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?

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.

Looks like Hugo Weaving’s com­ments were the last straw — Michael Bay has pub­licly stated on his forums that Mega­tron shall return in Trans­form­ers 2, although he does play down his role — sug­gest­ing its more of a cameo within a flashback.

“Okay cat is out of the bag. Mega­tron is back —- but you will only get to see him from the long lost past. We go way back in time as this movie explains the mythol­ogy of the Primes. He is not a tank like every­one sug­gests, but an alien vehi­cle. But sadly he does not has much screen time.”

Well it only took toys, images, Orci’s con­fir­ma­tion, Weaving’s con­fir­ma­tion and all the rumors for Bay to make a turn­around on his pre­vi­ous state­ment that Mega­tron would not be return­ing. Sadly, Bay’s new expla­na­tion falls into that pool of poten­tial ‘mis­in­for­ma­tion’, oth­er­wise known as lies. We’ve already seen Megatron’s bio from the back of the leader class toy pack­ag­ing. Mega­tron rises and leads an army, et al. Weav­ing also sug­gested that Mega­tron might be res­ur­rected using cube shards.

Rebuilt with parts can­ni­bal­ized from other Decep­ti­cons, Mega­tron rises once again to lead his army. Though the AllSpark destroyed him once, he can now feel its power cours­ing through his cir­cuitry. It calls him to seize his right­ful place as ruler over the puny planet on which he was impris­oned and destroyed, and from which he will launch his con­quest of the uni­verse. Opti­mus Prime is all that stands between him and vic­tory, and the Auto­bot leader has done a poor job of hid­ing him­self. At long last, Mega­tron knows exactly where his enemy is, and he has power enough to destroy him.

Andrew Fen­ton of Aus­tralian pub­li­ca­tion, The Adver­tiser reveals in an inter­view with Hugo Weav­ing that Weav­ing shall return to voice the part of Mega­tron and that Bay asked him to keep it hush hush. He goes on to sug­gest that Mega­tron may be res­ur­rected from shards of the cube.

“Mega Secret
By Andrew Fen­ton
Film Writer, The Advertiser

In town to pro­mote his rather excel­lent new Aussie film, “Last Ride”, Hugo Weav­ing let slip he’ll be return­ing as the voice of Mega­tron in “Trans­form­ers: Revenge of the Fallen”.

Fans no doubt will recall that when we last saw Mega­tron, Sam (Shia LaBeouf) had rammed the All Spark cube into his chest, thereby destroy­ing him. Despite this cer­tain death, rumours have been cir­cu­lat­ing the vil­lain was going to make a come­back. Direc­tor Michael Bay went so far as to flatly deny the rumour, telling Empire: “He’s not in the movie”.

Turns out Bay was fib­bing. “I’ve already done it,” Weav­ing says, adding Bay had told him to keep the news hush-hush. “He’s over in LA and we were work­ing on the video split sort of thing and I had this strange con­ver­sa­tion where he seemed to imply it was all a big secret. So there you go — I’ve given you the secret scoop.”

So how is Mega­tron res­ur­rected? Weav­ing is coy about revealling too much, but does give a tiny hint.

“I think in the last one, doesn’t Opti­mus Prime pick up a lit­tle bit of, a shard of the cube, or the thing that’s left, and he takes it with him. Maybe there’s some­thing there… but I don’t know,” he laughs.

We’ll find out on June 25, the film’s Aus­tralian release.”

Via Seib­ertron

Of the new Trans­form­ers mer­chan­dise at Toy Fair 09 were a set of key chains, with their front designs pix­e­lated out to pre­vent reveal­ing the details of the char­ac­ters. Action Figs have posted a gallery of these with the notice­able Bum­ble­bee, Starscream etc — there are two notable odd­i­ties how­ever, one mys­te­ri­ous unnamed ‘New Char­ac­ter’ and a fig­ure labeled as Opti­mus Prime that doesn’t match his usual robot form. TFW also have a pair of sil­hou­ettes that match these two designs.

The source of these sil­hou­ettes states that the robot form of Opti­mus Prime is in com­bi­na­tion with Jet­fire, look­ing closely you can see the wing out­line, boost­ers and a canon — this com­bi­na­tion has pre­vi­ously been seen on the Leg­ends class toys, although that arrange­ment looks very different.

The unnamed char­ac­ter has claws and is grey, I’d hes­i­tate a guess at Megatron.

Opti­mus Prime

The toys

New char­ac­ter

The lat­est Toy­fare mag­a­zine has some juicy gos­sip bits about Trans­form­ers 2, pri­mar­ily that Dev­as­ta­tor will be up to 120 foot tall and that The Fallen is one of the orig­i­nal 13 Trans­form­ers, the one that went bad — play­ing on the apos­tles theology.

Tim For­mas sur­mised the article:

- Images of ROTF toys for Leader class Opti­mus Prime, Pre­view Bum­ble­bee, Pre­view Sound­wave, and the Voy­ager Class Starscream fig­ure.
– Lorenzo believes the time­frame of ROTF is about one year after Movie #1.
– When asked about the chal­lenge of cre­at­ing Dev­as­ta­tor on screen, Lorenzo men­tions that Bay had the chal­lenge in the first movie of hav­ing 30 foot robots. In the sec­ond movie, Bay has the chal­lenge of hav­ing a robot almost four times that. Expect Dev­as­ta­tor to be 100 to 120 feet tall in the movie.
– Archer said he couldn’t give away the plot point, but there’s a rea­son that Sound­wave is designed the way he is for the movie. Has­bro had a more basic toy need. So, the two were blended together.
– Toy launch date con­firmed as May 30th. A few weeks before, Bum­ble­bee and Sound­wave will be released.
– Char­ac­ters men­tioned in the ini­tial wave are “Side­swipe, Side­ways, Bull­dozer, Voy­ager and many oth­ers”. Promise of more off-screen char­ac­ters.
– Robot Heroes will have bet­ter artic­u­la­tion
– Bum­ble­bee hel­met has voice mixer
– Bum­ble­bee con­vert­ing pulse can­non
– Big ticket deluxe item for the year is still “top-secret“
– Grav­ity Bots are geared towards younger kids. Con­vert auto­mat­i­cally when you pick them up.
– A Megan Fox Human Alliance fig­ure is on Archer’s “wish list”.
– The Fallen’s ori­gin con­firmed: He is one of the orig­i­nal 13 Trans­form­ers. Lorenzo said to think of the 13 as “apos­tles”. The Fallen is the one who turns and is the rea­son Trans­form­ers split into Auto­bots and Decepticons.

To show the size of Dev­as­ta­tor to scale against Opti­mus (28ft tall) and humans Gauge001 cre­ated this: