Today was a slow Saturday. The wife was at work all day and my daughter had a birthday party that took up the entire afternoon, so my son and I spent the day just hanging out at the house. I did some stuff online and got some more photos done. We watched an episode of Hometime (you’re welcome HGTV, DIY, etc) and used my new favorite tool (the Dremel) to get the last bits of ceramic number and adhesive off the front of the house after leaving it look like hell for the past two months.

At some point during the day, my little man was playing with his Transformers. He’s usually pretty good about transforming them himself. Maybe a little quick guidance in the correct order of steps, but for the most part, he’s pretty solid for a 7 year old. And when he’s not he’s usually pretty good about holding on to the instructions and digging the right one out and taking a look to refresh his memory.

So today he comes to me with one that I know he’s been wanting to turn back from robot into vehicle for a while now and making absolutely zero progress and generally getting blown off by me (just being honest) when he’s looking for someone to figure the damn thing out. So today he hits me up with this damn Transformer in hand and I figure what the hell.

Of course, he doesn’t have the instructions – which is probably ok because they all show you how to go from vehicle to robot and tell you to just reverse the steps to go back to vehicle and no matter how long I stare at the pictures, I just have more luck figuring it out on my own. And that says a lot about the system, because I’m generally a ‘read the instructions before you begin’ kind of guy.

So after a few moments of bewilderment and asking my son questions, we figured that this is apparently the most difficult toy in the world to get to go from robot to what appeared to be a tank of some kind. With no instructions, we thought to look online. Somebody is bound to have a site with scans of instructions for figures…the only catch was that neither of us know what fucking Transformer I was holding in my hands.

We searched all kinds of things, looked at too many fan sites, toy sites and whatnot and I was starting to get a little frustrated because:

1. We we getting nowhere fast.
2. I didn’t give a flying fuck if this thing ever looked like a tank again.

So I decided there had to be some marking on it or something that I could put into Google and get results. After looking it over, part of the graphics on it’s shoulder/gun turret thingy read, “GALV-25″ and I plugged that into google.

I got a bunch of results about drywall so I added transformers to the query and realized we were dealing with a Galvatron figure. Great.

After a little more searching we settled on this video of some annoying kid doing a review of the figure while chomping Cheez-Its like…well, like a Transformers geek chomping on Cheez-Its. About 13 minutes in he gets to showing us how to take the damn toy back to tank from robot…even commenting that it’s one of the most difficult figures of the Transformers Universe series (see, we’re not idiots – seriously, watch that shit) and that even when done correctly, some parts snap off, some never collapse and connect correctly and it’s easier to do if you flat out pull some pieces off and put the toy back together at the end.

So even playing and pausing the video of the kid doing it step-by-step we still found a lot of frustration, but between the two of us, got it back to tank form with strict instructions (with a wink) to never, never, ever, unless it will somehow magically save your life and even then think twice before you do it, transform this damn toy into the robot again.