War for Cybertron: Kingdom Dinobot

Dinobot was one of those characters who got a really raw deal, both in the original 1996 Beast Wars toyline and pretty much ever since. A pivotal and much-loved character from the TV show, he was saddled with one of the worst-looking toys, that suffered even more due to the line's 'mutant mask' gimmick that was never even referenced in the TV show. So awful was the original toy that my one and only experience of it was Takara Tomy's 2006 Telemocha Series repaint, released for the 10th Anniversary, which had the dubious advantage of a somewhat show-accurate colourscheme. I bought even that version reluctantly, and only because I wanted to have a version of Dinobot to honour his impact in the TV show.

He got a somewhat improved remake in the Universe toyline, back in 2009, but I don't think it ever made it to the UK, because I couldn't find it anywhere - online or in bricks-and-mortar toy shops. It looks substantially better than the original but, even then, my preference would have been for Takara Tomy's Henkei! Henkei! version, as Hasbro's version introduced a weird green and purple combo to his colourscheme.

 

So now, in the wake of the stunning, yet fragile and expensive Masterpiece toy, it falls to Kingdom to produce a more affordable update to the character. Having chosen to do so at the Voyager class pricepoint, let's find out if it's another comparative dud like Optimus Primal, or something special like Blackarachnia...

Beast Mode:

Dinobot's representation of a Velociraptor has definitely improved over the years... From the original Beast War mess to the slightly improved Universe figure, he was slimmed down generally and given much improved proportions. The Masterpiece figure went for screen accuracy, but bulked out the beast mode again to allow all the robot mode to parts inside and ended up with a strangely polygonal appearance. Now we have a beast mode with pretty reasonable proportions but, unfortunately, quite a few visible robot parts laying along his belly.

That's not to say his beast mode is bad, just a little incomplete-looking, and it certainly suffers by comparison to Kingdom Megatron, even though his colourscheme is significantly less outlandish. Like Megatron, his skin is beautifully textured, but all his parts fit together far more snugly because he's made wholly of rigid plastic rather than rubber fitted to a structural lattice.

 

One curious parallel between this toy and Kingdom Airazor is that the shade of brown plastic seems too light. It's darker than Airazor's certainly - I'm tempted to suggest that the shade used here is the lightest shade Hasbro should have considered for the other - but it still manages to look quite anaemic for a dinosaur. It could have done with being both darker and warmer, since it looks quite desaturated, and the contrast between the bare plastic and the painted sections is somewhat greater in my photos than it is in real life. Nevertheless, the overall look is pretty good, just not very dynamic thanks to the hips being immobile except for transformation. The sculpt of the feet keeps the Velociraptor's traditional longer, arched claw on the first toe of each foot, but takes the overall arrangement of the foot - with its large heel spurs - from the original Beast Wars toy rather than authentic fossil records, to ensure the correct arrangement of his hands in robot mode. Given that a Velociraptor is generally depicted as standing on its toes and the balls of its feet, perhaps it might have been nice to have the foot split so that the heel spurs could fold up the back of the leg for a more authetic appearance, but that would likely have caused the beast mode some balance problems.

Dinobot is, sadly, another of the Kingdom beasts who has a sad lack of C.O.M.B.A.T. ports. That said, all of them are accessible in beast mode, for better or worse. The two on his feet mean he can be fitted with Weaponiser/Fossiliser 'shoes', while the two just in front of his knees (part of the sculpt of the robot's knees) are both awkwardly placed and rather tight... leading me to believe they're just sculpted details of a coincidentally similar size, not actually intended for plugging in additional weapons. All of Dinobot's accessories are fully integrated into his beast mode - specifically, forming his tail - and, while this makes a lot of sense, it's another reason why this beast mode suffers in comparison to Megatron: it's largely rigid. The tail is held permanently erect, with no joints of its own, so it ends up looking completely unnatural. While the purple tip doesn't exactly blend in with the rest of the tail, it's probably the most unobtrusive of the design flaws. It could be argued that an additional C.O.M.B.A.T. port is made available by detaching the tail, but that then looks rather unnatural.

 

On the subject of his design flaws, it has been noted online that the robot's hip joints were originally depicted as being grey, and blending in better with the beige paint on the dino chest but, somewhere along the lines, Hasbro went with the copperish-orange plastic instead. This may well be great for the robot's hips, but makes beast mode look like it's developed robo-boobs. Following the body on down to the belly, the robot's legs can only be considered vaguely disguised by their sculpted dino flesh texture and the pale beige paint on the kneecaps, so they blend better with the striping on his flanks. The lower legs and feet literally just hang out on the underside, looking pretty ridiculous... but it strikes me that the feet could have been made to blend in better at the tail with the addition of a swivel joint above the ankle. Given the way Dinobot transforms, I guess they had to make a call between ankle tilt for robot mode and not leaving the soles of his feet showing on the beast mode's backside, and robot mode articulation was considered the more important factor. Given the largely empty area of the body between the robot's legs, I kinda wish they'd chosen to stash the sword in there, and added some joints to his tail - the Lost Exo Realm Dino-Femme-Bots proved five years ago that it's possible to have articulation in a tail that splits...

Other oddity is that the backs of the beast mode's thighs appear to feature eyes along with the incongruous smooth, blue panels with gold stripes. These are, naturally, features for robot mode and they don't jump out as much as one might expect. The weirdest feature is the way the hands have been designed: they're way too big for a Velociraptor, and the wrist has a fixed, sculpted bend to about a 90° with the wrist joint below it. This is all in service of robot mode and, while I applaud it as a clever solution, it looks pretty ugly on the toy.

At first glance, it would seem that the head sculpt is a high point on which to end the write-up of beast mode... and it's certainly nicely sculpted - at least as good as Megatron's - with decent paintwork, including a painted pupil for his beige eyes. He has the characteristic curled upper lip revealing a row of blunt - but painted - teeth on each side, and the jaw is designed to open... but it's a rather stiff joint, to the point that the head itself will start to tilt down just as the jaw reaches its fullest extent. The sculpting of the inside of the mouth is far more basic than Megatron's, but the tongue and the teeth of the lower jaw are painted. What's rather odd is that the teeth have been sculpted in such a way that they all lean backward, and only appear straight when the jaw is about half way open. That's a pretty baffling decision which ends up making his mouth look really weird when it's open.

Robot Mode:

My first impression of Dinobot, in hand and in robot mode, was that he's something of a mini-Masterpiece... at least in terms of his overall design and the level of sculpted detail. There's quite a contrast between the textured beast parts and the smooth armour of the robot parts, approximately following the plastic colour usage - orangy-copper for the tiny pauldrons and almost the entire lower leg, with paint applications highlighting robot armour where necessary on the brown plastic. In terms of the figure's overall build, I think the Kingdom figure does a better job than the Masterpiece in some respects. This one seems proportionally taller - particularly in the upper body, where the MP version always looked artificially wide at the shoulders, with the rest of the torso then spread out to fit, and so looking like a distortion of the already distorted CGI.

 

The engineers came up with a very novel way of replicating the CGI's squashed-in-spread-out-dino-bonce chest design, with the beast mode head loosely enclosed by a couple of shell pieces that don't perfectly match the contours (and leave the beast mode eyes very slightly visible), but nor do they look outlandishly bad. Even his backpack is comparatively tidy - certainly leagues better than Megatron's - with the base of the beast's tail clipping into the inside of a section of its back. There's even a representation - albeit largely obscured - of the animation model's pronounced spine, in the form of the orange plastic arm that connects the tail section to the robot's collar. The bone design on his groin is also recreated here, but now much softened and looking less specifically bone-like. It's still painted gold, and still looks pretty questionable, even compared to other Kingdom beastformers, but it's a reference to the original toy as much as it is the animation model from the TV show. There are even details sculpted onto the inner faces of the opened-out lower leg parts, which one would only see during transformation. While it look more like random tech detailing than the inner workings of a robot's leg, it's little things like this that suggest the folks who created this Dinobot toy had both respect and affection for the character.

 

I'm a little less impressed by the way the beast mode's arms and weirdly-shaped hands get wedged into the torso to fill out the sides (with two fingers remaining visible from the front, just dangling above his hips) but can't deny they serve a useful function - preventing the shoulders from drooping. Also, clever as it is, the way the lower legs transform and peg into beast mode has left gaps at the tops of his calves. It's one of those things that seems very weird when you look at it... but it's surprisingly easy to ignore, not least because it's only really visible from the sides or from the back.

 

As with the rest of the Kingdom line, Dinobot's paint job is rather miserly. It's by no means as terrible as it could have been - the blue panels on the sides if his waist and their gold bands have been painted in, at least, and the armour panels running down his thighs have been painted on both the front and the back, while the groin has that dash of gold paint, as previously mentioned. I'd also grant you that the upper body doesn't really need a great deal of paintwork, particularly with the simplified engineering of his backpack meaning that the parts of his back that could have been painted blue and gold are covered over anyway. In a way, it could be argued that Hasbro have been just as strategic with their paintwork here as they have been with other figures... but the fake head parts on his chest should have had some beige striping to match the paintwork on his beast mode head. Additionally, the dearth of paint on his lower legs just looks awful, as if they rushed incomplete figures to the market. The beige paint used on the kneecaps and the outer face of the knee area, to match their colour to the beast mode's belly, doesn't follow the same details round to the inner face of the knee, making it look disjointed, while the sculpted 'bone' design down the shins and the 'ribs' wrapping around the calves should have been painted gold

 

Dinobot's traditional weapons are a sword and a... spinny thing (apparently called a "Cyber-slash" weapon, though I seem to recall it was used mainly to deflect gunfire in the TV show). Both look pretty good at first glance, but neither are quite right. For starters, the sword's 'blade' has been painted metallic purple - a colour that isn't used elsewhere on the toy and just shouldn't have been used here. In the absence of chrome, silver would have been ideal, and gunmetal would have been acceptable... Though I have to say, conspicuous as it is, it doesn't look to bad in and of itself. I also have to applaud the designers for managing to get Dinobot to hold it properly, by adding a tab to the side of the hilt, which then plugs into the C.O.M.B.A.T. port in either hand. The fingers/thumbs don't quite close around the hilt fully, but it works well enough, and certainly beats the original toy's permanent fencing thrust. The only downside here is that the articulation of the wrists isn't quite up to reproducing it, should one wish to do so. The spinny thing loses its geared, push-button spinny gimmick and, plugging directly into the other hand's C.O.M.B.A.T. port, any spinning it might do would be (a) interrupted by the fingers unless they're folded right out into their beast mode position and (b) entirely manual... and the connection is solid enough that the wrist joint is more likely to spin than the "Cyber-slash" weapon. Another downside to this version is that it's one of the few on which the interior of the tail is unpainted - it's been red, blue and silver in previous versions of Dinobot, so they had plenty of options... I guess this was seen as the less important accessory, though, and so an easy way to keep the paint budget low. The inside of the tail does present another C.O.M.B.A.T. port, as does the stump of his tail, now on his back.

The head captures Dinobot's animation model perfectly in its sculpted detail, though I'd say they should have used a slightly darker shade of orange throughout the figure to make it look just right. I've always been puzzled by how the CGI designers developed his appearance for the TV show considering how far removed it is from the original toy, even leaving aside the 'mutant mask' feature. It's far more ornately designed and the angled brow piece is unique to the animation model. The face is excellent, capturing the character's grim, snarling demeanour without going full-on with bared teeth... Though I have to confess a touch of disappointment, since it would have been cool if he'd lived up to Rattrap's nickname - Ol' Chopperface - considering the Masterpiece version has several alternate faces. The chin protrudes to just the right length and at the right angle, though this does mean he has to raise his head slightly to ensure his chin clears the back of the dino head on his chest. Paintwork is surprisingly good - the black paint of his brow piece wraps the full way around his head, while the black stripes in the grooves either side of his central crest go all the way back over his crown to meet it at the back. The shade of blue used on the face is pretty much spot on, though I find myself wishing they'd used a metallic blue. His narrowed eyes are picked out with red paint, but they're quite deeply sunken into his face, and so tend to get lost in the shadows below his brow.

Given how pedestrian most of the War for Cybertron toys have been in terms of their transformation, Dinobot is an absolute joy to behold. Transformation is intricate and clever without being either difficult or fussy. I always like to try transforming new toys without referring to the instructions and, while some steps in this one weren't immediately apparent or entirely intuitive, it all started to make sense pretty quickly... The real surprise is how different it is to the original toy. In general terms, the layout is much the same - the robot's arms form the beast mode's legs, and the robot's legs lay under the beast's belly and the tail detaches to become the robot's armaments - but here, parts of the robot's chest and back end up wrapped around the arms to form the beast's thighs, and the robot's waist is at the front of the beast mode rather than the back, so the feet end up below the tail rather than the jaw. The lower legs also split open to fit better into the torso - with the knees and the unfolded calves each tabbing in securely - and to keep beast mode comparatively narrow. The other main difference is that the robot's head ends up inside the beast's hind quarters rather than just behind the beast head. With the collar unpegged from the back of the beast head, the back of the torse then unfurls to get the robot's head from one end to the other. It works so smoothly, it looks simple... but it's a remarkably clever bit of engineering. The reconfiguration of the hips into the sides of the torso is a work of absolute genius, even though the end result in either mode is far from perfect. The only real letdown is the way the beast's arms just kind of get stuffed into the robot's sides to fill out a gap, but the look of that could have been improved if the beast's hands were smaller.

Where Kingdom Megatron hit pretty much all the right notes in both beast and robot modes, Dinobot is comparatively static in beast mode. Zero articulation in the tail, zero articulation above the knee, but about 90° range at the knee, almost 90° tilt and unrestricted rotation at the ankle, as well as at least 90° tilt for the toes and heels. His shoulders can rotate a full 360°, swing out to about 140° (though they can't hang straight down due to his robot legs bulking out his dino chest). The elbows have a positively unnatural range of about 160°, though only the forward-bending 90° is of any use, and the wrists are ball joints offering unrestricted rotation and a bend of about 90° for transformation. This makes the arms surprisingly expressive, but not quite making up for the lack of articulation elsewhere. The neck is completely fixed in place, but the head can tilt down with a spring-loaded panel giving way in the throat and allowing the head to collapse right against the neck for robot mode, while his jaw can open to about 60°. Aside from the comparatively short neck and its spring-loaded panel, I can't see any good reason why the head can't turn, and but it's the absence of any hip articulation that really hurts beast mode. Even so, as my photos hopefully show, everything from the shoulders up can be quite expressive thanks to the joints in the arms.

Robot mode fares much better, with the full range of excellent articulation the rest of the War for Cybertron line has offered, and then some. The 'toe' and 'heel' sections of his feet are separately articulated for transformation, enabling extra support where one foot is not planted firmly but, while the joint between the two parts is extremely tight on mine, the actual forward/backward ankle tilt - offering about 50° in range - is comparatively loose. The sideways tilt - moving inward only - offers a full 90° and feels quite tight, so I'm a little concerned about the joint's longevity due to the pin being so close to two different edges of a piece of plastic with a pearlescent swirl. His knees have a full range of about 140°, 40° of which is forward swing used in transformation, and both are extremely tight. Not half as tight as his hip rotation joints which, at first, I thought might have been accidentally glued. In fact they can rotate the full 360° if they're swung out far enough to give the outer rim of the thigh clearance around the main hip joint, but getting any movement out of them on mine is quite a struggle. The hips themselves can swing easily out and forward to 90°, but their backward swing is restricted by his dino mode chest, requiring the legs to swing slightly out to the sides to get anywhere. He has waist swivel as part of transformation, so it's completely unrestricted, and the arms have about the best arrangement of joints I've ever seen on a mainline toy. The shoulders can swing through a full 180° sideways thanks to the transformation joint just inside the main 360° shoulder rotation joint, there are then additional rotation joints at the bicep and wrist, both unrestricted. His elbows bend the regulation 90° forward, with about an additional 60° backward, and he naturally retains both the wrist tilt and the 'finger' articulation of his beast mode. By comparison, the ball-jointed neck feels pretty basic... but it does offer a full 360° rotation and a little bit of tilt in any direction, making it super-expressive even without being able to open his mouth.

I'll be honest: when I first saw Dinobot - initial photos and early video reviews of the toy - I wasn't madly impressed. I'd almost suspect that my decision to order him came at a time I was feeling more positively disposed toward Kingdom Megatron, but my preorder for Dinobot predates my order for Megatron by a few days. Beast mode is hugely disappointing in comparison to Megatron, and the lack of C.O.M.B.A.T. ports is just as baffling here as it was on every other Kingdom remix of a Beast Wars toy... However, while the paintwork on robot mode is severely lacking, he's an incredibly well-designed robot, with excellent articulation and sculpted detail, and the head sculpt is every bit as good as the Masterpiece version. Additionally, while Dinobot feels a little on the small side for a Voyager class toy (especially one without any accessories beyond those that are integrated into his beast mode), he earns his price point far more than Kingdom Optimus Primal and further proves that £50 for Leader class Megatron is too much: if engineering like this can be achieved on a toy this size, at the £25 pricepoint, all of the Leader class has been an absolute joke by comparison. The designers and engineers who created this toy should be proud of their achievements... and everyone else on the TransFormers team needs to start taking notes.

 

What all this goes to show is that Hasbro had the means to produce a full Beast Wars reboot combining more realistic-looking beast modes with great-looking interpretations of the TV show's CGI robot modes... but, instead, they chose to shoehorn a handful of Maximals and Predacons into a dull and incongruous time travel story at the arse end of yet another disappointing G1 reboot. More than anything, it makes me wonder what could have been, if the 25th Anniversary of Beast Wars had received a similar sort of lavish treatment as the 20th and 30th Anniversaries of G1. I'd have loved to see these realistic beast modes applied to updated and reimagined robot modes, better emphasising the techno-organic nature of these characters.

 

Still, Kingdom is what we got... and Dinobot is definitely one of the best figures in the line. The one thing he's missing is his own Golden Disk accessory, not least considering how important the Golden Disk appears to still be for this continuity - even if the 'Golden Disk destiny' cards packaged with each toy feel like an afterthought - but I'm guessing there will be some kind of Netflix pack to fix that particular omission.