Buzzworthy Bumblebee/Worlds Collide Blackarachnia

(Femme-Bot Friday #78)

The Buzzworthy Bumblebee line has become a source of seemingly never-ending puzzlement for me. Quite apart from the fact that Hasbro still insist on pushing Bumblebee as somehow central to the TransFormers brand - perhaps moreso than either Optimus Prime or Megatron - they have created a whole new toyline whose express purpose is to put as many different versions of that single character on the shelves, and they somehow fail to see a problem with that.

But then, not content with shoehorning perfectly good Beast Wars reboot toys into yet another of their interminable ostensibly G1-rebooting toylines, they've created a Buzzworthy Bumblebee boxed set that takes two Kingdom beastformers and jams them in with a five-years-late Titans Return toy and a repaint of Earthrise Cliffjumper as Bumblebee, even though there was a perfectly good, dedicated Bumblebee mold in the War for Cybertron Trilogy line (released as a Walmart exclusive in the US, but seemingly more widely available in other territories) which they could have used.

Then again, this is the same company that made both a Bug Bite and a Shattered Glass Goldbug out of the Cliffjumper mold, neatly missing the point of the choice of molds used in the predecessors.

So. Worlds Collide: a Buzzworthy Bumblebee boxed set, exclusive to Walmart in the States (availability in the UK still to be confirmed) comprising Nemesis Primal (a character who did not appear in the Netflix show, and who may be Nemesis Prime cosplaying as Optimus Primal or Optimus Primal corrupted by Unicron), Fangry (a Titans Return retooling that was seemingly - and bafflingly - the main draw of this set for many fans), the aforementioned Bumblejumper (or would this be Cliffbee?) and a reworking of Kingdom Blackarachnia based upon the the appearance of the original Beast Wars Blackarachnia's toy.

As you can imagine 75% of this set was of zero interest to me... and when reports of the QC problems - ranging from insanely loose legs on Fangry to insanely tight arms on Nemesis Primal - emerged, I felt my lack of interest was vindicated. Naturally, though, those gullible fools who bought the set for just one of the figures started splitting it up and trying to make back their money via the secondary market. While I found one UK seller looking to offload his Blackarachnia, their Buy It Now price was seriously over the odds (approx. half the price of importing the full set from the US, with UK shipping on top of that? Seriously?) and they declined my offer (approx. one third the price of importing the full set from the US, so pretty fair, I thought). Thankfully, I found a couple of US sellers offering a much more reasonable price (slightly higher than a standard Deluxe) and with acceptable costs via eBay PackLink shipping, and so I snapped her up.

And so, coincidentally exactly nine months after I wrote about the Kingdom toy, here she is!

Beast Mode:

Of the two forms this toy can take, there's less to say about this one... It's still a spider, just with more variation in plastic colour (less of which is plainly visible in beast mode) and a bit more paint. This latter point is the more noticeable, since the smooth patches on her abdomen are now painted purple rather than red, and all of the black plastic has a light slathering of metallic blue painted over it. The latter has quite a significant effect - both adding a subtle iridescence and emphasising the bobbly detailing of the abdomen. The former is slightly more subtle, in that her hips - visible at the back of the abdomen - now appear to be additional purple patterning (albeit in a slightly warmer, lighter shade than the paintwork) where they blended in on the standard figure. Where the Kingdom toy has red eyes and unpainted fangs, both are painted metallic green on this version.

The underside, being where most of the colour variety is hiding out, is an even more unsightly jumble than before, with large green bulbous protrusions just below the head, and the purple-painted back end of her gun poking out below them. The robot's unpainted claws protrude at the back, giving the rear view the appearance of a weird, mutated head - almost like a skeletal or even more alien version of Megatron Megabolt, or a mutated form of the Spider Brain from Doom.

The spider legs, now molded in coppery plastic, reveal far more of the sculpted detail, but are much warmer or more saturated a colour than those on the Beast Wars original. It's puzzling, all things considered, that Hasbro chose to use approximately the right colour here, while the standard Kingdom release had to make do with black plastic beast legs. Some folks are swapping the legs on this version with the legs on the Kingdom toy, to create an even more Masterpiece-lite version of the latter, but then lumbering this semi-exclusive figure with the dull black legs, and it seems like an expensive way of making so minor a change to the original.

I have to say that, on balance, I prefer the standard Kingdom toy's beast mode due to the simplicity and coherence of its colourscheme... However, having this one in-hand, I rather wish they'd drybrushed some sort of paint onto the black plastic of its body, and molded its spider legs in a deeper, redder copper, closer to the Masterpiece. Presentation-wise, this still isn't a patch on the kind of limited/exclusive figure the Collectors' Club used to produce, but it is one of the more impressive ones Hasbro have released so far... If only it hadn't been part of such an awful boxed set.

Robot Mode:

The first thing to note is that this version of Blackarachnia is about as accurate to the original toy as the standard version is to the animation model... Which is to say, not very. What we have here is essentially the orange, lime & blackcurrant flavour Femme-Bot, sporting a fetching leopardskin bra.

"Why leopardskin?" you may well wonder. Well, I know the reason... but the it singularly fails to answer the question. You see, the original Blackarachnia/Tarantulas toy had a textured chest in robot mode, and the Blackarachnia version had a spray of copperish paint over the top of its dark translucent grey plastic. From some angles and in a certain light, this may have resembled leopardskin... but it very definitely wasn't supposed to look like leopardskin. It's not even that it's a combination of trying to reference the original BW toy and the Takara Tomy 'Telemocha' re-release, because the latter had more extensive paint in gold on the chest, overprinted with an attempt at the spider leg pattern of the CGI model.

Furthermore, all of the plastic colours are too light. Rather than a bold, leafy green, the upper arms are the colour of chocolate limes, while the purple is appropriately fruity, but very slightly washed out. Meanwhile, the copper plastic might be a fair match for the spider legs, but the robot's claws were translucent grey on the original, and the lower legs were purple, both with bronze paint detailing. All of the parts molded in black plastic look to have been translucent on the original, but I have to admit that I quite like the metallic blue wash applied here, even if it is a little haphazard. In some respects, this is a far better paint job than the original Kingdom toy got... but that's not to say Hasbro haven't been lazy about it. Her claws and calves each feature a pattern of three perfunctory black chevrons that's evidently intended to substitute for the striping on the original, leaving the former looking unfinished and the latter looking like some sort of big cat cosplay intended to complement the leopardskin print on her chest. One feature I quite like about this is the metallic green paint used for the 'eye' details on her groin - substituting for the metallic yellow on the stock Kingdom version - coupled with a bold, purple Predacon insignia stamped right in the middle of them.

Arresting as the colourscheme may be, the main event is the head sculpt. As has been pointed out by webcomic maestro and stalwart of the TransFormers fandom, David Willis, this is not so much based upon the original toy's head sculpt as the design suggested by the packaging art. Where BW Tarantulas was always depicted as using the 'mutant' head, Blackarachnia was seen to default to the 'normal' head, which was basically an afterthought painted onto the underside of Tarantulas' head sculpt, with a wide slot in the middle of her 'battle mask' to accommodate the mode switch hinge. The box art filled this slot with another section of battle mask and enhanced all of the perfunctory details. This sculpt draws all its influence from there, and ends up with almost a mediaeval Nemesis Prime vibe, without the antennae. While the 'crown' does a decent job of homaging the wider, flatter design of the original toy, the back of the head is identical to the standard Blackarachnia figure - I was rather hoping they'd remodel that as well, with hints of the Tarantulas 'face' on the top of her head. The whole thing is painted purple, with the eyes picked out in white and the slotted battle mask in a sort of smoky silver so, even if the rest of her body wasn't so visually distinct from the original, she'd still have an identity very much her own, just because of the head sculpt.

My copy of Blackarachnia is certainly not without her QC issues. The entire upper body is insanely loose, to the point where I immediately took some pliers to the collar hinge to fix her lolling head, and will be looking into how to strengthen her shoulder transformation joints. The robo-boobs barely clip into place anymore (seemingly that breakage-prone tab on the inside has been trimmed down on the production lines) and she feels quite wobbly. Conversely, the thigh rotation joints are incredibly tight compared to the hips and knees, while the ball joint for the head is both tight and irregular, leading to some defined stopping points where there should be smooth movement. Thankfully the knee and ankle joints are mostly quite firm, so she doesn't have any trouble standing or holding a pose.

Beast mode doesn't come together quite so well, though, with the legs feeling quite reluctant to collapse down fully enough to align (loosely) with the spider abdomen shell, and the trouble I had with the original pegging the arms in on the underside, then pegging the gun into the arms, pales into insignificance compared to this version. Additionally, the fact that the collar hinge is also the transformation hinge between the beast mode's cephalothorax and abdomen leads to no end of frustration getting everything aligned. Even after tightening the neck joint, the surrounding parts remain loose. One thing that honestly both impressed and surprised me, given the floppiness of many of the joints, was that the ball-jointed knees on the spider legs have not suffered any obvious mold degradation, and they're still strong enough to hold the beast mode up without a hint of sag.

Overall, it's still a really cool mold. The new colourscheme and the new head are largely quite appealing, particularly since I never owned the original Beast Wars Blackarachnia (having instead started with the Beast Machines version and then, more recently, acquiring the Transmetals version). Certain aspects of the paint job are highly questionable, and one has to wonder how the textured boobage of the original toy got parsed into leopardskin print, but there's no denying how eye-catching it is.

Ultimately, this is going to be one of those toys where your mileage may vary. It may be something you want, it may be something you're indifferent to, or it may be something you loathed upon first sight. For me, it's the only figure of the four that was of any interest, largely because (a) I'm into Femme-Bots, (b) I like the character of Blackarachnia and (c) the idea of a 'toy accurate' version, however flawed, would always pique my interest.

The fact that it's not currently available in the UK is surely going to be frustrating for some fans... but, given the reports of the QC problems that are rife in the set, it's perhaps giving a lot of us a valuable opportunity to avoid some buyers' remorse. On the flipside, I'd imagine that, by the time Hasbro get their act together and make the set available via Hasbro Pulse UK, anyone who wanted the set (or one of the figures from it) will have bought what they're after on the secondary market.