Beast Wars (Reissue) Scorponok

As a Collector who didn't become a Beast Wars 'fan' until long after the toyline had ended, the myriad reissues have been a great benefit to me. Much of my BW collection was obtained via the secondary market, but Takara Tomy's Telemocha reissues back in 2007 allowed me to pick up new versions of key characters featuring more TV show-accurate paintwork, and the Beast Wars Reborn set from the previous year even included retooled parts for greater accuracy.

Hasbro's more recent reissue strategy has been haphazard at best, trickling out random figures, with a strong bias toward recycling the same old G1 molds we've seen in previous reissue lines, but the decision to reissue Beast Wars toys - in recreations of their original packaging, no less - allowed for some more direct comparisons with their contemporary output in the War For Cybertron: Kingdom toyline... and, surprisingly, some of the new toys came off worse for that comparison.

One such example, in my opinion, is Scorponok. I've covered a version of the Kingdom figure in another post, so let's take a look at the original figure... or as close as one can get outside of the secondary market.

Buzzworthy Bumblebee: Creatures Collide 4-pack

By and large, the Buzzworthy Bumblebee line has been filled with products I have been perfectly content to live without: regardless of which line the toys are derived from, they have been mostly superfluous repaints. When it comes to the boxed sets, there have been far more misses than hits. When the Worlds Collide set came along, I ended up buying the Blackarachnia figure purely because she's a Femme-Bot and it was a decent reference to the original Beast Wars toy's box art, while the other figures were reportedly a mess of loose joints.

This second 'Collides' set was, at first, marginally more interesting. I wasn't overly fussed by the scarcity of the Netflix-branded Earthrise Bumblebee toy because, having already bought Cliffjumper, I knew it wouldn't be a patch on the Classics toy from 2006... But Goldbug was another matter, because I'm quite fond of the G1 Throttlebot, and he's sufficiently distinct from Bumblebee. Similarly, I'd passed on the TV show-inspired Kingdom Scorponok figure because I was disappointed by the look of it but, now I own a reissue of the original toy in show-accurate colours, a toy-coloured repaint of the Kingdom figure was potentially a fun comparison. Skywasp was a stupid/amazing pun, and so instantly interesting, in spite of the new mold's obvious inferiority to Generations Waspinator... Which left Ransack: a repaint of the Legacy Kickback figure that's barely an improvement on the G1 original, representing one of the 'Deluxe Insecticons' which, back in the day, had a wholly unique mold that was never made available in the UK.

So, when presented with this set at a RRP of £93, I turned my nose up and avoided it, even though that breaks down as four figures for slightly less than the price of four individual Deluxes. However, seeing it cut down to £45 at GAME, it seemed like a sweeter deal... But let's see how I feel about it with the figures in-hand...

Keith's Fantasy Club Sting Thing

(Femme-Bot Friday #65)

Following the example of their first year, TFNation 2018 didn't have its own convention exclusive toy, as such. Instead, it had a small selection of 'show exclusive' figures available via vendors, and one such figure was the KFC/Big Tin Robot & Sid's Toys Sting Thing, a repaint of 2016's Scorpinator, again made available first at an overseas convention with the remainder appearing at TFNation 'exclusively', before being made available online.

When I wrote about TFNation 2018, I noted that I wasn't going to bother with this - the original is OK, but feels a little fragile and isn't really a 'must have' unless you're obsessed with having a complete collection of TransFormers microcassettes - until I read the bio and found out that Sting Thing is a Femme-Bot.

Not only am I all for Femme-Bots generally, but I'm particularly keen on the non-traditional variety, that aren't designed to resemble sexy humanoid females... So, here we go again...

RID2015/Clash of the TransFormers Paralon

One would think, given the long history of Autobot/Decepticon conflict within the TransFormers franchise, that subtitling one portion of the newest Robots in Disguise continuity "Clash of the TransFormers" would be unnecessarily excessive tautology... Yet here we are. I know nothing about Clash of the Transformers except that it consisted mainly of repaints and was supposedly exclusive to Toys'R'Us.

Carrying on my habit of randomly purchasing RID2015 figures, I picked up this repaint/retool of Scorponok for a fairly flimsy reason, even by my standards: he's a more overt Beast Wars reference than the original version of the mold. Scorponok hadn't looked particularly impressive, being another one of RID2015's bizarre beast-robot Decepticons, but with a beast mode rather than a vehicle mode... making the toy as much a tautology as the name of the subline.

But does the toy rise above this inauspicious start?

Keith's Fantasy Club Scorpinator

One of my big regrets as a TransFormers fan and collector is never making it over to a BotCon. It never stopped me acquiring any of their boxed sets that I wanted, but there's something to be said for attending the convention and picking it up in person, I think. I did manage to get to a couple of AutoAssemblies, but it wasn't till Roll Out Roll Call 2016 and the first TFNation that the idea of convention exclusive toys really took form in the UK.

While RORC obtained a load of that year's BotCon exclusives (though, again, I'd already obtained the only figure I was especially interested in), TFNation 2016 pretty much allowed a couple of their vendors to carry the exclusives, rather than having any of their own in their inaugural year (it didn't take long for them to get proper show exclusives, though).

Since I try to make a point of supporting exclusive merchandise, there were a couple of things I picked up at TFNation, one of which was this G1/Masterpiece Soundwave-compatible cassetticon, originally created by Keith's Fantasy Club as Stinger, packaged with Doubledeck, their homage to G1 Twincast. This exclusive marks the first time it's been made available on its own.

TransFormers (Movie) Scorponok

Now, I'm going to be a little bit controversial with this one... Or not, depending on how you view the movies versus the toylines. In the movie, Scorponok was never depicted as a transformer and, if he was, it seemed likely that he'd transform between an Earth vehicle and a robotic scorpion thing. Hasbro's toy, however, transformed into something approximating a bipedal robot... just not very well... So I'm basically going to ignore that as far as possible.