ZeldaTheSwordsman wrote:RiddlerJ wrote:Yeah, on a mode that's cybertronian, I don't fret about a visible head. In those cases, the alt mode isn't a disguise, it's just a mode to get around, or fight, or perform some other purpose.
If anything, cockpits or passenger areas on cybertronian forms make less sense. Who are they for? Maybe after they met humanoids, it might make sense to install one but I don't think too many Decepticons would feel the need for one.
This is a fair point. And in point of fact I think it was on the minds of the movie designers too: Why would alien vehicle modes have gratuitous human-scale cockpits/windshields? These are noticeably absent on all Cybertronian altmodes seen onscreen. Working from there, I think this is the actual reason for Megatron's partially-exposed head on his Movie 1 and ROTF bodies: Not "to stick it to the man" (like Will suggested for some reason) but because with the usual "Gratuitous cockpit" convention discarded (eliminating the "See via windshield" method), that's how the movieverse designers decided that Transformers should see to navigate in their Cybertronian altmodes. I don't know that you can really call that lazy.
It may be the way they decided
Megatron should see, but that doesn't necessarily mean
everyone on Cybertron did it that way. Other than Megatron and maybe Soundwave (we never see him transform in RotF, so I'm not 100% convinced that wasn't meant to be one of the weirdly-shaped robot modes that so many bots from that movie wound up with), we don't really see any Cybertronian vehicle modes.
And the toyline's no help on this: Shockwave and The Fallen both have their heads (or at least faces) hidden in vehicle mode, but neither of them transformed at all in the movies themselves, so I dunno if those were designed for the movies and then just didn't get used, or if Hasbro made them up themselves. Ravage, meanwhile, has toys where his face (or at least his eye)
is exposed in vehicle mode, but in the movie he only seems to have his cat mode and the ball Soundwave ejected him in, which may of may not have been something he was inside rather than being him.