After the third chapter of Hasbro's War for Cybertron Trilogy turned
into a haphazard convergence of G1 and Beast Wars, I ended up
buying more of the latter selection than the former... But, while
two
versions
of Kingdom Blackarachnia were produced,
Tarantulas remained notable by his absence.
But then Legacy arrived, and it wasn't long before Tarantulas was
announced. It wouldn't be unreasonable to presume that he'd effectively be
Kingdom Tarantulas, rebranded for the newer line... but, to my
surprise, that has turned out not to be the case.
Come into my parlour, and lets find out what makes this figure
something different.
Even though the original Tarantulas and Blackarachnia toys were exactly the
same mold, it was natural to expect that a Kingdom or
Legacy version would follow the TV show's example and make them very
different. Tarantulas certainly makes for a much larger arachnid in his
beast mode, with a massively chunky body at the centre of his - surprisingly
- slightly shorter legs. It should be noted that, when I first saw photos of
Tarantulas' beast mode, I objected to the fact that his robot mode hands
were protruding all the way out at the front, rather than being somewhat
concealed as they had been on Blackarachnia. Of course, that only revealed
my ignorance of arachnid biology, since Blackarachnia - being a female - has
only small pedipalps, while Tarantulas, being male, has pedipalps that are
effectively an extra pair of legs, as explained to me by a helpful soul on
Reddit.
However, assuming Tarantulas is actually supposed to be a tarantula, these
pedipalps - aside from being anatomically inaccurate due to the additional
parts poking out on the underside - seem to indicate a juvenile, as they
would develop bulbous tips after an adult tarantula's final moult. The fact
that these are clearly just the robot's clawed hands is pretty obvious, but
the lower part isn't overly intrusive from every angle - it's most obvious
when viewing him from the front, since his legs do a decent job of obscuring
them in side views and, had they been molded in black plastic, or even had
the all-important yellow stripes been omitted, they'd blend in far better
with the rest of the spider. I'd be inclined to nitpick the smooth legs,
since tarantulas are normally pretty hairy. If I remember correctly, this
was explained by the design team in one of the panels earlier this year, and
the plastic used simply doesn't support an adequate level of detail.
The body isn't bad, but the sculpted texture certainly doesn't have the
depth or sharpness of Kingdom Optimus Primal, for example, and the presence of some very
defined seam lines over the top of the head makes it look like the kind of
knock-off created by basing a new mold on an existing toy... overall, the
detail looks fudged. That's clearly not the case, though, as the sculpted
borders of the pattern on his abdomen and the eyes on the cephalothorax are
very clearly and sharply defined. The problem is, with such a simple overall shape, the beast mode components really needed much more defined textures to look halfway decent, especially given the use of a fairly lurid purple plastic with yellow painted highlights.
While those highlights aren't the only paintwork on the figure, they are the most eyecatching... so it's disappointing that the markings on his abdomen look so half-hearted. Derived from the original toy they may be, but that had the advantage of a darker, smoky translucent purple plastic and slightly more intricate designs. Neither look like anything you'd see on a real spider, but they just add to the overall cheap appearance of this toy... Though not half as much as the absence of yellow paint on the matching designs sculpted into the lower part of the abdomen on each side. The head has all eight eyes picked out in pearlescent green paint, while the mandibles are picked out in metallic purple, with pearlescent green on the fangs themselves. A barely-visible application of purple shimmer has also been applied across the back of the cephalothorax, where it looks like a bit of an afterthought. The stripes on the pedipalps - another carryover from the original toy - look very artificial, not least because they don't follow the vague indication of sculpted joints on these parts.
Robot Mode:
Funnily enough, because I was expecting Tarantulas to have been a delayed Kingdom figure, the first thing I noticed about him is that he doesn't even have the calf ports that Blackarachnia has. Moreover, while he has 5mm ports on the soles of his feet, they're for transformation: his feet actually tab onto the inside of his abdomen. This is pretty much all the evidence needed to confirm that the C.O.M.B.A.T. system, Weaponisers and Fossilisers are done... Which is a shame, as it means there won't be any original characters made to be modular weapon systems... and, based on the couple of Legacy TargetMasters revealed so far, I think the Weaponisers have far more potential as a play pattern... But that's beside the point...
There's no denying that Tarantulas really looks the part as far as his menacing silhouette goes... though, given he was normally seen in the shadows in the TV show, the garish colourscheme is still a little eye-watering. While the pearlescent green looks pretty much right, the purple really could have been at least slightly darker, if not also less saturated... neither really suit the sinister character, though, and while it might have made sense to more clearly differentiate between the toys, it's not as if anyone would have mistaken Tarantulas' animation model for Blackarachnia. The lack of defined detail very much carries over from beast mode - the chest is left over and, while the vague texture is CGI accurate, it still looks too soft. The arms have no real sculpted detail except on the black sections attached to his spider legs, and even that doesn't take advantage of the area of plastic the way Blackarachnia did. The pelvis is adorned with nine faux-spider eyes, in homage to the original toy, on which the beast mode's head actually became the robot's crotch. The legs feature sculpted markings much like those on the spider's abdomen, but they're not painted, and the armour on the inner thigh is very simplistic, while the skinny lower legs just have a vaguely mottled surface, much like the chest. The feet and claws have simple ridged detailing... and that's about it.
Tarantulas' paint job was disappointing enough in beast mode... in robot mode it seems ludicrously underwhelming. The main problem is that the lion's share of the paint budget appears to have been blown on painting his (black plastic) feet pearlescent yellow, and his (purple plastic) lower legs pearlescent green, matched to the green plastic parts. Given the existence of these pearlescent green plastic parts - the hip and shoulder assemblies, the cuffs - I can't understand why the lower legs weren't molded in green, especially since the paint used to match the green plastic is a different shade to that used for his beast mode eyes, and the faux-eyes on his pelvis. As a result of this, more important applications - such as some pearlescent yellow on the details sculpted into his thighs, kneecaps and belly - have been omitted, leaving him looking quite plain. As with his beast mode, the purple sheen on his chest is barely discernible. What's even stranger, though, is the inclusion of a purple Predacon insignia... stamped onto the purple plastic of his right thigh. When I first noticed it, I thought it was discolouration in the plastic, and it was only upon closer inspection in better light that I was able to identify the design.
Weapons-wise, Tarantulas is a little more heavily armed than Blackarachnia. While he carries the much same 'anchor gun' as Blackarachnia, it's molded in black plastic (much the same type as Tarantulas' legs, I suspect) and is entirely unpainted. Alongside this, he has a small rotary saw, which is also molded in the black plastic, but has a coating of a light metallic purple paint over the blade. This appears to be a reference to the TransMetals toy's accessory, which was both a saw weapon and its vehicle mode's front wheel. The sculpt is just functional, nothing particularly exciting about it, but for the fact that it has a 5mm peg on the back, as well as on its underside, so it can be held almost as a gun, or as a weapon to be swung... though, with the grip in Tarantulas' claws being right at the wrist, almost, it doesn't look particularly effective in either orientation and, if held as a gun, it doesn't extend much beyond the tip of the larger half of his claws. However, that peg on the back of the saw also allows it to attach to the back of the anchor gun, since it's not completely identical to Blackarachnia's weapon, and has a 5mm port on the back. The problem with combining the weapon is that, even if the perpendicular 5mm pegs are arranged at different angles, either end of the combined weapon is too long for Tarantulas to wield it unless his arm is completely straight.
Considering how brilliant Blackarachnia's head sculpt was, and its pretty decent paint job, Tarantulas' head sculpt is another factor that leads to it feeling like a knockoff. For starters, it feels oversized, and that seems to limit its ability to move. The 'eyes' dotted about on his forehead, while painted, seem a little perfunctory - they're all quite small and very regular, when some sort of organic variance would have given the head a bit more character. The face, such as it is, appears to be made up of six inner and outer mandibles (the latter being much smaller) painted pearlescent green over a matte black battlemask, and with a large visor for his optics. The visor, the 'eyes' on his forehead and the band running from side to side over the top of his head are all painted pearlescent yellow. Most of the paintwork is sharp enough, but the green is a little sloppily applied on one side on mine, spilling over the matte black.
The best thing I can say about this figure's transformation is that it's not as fiddly as Blackarachnia. There are no points where I was concerned that something might break through the natural course of transformation, and, while there are certainly clearance issues with his arms and the spider legs, it's mostly quite easy to navigate them. The backpack untabs from the spider's head, behind the robot's head, and shifts down for clearance. The arms then need to be straightened, out to the sides with the spider legs rotates so they point loosely upward, allowing clearance for the entire upper body to rotate 180° at the chest joint. The spider's head then hinges up and over the robot's head, but it doesn't tab into anything yet. At this point, the robot's arms need to be rotated round so the claws are pointing 'up', then swung to the underside of the slowly-forming spider mode, with the claws themselves oriented such that they can be tilted out toward the nearest leg if desired. They then peg into the body in two places: a large tab on the underside of the spider's head goes into a slot at the base of the spider's first leg, and then a tab just behind the back leg needs to go into a slot near what was the robot's waist. This fully secures the cephalothorax, so now the abdomen can be tabbed in just below the robot's chest, though getting it into its intended slot can be a chore because it's a little bit behind where the tab naturally wants to go. At this point, the legs need to be bent right back at the knees such that the calves peg firmly into the backs of the thighs, allowing the feet to then be swung into the underside of the abdomen. It's recommended to plug his gun onto the peg at the end of the abdomen at this point, since the legs will be in the way once they're closed up, with the pointed kneecaps ending up as his chunky spinnerettes. Transformation is complete, but his circular saw accessory can also be tabbed into the underside of the spider for storage. The main downside to this spider is that, while Blackarachnia's abdomen closes up nicely, there's a visible gap on Tarantulas, through which his pearlescent green lower legs can be clearly seen. Getting him back into robot mode is equally smooth and simple, but I have found that one arm is prone to popping off its bicep mushroom peg when untabbed from the cephalothorax. This can be solved by opening the spiders head as the first step, since it's the softer plastic of the legs that allows the joint to separate so easily. Probably the most frustrating thing about the arms, though, is that they don't clip into place in robot mode... so let's talk articulation...
By and large, robot mode has all the fantastic articulation I've come to expect from contemporary TransFormers toys... but some of it just doesn't feel right. The head is on a ball joint, but offers barely any tilt, and will only reluctantly rotate a full 360° due to the bulbous back rubbing up against his collar. The shoulders can easily rotate a full 360°, but can't quite manage 90° out to the sides before the spider legs start clashing with the torso or the backpack. Most frustratingly, since the shoulder transformation joints don't clip into the chest, he ends up with a sort of reverse butterfly joint, and it's significantly looser than the articulation joints, which can really take the fun out of posing him. He has a rotation joint at both ends of his biceps, just like Blackarachnia, and his claw is on the 'elbow' joint, which offers the standard 90° bend. His waist technically has a full 360° range - and is wholly separate from the transformation joint just below the chest - but the bottom of the backpack butts up against the hips, restricting the waist to a little over 90°. Similarly, the hips can kick 90 ° forwards and out to the sides, but back only about 45° before they butt up against his backpack. He has unrestricted hip rotation, double-jointed knees for transformation, and the now-standard ankle tilts offer just over 90°. In addition to this, and thanks to transformation, his feet can tilt forward/backward through about 180°. This all sounds great... and I'm happy to say that none of the joints are exactly floppy... but they're certainly very 'floaty' - there's little resistance where it's most needed, so any attempt at adjusting his upper body pose while he's standing on a surface invariably results in the legs sagging. While the spider legs only have one ball joint each, and those individual joints are fairly loose, he's well able to stand if all of them are arranged such that they make contact with the ground. The moment any number of them are removed from actively supporting him, the others become steadily more inclined to sag. On the upside, even at full extension, the legs keep Tarantulas fractionally off the ground, even allowing clearance for his saw accessory. The strange thing is that the ball joints here don't seem to have as much range as Blackarachnia's, and I've had trouble getting any satisfying 'action' poses out of Tarantulas in his beast mode. If just the front pair of legs had been given a second ball joint, at the base, that alone would have allowed for some more dynamic spider-mode posing.
I'm very glad to have picked up this figure - it's great to finally have a
unique Tarantulas in my collection. It's certainly an improvement on the original, and the engineering is a hell of a lot less fussy than Kingdom Blackarachnia... but, to be honest,
it feels cheap. Not flimsy, exactly, but joints are
less than optimal, some parts have a nasty habit of
popping off their mushroom pegs through normal handling, while others
either struggle to tab in cleanly or don't tab in at all
securely. The paintwork is wastefully applied and does little to improve on the look of the bare plastic. Both the engineering and the plastic quality just feels... off somehow, so the
experience of handling, posing and transforming Tarantulas is
ultimately unsatisfying. I already didn't foresee myself buying
much of the upcoming Legacy toyline but,
if this one is anything to go by, I may end up acquiring even less than I'd anticipated... And if
this is a sign of things to come from Hasbro, there's a good chance that
Legacy will be
the final nail in the coffin for my adult collecting of official
TransFormers toys. That said, I've preordered Legacy TransMetals Megatron... I'll have to keep an eye out for early reviews to see whether I end up cancelling that one due to QC concerns.
No comments:
Post a Comment