Phil's Beast Wars Transmetal & Fox Kids Transmetal Waspinator Review

Transmetal Waspinator

Waspinator - like Rhinox and Airazor - got a Transmetal toy without it appearing in the show. Like the other TMs liberties were taken with the colour scheme for making this new toy, but here it just doesn't work - it isn't Waspinator. All 4 wings are a transparent blueish green. The legs and antennae are bright red. The eyes and the abdomen are gold chrome. The rest is black. I look at this and it doesn't say Waspinator to me. One solution to this problem would be to make the black green and the red black (and perhaps the clear green a clouded clear colour) A second solution is suggested by the vehicle mode though ! The wings move - the front upwards from the vertical (and back down again but no further) The rear wings are on ball joints. The front two pairs of legs have a ball joint at the body and the second elbow, the back legs bend down at the point they get beyond the abdomen. The mandibles move to the side.

TF to vehicle mode: Fold the plane nose and cockpit out from under the head and straighten both out. Fold the rear wings up and turn the paint lined sides in. Turn the end of the front wings back at the end till they meet the rest of the front wing, then fold them back along the sides of the body. Fold the rear legs under the vehicle, and fold the remaining legs under and back where possible. Resulting vehicle is a plane, a fighter jet - itself a homage to the episode where Waspinator gets possessed by the ghost of Starscream. Now if you'd made the black into grey, the red into blue (or maybe kept as red) the green into clear blue and the gold into metallic red this would have been a decentish Starscream tribute. If they did it now I'd buy it.

TF: Fold both wings back to their beast mode form. From jet mode fold the robot legs out from under the jet and bring them under the jet's nose. Remove the stinger from under the tail. Fold the beast head and robot legs down toward the abdomen, which should expose the robot head. You'll need to wiggle and bend the parts around to get it looking right but the robot head should be able to look out over the top of the beast head.

The robot has BW Waspinator's mutant face - together with a green lightpipe lighting up the eyes. He bends at the knee, ball jointed hips & and neck, shoulders move back and forth and to the sides, there's a bicep swivel and bending elbows. Stinger can be hand held or mounted on either side of either forearm. The only downside to this mode is that the front two pairs of legs are a bit all over the place with no obvious place to store them.

Overall: I think there's a good toy trying to get out here. Shame about the colour of it.


Fox Kids Transmetal Waspinator

Fortunately when it came to recolour it for the Fox Kids line a stroke of genius was had - the old BW Buzzsaw (Waspinator repaint) colour scheme was used. If they'd have done this for other TM's we could have had a TM Tigertron and TM Blackarachnia too ! Black becomes yellow, red, an orange/gold colour and pale green a brighter green. The metallic gold becomes a dark metallic purple. Near perfect. My only gripes - and they are tiny - is that the lightpipe is painted over (any ides how to remove that ?) and that I associate the robot face more with Buzzsaw to differentiate the two of them !

Fabulous repaint. There's a further unrelease repaint with purple legs and clear red wings that would have formed part of a Universe VS packs. Seach the net for images.


Email Philip

Phil's TF Review Page