Phil's Beast Wars Snarl,
Beast Wars II Tazmania Kid &
Robot Masters Bound Rogue Review


Beast Wars Snarl / Beast Wars II Tazmania Kid

Beast Wars Snarl & Beast Wars II Tazmania Kid are essentially the same toy, just under different names in different toylines. Snarl doesn't appear in the Japanese Beast Wars, while Tazmania Kid is C-14 or part of VS-14 with Dirge - the blue Flipchanger jet (the one that doesn't have Megatron's head !) I'll refer to the toy as Snarl throughout.

Snarl is a Tazmanian Devil, mostly in reddish brown but with a grey stripe down his back & into his tail, and on his forelimbs. The forelimbs are jointed at shoulder, elbow/knee and ankle. The jaw opens and the upper part of the head can move a bit. The back legs move only at the hip. The tail isn't articulated but has a trigger underneath it that should launch the rest of the beast forward. I say should because it didn't work on my original one ! The tail becomes the gun in robot mode so you'll need to remove it. It occurs to me a peg hole in the grey stripe in the back would have allowed the gun to be mounted in Beast Mode.

TF: Remove the tail. Fold the side panels up - they may catch on the forelegs. (There's some lovely detail only visible here on the inside of the body - there's 4 ribs molded into the panels exposed) Separate the head in half then fold out to the sides bringing with it the robot legs which are folded up the robot's back. Fold these down folding the upper jaw halves forward to form the feet and fold the heel spurs back. Fold the lower jaw down to form the robot chest. Bend the back hip panels in, and rotate the back legs round so the feet face upwards. Straighten out the robot arms and peg the gun into a forearm.

As you'll see by the last comment there's no fist. Bad sign, especially with the oversized hands he has (and an odd coincidence later ...) Standard basic articulation of ball joints at knee, hip, shoulder, elbow and neck applies but with a bonus of bending ankles and ball jointed wrists.

Overall: Decent enough. But the bust gimmick on my first one, the "head as feet" and a chronic misuse of the Snarl name (He's a Dinobot ! not anything else !) biases me against the toy.


Robotmasters Bound Rogue

Bound Rogue is a straight repaint. Dark blue for the reddish brown, cream for the grey. Odd colours. He's one of two Beast Wars toys recoloured in Robotmasters. The other - Armadillo/Psycho Orb - also suffers from having to pin the weapon into the forearm due to lack of fists. Bound Rogue also has an additional weapon - it's a gun cast in the same clear green Energon as the combining Destron weapons, but here it's been chromed in silver. It's an odd shape as what looks like the shooting end is closest to the handle and can't be faced directly forward due to the rest of the gun behind it. If the other end is meant to be facing forward then the cartridge bellow the gun hits the hand so in neither mode of handling can the gun be positioned directly forward ! I can't help wondering if he got the right weapon ! An alternate design - a longer one with nothing hanging down might have worked better !

So you get a bonus if odd weapon, and an odd colour scheme. Hmm. Not really worth bothering with. And that's what fans at the time thought leaving this on the shelf for new small BW & G1 versions and some great new Cyberjet and Flipchanger repaints. A rare RM failure.


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