Phil's Beast Wars Razorbeast &
Beast Wars Neo Randy Review


Beast Wars Razorbeast

Razorbeast is a Warthog. At the time of Beast Wars development The Lion King was a recent release and Pumbaa the Warthog was a popular character in the that so it made sense for BW to have a Warthog (similarly Dinobot and the Raptors in Jurassic Park) Razorbeast had 4 legs each attached to his body by a limited ball joint. No other parts of the beast move. The dominant colour on the beast is a reddish brown, with black fur down the head and back.

TF: Flipchanger. Pulling back on the tail causes the sides of the beast to fold out, the head to fold under the beast revealing the robot head, and the beast legs to extend out the back of the toy. From here the arms unpeg from the sides of the toy.

His robot mode exposes a more sandy brown on the upper robot limbs and the lower chest, while the head is the same reddish brown as before. He's the BW basic standard for articulation - ball joints at knees, hips, shoulders and elbows plus neck. The head is molded to take a lightpipe, but like all the early BW basics it's disabled by using an opaque piece of plastic and the eyes are painted.

Like all the BW basics he has a concealed weapon. In his case it's in the black piece of fur on the robot's back. Remove it and flip out a dual cannon. This can either be hand held or - in a nice touch - reattached to his back and fired over his head.

Overall: Simple, effective and done well. I look at these BW basics and rarely see anything really special but they're all perfectly decent toys. No feature that doesn't work or isn't implemented quite right, they all TF ok, they all look like beasts and they all have decent articulation. We didn't know how lucky we were.


Beast Wars Neo Randy

In nearly 10 years of writing toy reviews I've never had to talk about GPS before. But I will here. (and I don't mean the Global Positioning System !)

Randy is Neo toy C-34 and is also part of VS-34 with Crazybolt - the rather fetching Iguanus recolor.

Randy is a basic colour swap. The sandy brown is now white. The reddish brown is gold. And that's where the trouble started for me. I got my brand new Randy and tried to pull him out the packaging. Off came his leg and with it a sizeable proportion of one side of the beast. Randy had fallen prey to GPS - Gold Plastic Syndrome. A certain sort of gold plastic used in toys has a tendency to break easily. Amongst the toys affected are Bristleback, Black Zarak, G2 Slingshot, Thunderclash, BW Grimlock & Armada Superbase Op have all had plastic breaking reported by various members of the hub. As it is the gold looks a little silly on a beast ! So maybe a slightly different choice of colour may have been in order.

I've got a 2nd on the way. That'll be cut out of it's packaging !


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