War for Cybertron: Kingdom/Golden Disk Collection Terrorsaur

I mentioned in my write-up of Kingdom Airazor that it would be pretty much criminal for Hasbro to fail to produce a Terrorsaur figure having developed such a good remake of the Maximal falcon, so it came as no surprise when he was eventually announced. What was a surprise was that he would be made available as one of Hasbro's much-vaunted 'capsule programme' sets - in this case, the (technically) Amazon-exclusive Golden Disk Collection. Split across four 'chapters' (comprising Road Ranger & Puffer, Jackpot & Sights, Mutant Tigatron and this one), it's basically a bunch of mostly uninspiring (and uninspired) repaints with the exception of Terrorsaur, who is a substantial reworking of the Airazor mold.

This was not unexpected, but the actual execution of the figure was certainly not what I'd hoped to see. So, the big question is, are there any other surprises with this figure, and is it a worthwhile representation of the Predacons' less accident-prone flier?

Packaging:

As with other figures released in Hasbro's other special collections, Terrorsaur comes completely enclosed in cardboard - no plastic window showing the contents of this box. I do quite like this decision, not least because it frequently ends up making far better use of the art assets prepared for each collection... but the artwork specific to the Golden Disk Collection is... pretty dull. It's literally just a close-up image of a section of the Golden Disk, with some of its imagery glowing, while the disk itself appears to be glowing against a starry background with hints if distant nebulae and galaxies.

OK, granted, there are photos of Terrorsaur on the back... but box art has always been a prominent and important feature of TransFormers toys. While it is traditionally Hasbro that fluffs this aspect - many of the carded releases in toylines from the 2000s onwards were pretty generic, with just a small image of the character on a card strip inside the plastic bubble - the fact that they can't even be consistent with the presentation of these collections makes me wonder what's going on in the heads of their Marketing and/or Packaging teams. While the Golden Disk undoubtedly has significance - moreso to the original Beast Wars than the travesty of a retelling in Kingom's TV show - it doesn't make for especially appealing, exciting or evocative visuals. About the only thing I can think of to say in its favour is that, were you inclined to buy the complete Golden Disk Collection set, the boxes can then be stacked together to display the complete pictoral face of the Voyager disk.

Considering the excellent artwork - featuring the characters - from the two-part Battle Across Time Collection, this is incredibly disappointing and far too generic. These figures are techically 'Premium', yet there's little indication of why they're considered to be worth more, they simply have higher price tags. The only significant differences are in the style of the packaging, the fact that they're not as widely available and are potentially more limited in numbers.

Thankfully, I'm not one to obsess over packaging, and normally just throw it away once I've extracted the toy... but part of me wishes Hasbro had put in a bit more effort to make this sort of box worth keeping. The Battle Across Time boxes certainly would be because of the battle scene they portray, but this set feels very 'meh' in its presentation, perhaps because the figures in this collection are largely pretty 'meh' themselves. Certainly, this was the only one of any real interest to me. On the upside, it does at least appear as though both the product shots on the back show the toy properly transformed. One specific difference they appear to highlight is that the iteration of this mold which was used to take the product shots had the wingtips pinned in place, where the final production model does not.

Beast Mode:

As mentioned above, when it was revealed that Terrorsaur was a retooling of Airazor's engineering, no-one was remotely surprised... However, one thing I was a little surprised by was that they didn't flip him top-to-tail. The original Beast Wars toy turned the beast's tail into the robot's chest, had the beast's head swing over the robot's back from the bottom, and left the wings upside down. This look was cheated somewhat for the TV show's CGI, which then placed the wings on his arms rather than depicting them as being part of his backpack. Granted, this version has a proportionally larger wingspan and takes advantage of the Airazor engineering to grant them some articulation, but there was no real reason not to take the same approach when reworking the Kingdom toy. What we have instead is an extensive - yet comparatively basic - reworking of the original Maximal mold.

Nevertheless, the level of sculpted detail is excellent, from the wrinkled, leathery wings to the scaly texture of the body. There are a couple of surfaces - adjacent to the wings - where the sculpted detail just ends abruptly, and leads into flat, squared-off areas of plastic that, while comparatively small, are incredibly incongruous in the context of everything else that's there. A couple of the transformation hinges - the midpoint on the back and the base of the neck - leave surprisingly ugly gaps, though the latter can be closed up at the expense of the front of the neck no longer making contact with the top of the chest. 

The back of the neck and the upper part of the beast's back feature a smattering of painted brown spots, and it took a surprisingly long time for it to sink in that they are essentially the extent of the beast mode paintwork, apart from the head. The area of chest directly around the neck is basically the robot's upper torso with the head folded away, and looks substantially worse than the same area on Airazor simply because so much more of it is left exposed. That whole area, even without the robot's arms just hanging out at the sides, looks far blockier here than it does on the Maximal simply because his small, slender neck does nothing to disguise any of it. Then, where the back of Airazor's robot head was visible on her beast mode chest - barely concealed by the feather-like sculpt of the back of her head - Terrorsaur basically has his robot mode's chest - ostensibly the beast mode's tail - acting as beast mode's chest/belly. It's not a duplicate of the 'real' tail in terms of its sculpted detail - this one is scaly where the real thing is just wrinkly - but it does have a pattern of brown spots painted on, similar to the one on beast mode's back. As with Airazor, the beast's legs are basically the robot's legs, folded up and turned around, with the feet rotated 180° to show the Pteranodon's three-clawed feet. The silver paint all over the underside doesn't help the 'beast mode' vibe, but it is a welcome variation on colour on a toy that's otherwise overwhelmingly red. Some sort of dark - or light - wash would have really brought this figure to life in beast mode... as it is, it looks cheap and plastic-y, far inferior to Airazor or Skywarp.

On the subject of his wings' transformation hinges, the square plastic double joints that link the first two segments of each wing were both installed upside down on mine (and I gather this is a common assembly error), though they pop out easily enough to flip them round. The only other aesthetic issues with the wings are that the sculpted detail of the 'arm' leading up to the final hinged segments is sculpted such that it only looks good with the wing fully straightened - the slightest bend makes the wing look broken. This is then exacerbated by the unnecessary underhanging protrusion from the final, rotating segment of wing. It's designed to slide under Terrorsaur's beast mode 'hands', but it doesn't align properly due to attaching via a ring that's just a bit too thick, and then when the wingtip gets swing backward, it pokes forward, breaking the continuity of the wing. Really, all they needed to do was have the wing detail wrap around the rotation point, thus making it look consistent regardless of the position of the wingtip. In general, it feels like the proportion of wing in each plastic segment should have been adjusted so the hinges could have been 'safer' positions - such as directly in line with the 'hand' rather than about half a centimetre behind it.

That 'hand' is one very awkwardly sculpted part of the toy - again, due to accuracy to the CGI. It wouldn't be so bad if the final wing segment - which swings in and out on a split mushroom peg on the underside - actually connected flush with the main part of the wing but, for whatever reason, there's a significant gap between the last two sections on wing, and a chunk of the wingtip section has been unnecessarily hollowed out and flattened below the 'hand' well in excess of what was needed for clearance. In addition, the left wingtip on mine is very prone to popping off, as the peg doesn't grip as well as the one on the right wing. This appears to be due to mold flashing on the peg, and can be fixed - to a degree - by shaving it off.

Terrorsaur's weapon and 'fin' accessories can all stow in beast mode. The latter can remain on his arms, and can be turned round in their 5mm sockets so that the point faces forward or back - neither clashes too badly with his thighs - but they don't seem to serve any useful purpose. Alternatively, they can be relocated to the backs of his legs, which arguably looks a little better, but they hamper what little articulation the lower part of the legs can offer in beast mode. I believe the intention is for them to remain in his arms and face toward his tail. The handgun is a bit more adaptable in terms of storage. While the slots on his legs are really intended for 'holstering' the gun in robot mode, they remain accessible in beast mode. Additional to this, there is a slot in the underside of each wing that can accommodate the gun's peg. It's located on the second wing segment - the slimmest part - and the gun can only fit with the grip pointed outward... however, the slot is just far enough from the edge of the wing that the grip then interferes with the mobililty of the outer segment of the wing, because it sits a fraction over the end of the hinge.

The beast mode head sculpt looks like it came straight out of the TV show's CGI - it's not remotely 'realistic' in the sense of looking anything like the traditional 'shrink wrap' depiction of a Pteranodon, instead resembling a nightmarishly distorted version of a woodpecker. This pretty much makes Terrorsaur very much the odd-one-out in Kingdom's selection of Beast Wars remakes. While I like the head sculpt because it's such a good representation of the character from the TV series, and thereby full of character, it's also rather ugly. The long, sweeping supraoccipital crest is almost a mirror image of the beak but for the colouring and the presence of nostrils on the latter. One oddity - very much derived from the CGI - is the presence of teeth. Considering 'Pteranodon' literally means 'toothless wing', it's quite a daft error but that goofy appearance was effectively part of his character, since Terrorsaur wasn't remotely terrifying in appearance. The yellow paint on the beak looks pretty good, but the tiny dabs of white on his teeth are completely inadequate, and the underlying red plastic is left visible from most angles. The eyes are just blobs of green paint with dots of black for the pupils, but neither seem to align with the sculpted detail - the green paint in particular, while neatly applied, appears to extend over his eyelids. The inside of Terrorsaur's lower jaw features additional unpainted teeth in lieu of a tongue, while the upper jaw is mostly hollow, with sculpted dents aligning approximately with his teeth.

Robot Mode:

One thing that's apparent in this mode is that Terrorsaur is still very red. Certainly, he has applications of silver paint - around the faux-tail on his chest, on crotch plate, the forearms, the lower legs and, of course, the plug-in arm spikes - but there really doesn't seem to be enough. Terrorsaur in the TV show had metallic upper arms, bare metal armour around his thighs and dashes of silver on his feet. This thing, utilising the forearms and lower legs of Airazor, makes semi-decent usage of the sculpted detail to add some silver highlights, but that's really all they are - just highlights. The new parts unique to Terrorsaur - the upper arms, thighs and feet - are bare of paint, and thus much of their visual impact is lost due to them not standing out well against the rest of the bare red plastic. It's a shame because, while the thighs are comparatively plain in their sculpt - representing large armour panels with minimal detailing - the shoulders and biceps are comparatively replete with smaller, more intricate details. It might stand out well enough in the red plastic, but the CGI had it in either silver or gunmetal. The elbow joint itself is grey plastic, but it's pale and anaemic, with virtually no impact. Even so, given the choice, I'd have preferred that to be used for the upper arms in their entirety, perhaps the thighs as well.

Possibly the most frustrating omissions in terms of paintwork are the bands of armour running back over Terrorsaur's shoulders, connecting the chest to the backpack. The front section of chest features silver paint all around the faux-beast tail, yet the continuation over the shoulders wasn't painted and so ends up looking cheap and unfinished. Considering the only other paintwork on this figure is the brown spots on the chest, that makes for a rather sad entry in the Golden Disk Collection. Making matters worse, I've seen photos of this figure where, like Airazor, he has a small faction symbol stamped onto his right forearm... but both are bare on my copy. Errors like this seem to have plagued the War for Cybertron line, as I've seen instances of outright missing paintwork on figures in several YouTube video reviews. That sort of QC failure is bad enough on a standard figure, but in one of these semi-exclusives, it's just embarrassing.

As mentioned above, the 'fins' can remain in Terrorsaur's arms throughout transformation, so I honestly can't see any reason why these were made separate, except to save resculpting Airazor's forearms since Terrorsaur already has unique upper arms. The bonus for robot mode is that they can be detached and wielded like karambits. As per usual, though, I have to wonder about the practicality and efficacy of arming robots with blades, since it always strikes me as roughly analogous to a human wielding flesh as a weapon. Thankfully the gun is a bit more effective. It's fairly nicely sculpted, albeit typically full of open areas in lieu of scuplted detail. The larger ones are kept to the back end, the smaller slots in the middle are less obtrusive, and the ones at the front have a small amount of additional detail sculpted within. While I've not picked up any War for Cybertron figures that included blast effects, I'm nevertheless disappointed to see that Terrorsaur's gun is not compatible with these parts, as its tip is taller than it is wide. Given that it's unpainted - and so no need to worry about paint rubbing away - this seems bizarre... and suggests to me that perhaps the few elements of compatibility with these War for Cybertron bonus parts that exist within the Kingdom beasts appeared more by luck than judgement. As mentioned above, the gun can be 'holstered' on either thigh, or even on the wing ports, which are still accessible behind his arms. Being a standard 5mm grip, he can naturally hold it in either hand or mount it on either forearm, Seeker-style, if one of the 'fins' is removed. There are also the sockets on the backs of his legs, but it doesn't make sense to stick his gun in either of them, even for storage.

The head sculpt is the highlight of this mode, since it's a very accurate rendition of the CGI. The helmet almost seems like a development of the old G1 Seekers, flaring out slightly at the sides, albeit without the pronounced vent detailing. It also features a large central crest that sweeps all the way to the back of the head, from which it protrudes like an echo of the beast mode's supraoccupital crest. The face features a brilliant, beautiful, almost Starscream-worthy smirk and is painted off-white, while the eyes have been painted yellow. It's not entirely clear what colour they should be from what little CGI I can find, but I'd have thought gold or copper might have been a better choice, since the eyes are so small, some kind of metallic paint would make them more of a feature. Alternatively, a black outline would have been possible, since there's a slight ridge around his eyes.

Given how few changes have been made to the transformation engineering - mainly, it's how the beast mode's head gets dealt with that has changed - it's surprising how different it feels. Unfortunately, that's not in a good way. For starters, the figure's back only tabs into place in robot mode. In beast mode, it's just resting against the inner torso with nothing holding it there other than friction at the transformation hinge, where Airazor's back tabbed in fully in both modes. While the wings fold away in much the same manner, the tab for fixing them to Terrorsaur's back in robot mode is now on a smaller section of wing, and getting it tabbed in place feels more fiddly. While the compression of the torso is a bit smoother than it was on Airazor, and the belly tabs together more securely, getting his head out of his chest is more fiddly because it can't be pushed out from below. It a lot of ways, I think this figure could have been so much better if they'd flipped its engineering the way I'd hoped, even though that would have left his wings upside-down (per the original toy). It wouldn't have had two different versions of the beast mode tail, and the legs would have been the right way round for a Pteranodon, rather than digitigrade, per Airazor.

Having been so heavily based upon a mold with excellent articulation, it's no surprise to find that Terrorsaur is just as poseable in both beast mode and robot mode. The wingtips are not quite so effectively designed as those on Airazor, but their problems are largely aesthetic. That said, I do find that the wings don't seem to wrap around Terrorsaur quite so effectively because the joint at the base of each wing doesn't really offer any downward movement. Additionally, the feet on mine are incredibly loose on their ball joints, leading to him toppling over backwards rather too easily for my liking. The beast head and neck are better articulated at the expense of a more convincing-looking beast mode, but the additional range of motion is very welcome and expressive. In robot mode, everything is fundamentally the same as Airazor, though the shape of Terrorsaur's robot head limits its range of motion quite considerably - the chin stops it tilting down more than a couple of degrees as well as reducing its rotation to something in the region of 110°, while the back of the helmet and the position of the ball joint prevent the head tilting up. On the upside, for those who are inclined to try it, his 'hybrid mode' - leaving the robot head inside the untransformed torso and the beast mode head in place - is rather more successful than Airazor's, coming across a bit like Ridley from the Metroid games, albeit without the long tail.

Golden Disk Accessory:

I have to object to the naming here because, while I know it's intended to represent both the Voyager golden disk and the Vok artefact... it's just not gold. Granted, I can't go expecting chrome these days, and the real-life Sounds of Earth disk was gold-plated copper... but the paint here is neither gold nor copper. It's fully painted with a dull, brownish metallic colour which ends up looking greenish in some lighting conditions.

In terms of sculpt, it's very simple. One side features a sequence of concentric rings (sadly not a continuous spiral, per a real-life record) and the familiar "The Sounds of Earth" label embossed on the hub. The other features five Vok glyphs arranged around the middle. I was a little surprised that these glyphs are raised rather than embossed, but I guess that was for the sake of sturdiness considering the disk itself is only about 1.5mm thick at the (raised) rim.

Possibly the strangest thing about the Golden Disk Collection is that this is the one and only Golden Disk it contains... when there were two present in the Beast Wars TV show. Given that it's a four-part set, and the disks were broken in the TV show, I'd have thought a larger disk in four clip-together parts - or two sets of two-part disks - would have made for a better accessory to be spread between the set, and thus encourage more people to buy the full set. Sure, this one is scaled for the Kingdom figures to hold (assuming the availability of anything other than 5mm port 'grip', since there are no pegs on this disk), but that feels like a cop-out on Hasbro's part.

The Golden Disk Collection feels remarkably poorly thought out... even among Hasbro's other seemingly random collections. Split into four 'chapters', it featured homages to e-Hobby, Gobots and an obscure European G1 Mini Autobot in the first set, an Action Master homage using a Studio Series '86 mold in the second, a homage to a toy prototype in the third... and then this is the final 'chapter' - apparently dubbed "The Terrorfying Conclusion". While the collection is said to reference an alternate timeline, I'm not aware of any narrative material associated with it, and it's certainly not part of the awful Netflix series.

I genuinely had high hopes for this figure, and was almost compelled to buy the Mutant Tigatron toy as well, but I have to confess that Terrorsaur is a massive let-down. I don't dislike him by any means - as a regular retail figure, he would have been adequate, with or without the Golden Disk accessory - but as a special release, part of an Amazon-exclusive set, in which each figure is a few quid more expensive than the 'standard' figures in their respective size classes, he feels like a bit of a cash grab. Nothing here - certainly not the accessories or the bare-minimum paint job - supports even the slightest increase in cost. Terrorsaur himself has less paintwork than Airazor, and his weapon accessories surely don't represent a substantial enough increase in plastic volume to justify such a price hike. While I can excuse the need for custom paint applications or Reprolabels upgrade sets on a mainline toy, they really should not be this urgently required on a premium exclusive, even if it is 'affordable premium' rather than BotCon/Collectors' Club premium. Quite apart from that, the widespread QC issue regarding the outer wing segments, and the minor inconvenience of the absent Predacon insignia, should not happen on any kind of exclusive figure.

The only positives I can offer here are that, like the Airazor toy it's derived from, Kingdom/Golden Disk Collection Terrorsaur is a well-engineered update of the original Beast Wars toy (with the exception of the lack of tabs for securing the back in beast mode), and a decent representation of the CGI from the TV show (with the exception of the missing paint applications and/or additional grey plastic parts). It's a good, fun figure... 

...But it could have been so much better, even without re-engineering it as it should have been, such that the beast mode's tail actually becomes the robot mode's chest. The really sad thing is that this is my first Terrorsaur toy (not including the BotCon 2016 one). I didn't get the Beast Wars original at the time or even seek him out more recently on the secondary market, as I did with Airazor. I'd have guessed the 1996 toy would be disappointing as it's so basic... this one is just careless.

It leaves me with the impression that Hasbro really just don't care - not about the casual fans, and certainly not about the hardcore collectors - and are content to do the absolute minimum (or less), confident of sufficient sales to keep their shareholders happy. If Terrorsaur is in any way indicative of their future plans, I don't see that strategy working as well for them in future.