War for Cybertron: Kingdom Airazor

 (Femme-Bot Friday #77)

It's beginning to look as though there will be very little of interest to me in the final chapter of Hasbro's War for Cybertron line beyond a handful of its Beast Wars remakes. Even those have generally been undersized remakes and, for better or worse, minus many of the play features of the originals. The one area of the toyline where the results have exceeded my expectations is its Femme-Bots, with Blackarachnia being both an early release and a (small) Deluxe class reworking of the Masterpiece figure that ended up being, if not generally better, then at least better value for money.

So, when Airazor was revealed, and looked pretty fantastic, she went straight to the top of my want list. Considering I only acquired the original Beast Wars version comparatively recently (six or seven years ago, I think) and, broadly speaking, still think it's a pretty good toy (even if it's not remotely 'screen accurate'), my main reasons for wanting this are the improved articulation demonstrated by other War for Cybertron toys and a head sculpt more in line with her on-screen appearance.

 

It also came into stock on Hasbro Pulse UK ahead of its arrival in other UK outlets (and we can't all be YouTubers, graced by Zavvi's largesse) so that gave me an excuse to sign up.

However, all of the Kingdom toys I've picked up have come with several significant caveats, so let's find out if Airazor swoops to conquer what I've come to regard as the 'Kingdom Curse'.

Beast Mode:

I really wish Hasbro had, at some point, made a decision on what kind of bird Airazor transforms into. While her original toy best resembled a peregrine falcon - based on the pattern of stripes on her feathers and the length of her tail vs her wingspan - this one looks closer to a golden eagle in every respect except the head, which still looks like a peregrine. Her colouring is completely wrong for either - the majority of her bird parts being a surprisingly light, washed-out stone colour rather than a true brown. Rather than the striping of the original figure, Kingdom Airazor has what's effectively a weathering effect on the wingtips and on the middle section of her back. The latter is by far the more effective of the two, as the paintwork on her wingtips looks like someone attacked the ridges between the feathers with a brown marker - it's neither subtle nor attractive, and ruins the look of the sculpt. Weirdly, the undersides of the wingtips have a light spray of a off-white paint which would have been rather more appropriate to the upper faces. If she is supposed to be a peregrine, the paint should have been applied far more heavily, and across the entire undersides of the wings.

 

The wings are the clear highlight of this toy, though: where the original featured concealed 'blades' in the wings, and a geared gimmick that would swing them forward - all completely unnecessary but symptomatic of the way even the smaller Beast Wars toys were made - this version... just makes them act more like wings. Like the original toy, the tips can swing in and out (almost to the point of reproducing the 'diving' arrangement), but these are supplemented by four hinges per wing. While the robot's arms get in the way of swinging the wings straight down, the other joints pick up the slack and allow them to pretty much wrap around the arms, achieving a halfway decent range of 'flap'. All that's missing is some measure of backward swing at the 'shoulder' - with that, this would easily be the best TransFormers bird yet made. 

All of the sculpting on the bird parts is leagues better than that of the original toy - far more natural-looking - with the wings designed as outstretched for flight (or hovering?) rather than folded for diving, per the original. Where this figure starts to go a little wrong - just like on the Beast Wars original - is on the underside. Instead of anything remotely bird-like on the belly, she has a whole load of exposed robot parts arranged almost exactly as they were on her smaller, simpler ancestor. The robot's head, thankfully facing into the body, occupies part of her belly, her arms run down the length of the body just below the wings and the robot's thighs peg in over the hips, with the robot's lower legs forming the total of the bird's legs, making use of an additional joint above the ankle to achieve the digitigrade appearance. The only improvement is that it's molded in a mixture of murky yellow, pearlescent orange and the stone colour used for her bird parts, where the original's underside was almost uniformly bright yellow plastic, but the end result is every bit as untidy and unnatural-looking.

Now, don't get me wrong - I like the way they've handled the legs. It's far better than the original Beast Wars toy and its awkward combination of a small hinge right above the ball-jointed knee. This version ends up with a far more natural-looking legs shape for a bird of prey... the only problem is that it doesn't really connect with the body because there just ain't enough body. Ideally, they would have found a way to fold the arms in under the body to bulk it out, but they left Airazor with a wide, very flat body that doesn't disguise her robot parts at all well.

Airazor's weapons feel a little perfunctory compared to the original, which is quite an achievement considering the gun had to be pegged in underneath the tail on that toy. In beast mode, this version's weapons have to be plugged into the robot's hips and, as a result, they're at a weird angle to the bird - tending slightly outward - and so of dubious effectiveness as weapons. They're somewhat modelled after her the missiles she fired from her forearms in the old Beast Wars TV show, and painted accordingly but, if that's truly what they're supposed to be, they're way oversized. What's more, pegging them onto exposed robot parts in her beast mode is a complete waste. They're two chunks of plastic that could otherwise have been put toward improving the toy's engineering, if only Hasbro hadn't been so laser-focussed on shoehorning in compatibility with the Kingdom line's appalling reimagining of weaponisers. Fitting them instead to the underside of her body could have bulked her out a touch, while adding ports to her wings would have given her a Seeker-like quality. There has been some seriously addled thinking in the War for Cybertron line.

So, this being a beast former, let's consider the head. While it's quite nicely textured, the look of the head - in terms of both shape and colouration - isn't quite right for either a peregrine or a golden eagle. It's almost as if the sculptor had a rough idea of what a bird's head looks like, but didn't bother looking up any reference. Thus, the head almost looks more like an angry pigeon than a bird of prey, and the paintwork doesn't follow the sculpted cues. It only uses the off-white paint for the feathers below the brow line and at the very top of the gullet, while the beak itself is painted with a grey far too pale for the job, and lacks any of the yellow frequently seen toward the back of the beak. The beak opens, but the way it's hinged appears to have been based on parrot rather than a typical bird of prey... About the only thing it got right was the rings of pale paint around the beady, black eyes.

Robot Mode:

Well, just like Blackarachnia, Airazor cuts a very slender figure of a Femme-Bot. Unlike the Predacon, however, and in keeping both with her animation model from the old Beast Wars TV show and the original toy, her design does not incorporate any overt robo-boobage... and, really, so much the better. While I believe the designers could have incorporated suggestions of such on the orange plastic parts of her upper body, it would more than likely have looked awful and, given that this is an alien robot, I'm perfectly content to forgo gratuitous tits in favour of a better-looking toy.

And Airazor certainly is a good-looking toy - in terms of variety and distribution of plastic colours alone, she's more visually engaging than almost any other toy in the line. While beast mode is largely brown, robot mode brings in some vibrant orange and gold to liven her up. Orange plastic effectively frames her torso, with chunks of it filling out the chest between the bird head and the shoulders, and the pelvic armour panel continuing the simple pattern of sweeping curved bands from her upper body down to her groin. Her beast mode wings remain visible but, with the tips folded down, nowhere near as excessively prominent as wings tend to be on TransFormers toys. Even with the wingtips folded out, they're effectively about 30% shorter due to compression via their concertina hinges, and this seems to be in keeping with her animation model.

 

Compared to the other Kingdom toys I currently own, Airazor's sculpted detail makes her look substantially more robotic - the arms and legs being more angular generally and featuring more by way of panel lining. There's panel lining on her collar, just in front of her head, and even some tech detailing on the inside of the panel that peeks up behind her head. Considering both the original toy and the CGI model appeared to go for a far more organic look - albeit not quite to the same extent as Blackarachnia - I think this works particularly well and helps her stand out while maintaining the techno- part of the 'techno-organic' concept a lot better than some of her counterparts.

At first glance, Airazor appears not to have a great deal of paintwork and, while that's certainly true in terms of quantity, she's another fine example of the considered and strategic use of paint that has not been prevalent enough in this toyline. Her thighs are cast in the orange plastic, with the pale beige paint applied at the hip and down the sides, around the raised details. The pelvic plate, meanwhile, has an application of the gold-ish paint around its joint to better match the yellow plastic it's attached to. I've no idea what colour of plastic was used for the upper arms because they're thoroughly coated in the pale beige paint - even popping the lower part off via the bicep swivel joint yields no clues about the underlying plastic. All this means that she looks substantially less bland than the BW original and, while she doesn't quite match up to the CGI of the TV show, she's about as close as one could hope for in a contemporary Hasbro toyline. While I'd have liked to see a bit more paintwork - silver or gunmetal on the collar panels and some gold on the belly, behind the beast head, perhaps some gold on the shoulders - the fact that both the yellow and orange plastics are slightly pearlescent means they catch the light in a very different way to the flat brown plastic of the parts carried over from beast mode, quite apart from just being brighter. I also like that they added a small Maximal insignial to her right forearm, though its red paint is perhaps a little too unobtrusive against the brown plastic.

 

Airazor's weapons look good, but they're a little oversized if they are meant to represent the mini-missile launchers integrated into her forearms in the TV show. Nevertheless, I feel that they present an apt parallel to the way the Seekers' weapons are traditionally attached and, to be honest, they'd look a bit crap if they were actually sized according to the CGI in the TV show. Both are identically molded, with a large 'arrowhead' part on the front and a short fin rising from the back, with little bits of panel lining and a good, solid coating of gold-ish paint. There's no integration with the blast effects parts from some of the other toys, which makes sense, in that Airazors weapons were despicted as missile launchers, but nevertheless demonstrates the inconsistency of Hasbro's approach to these toys... At the very least, some of the smaller blast parts could be used to represent muzzle flash, had her weapons featured the necessary peg. Technically, she could also 'holster' her weapons by attaching them to the ports in her thighs (or just leaving them there during transformation) or hold them in her hands, but the only other ports she has for upgrades as the ones on the backs of her legs, just above the ankles.

 

Among all the Kingdom toys, Airazor benefits most by her show-accurate head sculpt. Both her Beast Wars and TransMetals head sculpts were fairly nondescript and lacking character, while her appearance on the TV show was both more elaborate and more colourful. It does feel as though Hasbro are kind of hedging their bets with Airazor's gender with this toy - there's nothing overtly feminine about the face, despite some finely sculpted lips and fairly prominent 'eyelash' details lining the outer corners of her eyes. Her expression is pretty neutral, but her eyes seem enormous, with the little metallic green dots being slightly misaligned on mine. The sculpt of the helmet kind of reminds me of the armour worn by the Horus guards in Stargate, with a prominent 'beak' on the brow, but with more of the 'feather' details running along the sides. Of the Kingdom toys I currently own, Airazor's is perhaps the most elaborately painted head, with metallic orange and gold-ish paint on the helmet, metallic purple for the face and both black and green paint used on the eyes. Closer inspection of the CGI suggests that the eyes should have been painted a dark metallic green rather than black with green dots, and the 'eyelash' parts were meant to have some of the metallic orange paint, but they've certainly captured the essence of the design. Even the back of the head features more detailing than any of the others so far, with a row of spikes protruding from below the back of her central crest and quite a bit of panel lining packed into a small area around them.

The original Airazor toy was one of those smaller Beast Wars figures that didn't have any geared 'Automorph' style gimmicks to its transformation but, nevertheless, required very little effort to switch between her modes. This Kingdom version is clearly a development of that original and features a few quite similar steps, but taken to the next level in terms of intricacy and extensiveness. The arms are basically identical in the way they fold against the sides of the body, except for an additional joint just behind the wrists, and the fact that the forearms actually peg into the body rather than just sit behind it. The legs accomplish much the same shift below the body, but with the ab crunch manoeuvre replaced by a simple the waist rotation of 180°. An extra joint above the ankle ball joint makes the bird legs digitigrade and, while both toys rotate the entire lower leg at the knee, this one additionally has the feet rotate to the appropropriate orientation. Even the head reveal is much the same, but more extensively engineered - rather than the beast simply folding over the robot head via hinges at the base of its neck, the two are on opposite sides of a rotating section of the body, wedged between the shoulders, with a flap on the back allowing clearance for the transition, and facilitating the slight extension of the torso going into beast mode. Probably the biggest improvement on this version is the way the wing concertina down, pegging into her back and reducing their impact on her robot mode width considerably. On the downside, the joints used only for transformation in the left arm and right shin on mine are surprisingly loose and bend very smoothly, where the same joint on the opposite limb requires some force to move from one position to the other, and clip firmly into place in either. I'm also a little concerned about the longevity of the two yellow plastic hinge parts used in compressing/extending the torso - they never quite synchronise, they're very small, and they're pinned at both ends. The only other gripe I might have about her transformation, and something picked up on by several YouTube reviewers, is that the waist joint - a mushroom peg - ends up in plain sight, behind her beast mode's beak, when in robot mode. This could easily have been avoided by having the joint installed from the rear rather than the front, and would have had zero impact other than hiding this ugly joint, so it's baffling as to why it wasn't fixed during her development.

What really marks this toy as an improvement on the original is that its only ball joints are at the ankles, and they're rather more snug than any of the joints on my BW Airazor toy. The many hinges of the wings allow for myriad dramatic flight poses and, while she can't flatten them against her back the way real birds do, they can fold up against her sides, and I find that to be an acceptable compromise. Had they somehow been able to add joints to the claws, I could probably have forgiven most of my complaints about her beast mode, because the jointing of her legs is such that they can be angled quite naturally for a bird of prey in flight or on the attack. I love that the bird head can rotate a full 360° and tilt about 80°, but that makes it so close to perfect that the absence of the slightest bit of side-to-side swing becomes all the more glaring. Aside from being too short, the tail is also not articulated except to facilitate transformation, which is a huge shame - longer tailfeathers that could fan out, and then split and become hipskirts for the robot could have looked cool. Robot mode, by and large, benefits by many good, stiff joints, but there are clearly some plastic tolerance issues at play. The shoulders are super-tight, and her spaulders will always tend to move along with the arms rather than staying in place, extended out to the sides. To be fair, this is a problem with literally any TransFormers toy that tries to accommodate this kind of shoulder armour when it's intended to fold away for the alternate mode - it's true of the original Airazor from 1997, and of the 2016 Combiner Wars Airazor produced by the Collectors' Club, based on the Generations Windblade toy from the previous year. Rotation around the shoulder is also pretty stiff and somewhat hindered by the wings folded up onto her back, but she still manages a full 360°. Unrestricted bicep swivel and the elbow bend of slightly over 90° are not quite as stiff, but sufficient to hold a pose. Her waist joint, since it's used in transformation, offers a full 360° with the tail raised, and there's a hinged armour panel covering the hip rotation joints embedded in her pelvis that can be raised to get them out of the way of the legs. The hips can rotate a full 360° assuming the legs are extended outward, but their forward/backward swing range only achieves 180° with the groin panel raised and the bird's tail unpegged, and then only because they get a little beyond 90° forwards. Rotation joints above the knee, also used for transformation, are completely unrestricted, and the knee can comfortably bend to almost 150° due to her hollowed-out calves. The ball-jointed ankles aren't quite so good at tilting as the hinges of most other War for Cybertron figures, but they offer rotation as well as omnidirectional tilt.

 

Airazor is, without a doubt, my favourite Kingdom toy to date, because she's a fantastic homage both to a much-loved character and another highly-prized toy in my collection. That being said, were I not the Femme-Bot Fanatic I am, and were I not so invested in Beast Wars as one of the best bits of fiction ever to be associated with the TransFormers brand, I can imagine being quite nonplussed by her. Sure, she's bigger and feels more substantial than Blackarachnia, but she's still pretty small for a Deluxe... Though she does compare more favourably with the likes of Generations Rattrap, Waspinator and Rhinox on that score. If Kingdom Optimus Primal is to be considered a Voyager class toy, then Airazor is certainly a correspondingly-sized Deluxe, for better or worse. As updates to Beast Wars toys go, she's a far better example than Kingdom Megatron, and I would now consider this figure to be my definitive Beast Wars Airazor, thanks to the excellent robot mode head sculpt, increased articulation of her wings, and the clever arrangement of her legs in beast mode.

As I final note, I would only wish to add that I'm pleased to have seen a recent announcement of an upcoming Terrorsaur figure, and sincerely hope it's based on the same engineering as Airazor (as would seem to be the most logical option). Had Hasbro declined to produce an updated toy for Terrorsaur, it would perhaps have been the most heinous crime of the entire War for Cybertron toyline.