The end of my winter hell week at work is almost over. At noon tomorrow, Jaime and I will be done working and on our way to a glorious 3 1/2 day weekend.

I’ve been slowly catching up on blogs, Digg, and the news I’ve missed this week while work was an all-consuming force, and I stumbled across the first photos (at least the first I’m aware of, anyway) that show what the Optimus Prime toy looks like for the new Transformers movie this summer. And, of course, if you know what the toy looks like, you have a pretty good idea of what he’ll look like in the movie. I don’t really care for what they’ve done with Bumblebee -

but Optimus doesn’t stray as far from the original as I had feared. Yeah, the flames make me think they’re trying too hard, and I have serious doubts that this is the movie a first-generation Transformers fan like myself really wants to see, but at least they didn’t completely mutilate him. You can see a strong resemblance to the Optimus I loved as a kid.

Speaking of that, I have a coupon for Best Buy that’s good starting tomorrow, and I’m thinking about stopping in and using it to get the 20th Anniversary DVD of Transformers: The Movie. I watched it about five years ago and vaguely remember being somewhat surprised by what a blatant toy commercial the whole thing was, but (spoiler alert) the death of Optimus Prime still ranks up there as probably the most shocking cartoon moment of my childhood. And I still remember some of the words to that stupid “You’ve Got the Touch” song.