated parts, grey roller Primes were fairly well know if not well available, this one was new. I was interested. And it was pre-rub too, which led to all sorts of interesting discussions with E and E doing her own research on what is pre-rub.

After a number of small discussions with E, we decided, yes, we would like to add this to our collection.

Before I go on, I'd like to thank Maz for selling this to me and also for his gracious permission to use his photos for my post here. Yes, all the photos in this post were taken by Maz and not me.

So here it is, 'first Optimus Prime #2' with the light blue trailer parts.

Back of box

Again, quoting Maz, who so eloquently described its characteristics, I'm going to reproduce his words here:

"Here's just a run down of the features:

• Diaclone light blue coloured parts
• Copyright is Diaclone style "TAKARA JAPAN" only
• The 3 stock photos in the top left corner of the box front have no white border
• You can see where Prime's fist is in the boxart, there is an extra little grid square that would be later removed. This is as close as Prime gets to a "no-grey" box
• You can see the error at the bottom of the artwork between his feet, the radar dish was not correctly cropped from the bottom"

Radar dish not cropped, photoshop fail!

The contents, simply beautiful!

Here, the 'blue' parts are clearly visible

"I need a recharge."

Autobot Commander - Optimus Prime

The rich history of this variant is covered by Maz in a lot more detail over at TF Source here.