Beast Wars TransMetals 2 Blackarachnia

(Femme-Bot Friday #70)

I have a bit of a history of buying toys that I once professed to hate. Probably the best example of this is Lio Convoy, about whom my feelings changed very dramatically and for no reason I can readily recall. He - and his gorgeous black repaint - seemed to open the floodgates, though, leading to me buying BotCon 2001's Universe Arcee, a repaint of the Beast Wars TransMetals version that appeared a couple of years before.

That, naturally, led me to seek out the mainline original, a much-maligned toy in its own right, both because of its wasteful transformation and the ridiculously un-robotic looking, bikiki-wearing robot mode. TransMetals was, after all, the point in the Beast Wars toyline where it started to go completely crazy, in preparation for the nightmarish distortions of Beast Machines... But I think I've already proven that I consider Blackarachnia such a fun character that at least one of almost every iteration is worth acquiring... How bad could this one be?

Beast Wars Metals Airrazor

(Femme-Bot Friday #38)

Yes, you read that correctly - I had to double-check the box, instructions and bio card to be certain but, for no obvious reason, Beast Wars Metals Airrazor has a double-R in her name. For the sake of simplicity (and because I'm more used to typing a single R in her name) I'm going to call her Airazor throughout. That's not the strangest thing about the BWM version of one of my all-time favourite femme-bots, though. The strangest part is that, since she and Tigatron were imprisoned by the Vok at the point when the quantum surge hit, she never had a TransMetals form in the TV show, though she did in an incomplete 3H Productions comic.

I've seen plenty of photos of this figure over the years and it never really lit my candle in any way, shape or form, despite my fondness for the character, because the vast majority of TransMetals toys seemed to be a bit on the rubbish side, and the fact that she was repurposed into Armada - largely a junkpile of poorly-designed toys - kept her off my radar.

...Buuuut... Times change, I started this Femme-Bot Friday feature, and I figured it'd be worth picking up the first ever TransFormers mold that was designed to be a canonical femme-bot (the original BW Airazor wasn't designed to be any specific gender, and the original Blackarachnia doesn't count as she's just a repaint of Tarantulas). I picked up the Japanese version largely because it was available fairly cheaply on eBay, but I've since realised there are some significant differences to the US/European version, so I'm very glad I chose this one over the Hasbro version.

3H BotCon 2001 Universe Arcee

(Femme-Bot Friday #26)

Once in a while I get a bee in my bonnet about a particular mold, or just a particular iteration of a particular mold... Especially if that iteration is an exclusive. For example, having spent many years thinking Beast Wars II Lio Convoy was the most ridiculous TransFormers creation in all history, I suddenly decided it was awesome and set about collecting as many instances of the mold as I could (currently the original and black versions of both the Robot Masters mold and the Beast Wars II version... Flash Lio Convoy I haven't bothered with thusfar because he looks rather like he's made of sparkly wee).

The latest example of this strange mania is the Beast Wars TransMetals version of Blackarachia which, thankfully, has only two iterations. One was the mass release in the TransMetals toyline... The other was this limited edition (1200 pieces, according to TFWiki.net) from BotCon 2001, back in the days when it was run by 3H Enterprises...