Femme-Bot Friday #90
These days, even now I'm back in full-time work, impulse buys of TransFormers toys are few and far between, because my abiding impression is that overall quality has dropped substantially versus toys from a few years ago. Where a new figure is a remake of an earlier Generations toy - especially something like the Kingdom Waspinator mold feeling like a cheap knockoff of the 30th Anniversary toy - I'm even less inclined to pick up the newer version.
However, Legacy Inferno was the first new toy of the Beast Wars character since the 1997 original, which I've never owned, and Antagony was a BotCon 1998 exclusive repaint as a Femme-Bot, which I've also never owned... The new toy appeared to be such a hopeless simplification of the original, losing most of its impressive features, so Inferno was among the majority of Legacy toys that I skipped.
And yet... when I happened upon Generations Selects Legacy: Evolution Antagony - ostensibly a limited edition repaint by Hasbro themselves - at a branch of Game inside a Sports Direct in Eastbourne, that old impulse arose. Could this be another case of buyer's remorse? Let's take a look...
The Generations Selects packaging gets more repulsive every time I see it. I half expect to find a pair of shoes inside the box, rather than a 'limited edition' toy, and that's coming from someone who was a member of the official TransFormers Collectors' Club from 2007 till they were shut down, and who received plenty of exclusives contained in plain, beige postal boxes just like this. I'll give them this: the monochrome print is quite stylish and well-designed, but uncoated beige cardstock lowers the tone, and makes it look less special than the mainline toy boxes, especially given the vibrant colour and unique art on all the Legacy boxes.
Nevertheless, it does the job... and, not being a window box means you only have the wireframe image of the toy to judge what it's going to be like when you take it out of the box... which probably works in its favour.
Beast Mode:
One of the things I liked about some of the original Beast Wars toys was that they tried - to a certain extent - to authentically represent the creatures they were based upon. While certain artistic license was employed with many of them, and sacrifices inevitably had to be made for transformation and/or gimmicks, there was always an element of accuracy, overall, to the beast modes. Some were more cartoonish or stylised than others (Scorponok being a prime example), but none were so stylised as to be unrecognisable as specific, real-world animals (except BW Neo Moon, perhaps, who looked more like a Pokemon in both modes). Beast Wars Inferno - and thereby the BotCon repaint Antagony - used the robot's legs as parts of the front and rear legs of the ant mode, so some their segments were disproportionately large, and some of its joints had incongruous protrusions, but it was otherwise a fairly tidy representation of an ant, in mostly translucent red plastic.
The Legacy version presents a curious dichotomy: the body of the ant is, at first glance, well-proportioned and nicely sculpted... however, while the abdomen of the original was a completely enclosed unit, this one leaves the robot's legs exposed on the underside. While the robots arms are better disguised, the insect legs are a step backward from the original. They're barely articulated - the only joints are where they join the thorax - and, while the sculpted detailing is generally pretty good, the feet make it look like the ant is wearing tiny shoes. They present a far more stable base for standing the figure, to be fair, since the original used ball joints which, as far as I can tell, were pretty loose from the get-go.
Most of the figure appears to be unpainted black plastic, with a softer, matte-finish material used for his legs and antennae, while a more rigid, glossier plastic is used for the head, thorax and abdomen shell. Her mandibles are molded in a pale purple, while the eyes are translucent pink/purple insets in the head. The only paintwork here is a rather blobby pattern in metallic pink, on the back of the thorax and abdomen.
Gimmick-wise, this mold is a mixed bag. The mandibles are articulated, but not spring-loaded, and they no longer feature a missile launcher embedded in his mouth. The antennae on this version are separately articulated, which makes for a more expressive ant. Curiously, what's included with this mold as a weapon was originally thrusters built into the abdomen. Due to the way the robot's legs transform, that's no longer possible here, so its only 'storage' option is mounting it on the thorax which, naturally, looks ridiculous.
Robot Mode:
Here's where Legacy pulls its usual trick of delivering an update that is substantially less impressive and innovative than the (almost 30 year old) toy it's based upon. On the original toy, the ant legs attached to the arms would fold back against the forearms, while those on the legs became toes and shin armour. Here, one set of legs is attached to the robot's wrists and can only spin around, another is attached to the backs of the biceps, and the other is attached at the robot's waist. All of them clash with each other as you try to pose the arms, and the shin armour and toe pieces here are just sculpted detail on the leg and foot, respectively. On Inferno these details were painted but Antagony is bare black plastic almost everywhere.
Aside from the hints of purple plastic here and there, the only instances of paint are on her upper arms - a dark gunmetal panel, split between the two parts, with a Predacon insignia stamped in purple on the right shoulder - the front of her pelvis and the inner faces of her abdomen... the latter of which, to be fair, are thoroughly covered with silver paint, with dashes of yellow in the slotted circular details. This is almost certainly where the paint budget went, but this being a supposedly limited edition special, one would tend to expect a little more effort. Normally, a black repaint brings something new and impressive in terms of accent colours - witness almost every Nemesis Prime/Scourge toy ever - but this one is... mostly unpainted black plastic. Worse than that, though, the extensive use of black plastic doesn't even disguise the hollowed out thighs or the exposed mushroom pegs of their swivel joints.
As mentioned above, Antagony's weapon is a representation of what was the jet engine gimmick on the original Beast Wars toy. It was a poor representation of Inferno's gun - the original having been incorporated into the beast mode's mandibles - so it's an equally poor representation of Antagony's, even though it's cast in a nice translucent purple plastic, with a coating of the dark gunmetal paint around the back of the unit. It's blast effect compatible - four 5mm ports acting as gun barrels, with an additional 5mm port on either side of the main body of the gun. Quite what one is supposed to do with those, I've no idea... and I also don't own any blast effects from the last few toylines. I can see from the detailing on the main body of the gun that they've tried to reference the CGI design from the TV show, but that was an exaggerated form of the mandibles, while this is trying to fill a dual purpose, but doesn't work well for either. It's marginally better as the jet engine but, despite the inclusion of a cutout at the back of the gun to allow it to sit directly over the hinge for the smaller abdomen shell panel, the 5mm socket is too shallow and loose to give a secure connection. Another problem is the shell itself which, due to the 'updated' transformation, is completely asymmetrical, so doesn't really work as rotor blades the way the original's did. There's one large panel, two smaller ones, and the last is tiny because it has to fit underneath the largest panel in beast mode. Sure, the whole splayed-open abdomen can rotate, as a budget-conscious nod to the original toy's geared spin feature, but the smallest panel doesn't fasten into its position parallel to the largest. This means it usually ends up slipping out of alignment, ruining the effect.
This release uses exactly the same head sculpt as Legacy Inferno, just with a metallic purple finish complementing the bulbous, light-piped red eyes. The mouth can open - the ball joint for the neck being part of the lower jaw - to show a huge dark void between her silver teeth. It's a bit of a nondescript head, but it's very much in keeping with the CGI from the Beast Wars TV show, which was an improved interpretation of the original toy. Strangely, Antagony also comes with a homage to the Beast Wars TransMetals Inferno head sculpt, which is about the only bit of bonus content in this Generations Selects package. It comes across as an evolution of the original BW Inferno head sculpt: slightly narrower, and enclosed by a pair of horned armour panels, with the bobbly forehead highlighted with metallic green paint.
There's really nothing special or innovative to this toy's transformation. The smallest bum panel rotates under the largest to make room for the legs, which compress at the knee via double-hinges. The feet fold back onto the calves, and then the abdomen pegs together around them, but leaving them visible on the underside. The ant head splits open to allow the robot head to stow and to flip out the mandibles, and the robot's arms fold in together under the thorax. After that, it's just a case of arranging the ant legs to stand her up. To be fair, it's probably more involved than the original Beast Wars toy... but the results are far less tidy.
On top of that, while its beast mode legs might be substantially more stable and capable of load-bearing, they're not as poseable. All but one pair has just one joint - where it meets the body - and the segments of each individual leg are fixed and molded. The front legs are pinned to the robot's upper arms, and so can only tilt outward or inward, while the middle legs are attached to the robot's wrists, and so will only swing forward or back. The back legs are pinned just above the robot's waist, with the first segment connecting to the rest of the leg via a mushroom peg. You'd think this would give it additional range of movement, but that first segment is designed to slot into the thorax in a particular way that doesn't allow a great deal of movement. Thankfully, it's not exactly a snug fit, so it can move... but I get the impression it's really not supposed to once transformed into beast mode... And the movement allowed by that mushroom peg really isn't much use. Just one more joint in each leg would have made the beast mode far more poseable and fun... though two more joints would have been preferable. Aside from this, the beast mode's head can tilt a little way - mainly as a side effect of transformation - while the mandibles and antennae can move a little... but the latter are pinned, where ball joints would have been far more expressive, and the former just aren't that convincing.
Robot mode, meanwhile, has all the articulation one would expect from a Voyager class figure released in the 2020s. The head is on a ball joint, both for articulation and for ease of switching between the two available heads, but it's really only the stock head that works well, since it also has the opening jaw. The shoulders can technically rotate a full 360°, but the ant legs get in the way even if the abdomen parts don't. They can swing a little over 90° out to the sides, there's the usual bicep swivel, double-jointed elbows due to transformation, and wrist rotation. The abdomen can swing up and down as well as spin, while waist rotation is only hindered by the abdomen... but that makes for quite a significant hindrance. The movement of the hips is largely unrestricted, swinging back, forward and out to the sides to most of 90°, along with thigh rotation. The knees are technically double-jointed, but not in a way that facilitates great articulation. The feet have a certain amount of backward tilt due to transformation, and about 90° inward tilt for posing but, even with the heel spur folded out, they don't offer a perfectly stable base due to the large abdomen.
Having this figure in hand, I felt quite vindicated in being unimpressed with Legacy Inferno. It's a truly mediocre mold, and Antagony is a serious let-down as a black repaint. In a lot of ways, my main reason for buying this - apart from it being on impulse, while on holiday - was that an upgrade kit for this specific repaint had been announced... and I'll get onto that on the next Femme-Bot Friday. War for Cybertron: Kingdom gave me some high hopes for future Beast Wars remakes but, on reflection, many of the ones I bought turned out disappointing. Legacy has only lowered the bar even further.
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