Nautilator is a Lobster, one of the more authentic looking Seacons. Most of his body is an aquamarine colour with the centre of the body and his claws being grey and his legs black. The legs are mostly fixed but each set of four on each side will fold under the toy as a unit. The claws raise up & down where they meet the head because they terminate in a 5mm peg which fits into a corresponding hole on the head. Unfortunately this means they can be removed and that means they can be lost so, like Overbite, many originals show up on eBay missing their most distinguishing feature. Under the head is a black lower jaw which folds down to an angle of 90 degrees revealing a 6mm peg socket in which you can mount the 6mm peg on the butt of his hand gun for an attack mode.
Nautilator's Weapons Mode involves folding down the Scramble City connector under the toy then folding back the tail and pegging the hand gun into it. This can then be used as a hand weapon by Piranacon or as a stand alone weapon when mounted on a weapons stand (See Overbite's review for details). However if I was using Nautilator as Piranacon's weapon I'd use the attach mode with the connector peg folded down as I reckon he's more fearsome with the claws facing forward. You can't replace the claws with weapons stand shafts like you can on Overbite but you can substitute one for the gun to beef up either version of the weapons mode.
To transform Nautilator into robot mode start by pulling back on the tail, then folding it back 180 degrees to become the legs. Stand with the underside of the crustacean facing forward. Fold the beast head back 180 degrees to reveal the robot head. The instructions say to fold the beast legs back at this stage but with the beast's claws there they can't move and removing them, as I outlined earlier, is the first step to loosing them. I prefer to raise them up beside the robot head. Swing the arms up and place his gun into his hand, or let him hold the gun like post from his weapons stand.
The legs on this toy are open at the front which does annoy me. He'd look much better is the waist could rotate placing the solid rounded side of the legs to the front which would also give him a function knee joint. In many way his robot mode, grey chest & upper legs, black head and aquamarine arms & lower legs, looks a little plain compared to the beast parts that hang round it. His only meaningful articulation here is his arms which raise up at the shoulders.
Nautilator can form a limb for Piranacon:
Arm mode: There's effectively two versions of the arm mode. The first is the official weapons mode with a hand instead of the gun. The second is the attack mode, with the hand again replacing the gun, and the Scramble City connector folded down under the beast. Either mode allows you to fold out the other piece containing the other 5mm peg hole at the top end of the limb and to plug his gun into it to give Piranacon some extra firepower.
Leg mode: Robot mode with the foot inserted into the peg hole on the bottom of Nautilator.
I've seen Nautilator used as an arm, a leg and the gun on various pictures and instruction sheets over the years.
Nautilator's beast mode looks great, and it's alternate attack mode makes a great weapon. However the official weapons mode and the robot mode are somewhat lacking.
Nautilator was sold in 1988 as Seacon SE3. Unlike the other Seacon limbs he was not part of the Piranacon giftset issued in the USA - that Piranacon has to use Snaptrap's gun as his gun. As a result vintage Nautilators are slightly more in demand than the other four Seacon limbs. Nautilator was sold in Japan as Masterforce Seacon D-315 Lobclaw and also appears in the Japanese D-318 King Poseidon (Piranacon) giftset. Takara would make us pay for this act of generosity to Nautilator ten years later.....
In 2010 Nautilator was reissued as part of the Generations Commemorative Series Piranacon in the states where his name becomes Decepticon Nautilator.
We can take a guess at what Nautilator would look like by looking as the other Seacons in the set and seeing how they're recoloured from the originals. The black of Nautilator's legs only appears on one other limb, Seawing , and Seawing swaps the black for white to become Terrormander so we have a start. Terrormander also has Seawing's sea green swapped for white and swaps the grey for a pearly silver. So we end up with a rather plain looking Nautilator that I'm sure would have been jazzed up with some lovely paint ops.
The following colour swaps apply for this release:
Grey becomes orange
Aquamarine becomes off white
Black becomes purple.
I hated the orange on Seawing but here I feel it works quite well. Imagine how great he'd look in the prototype colours for TFCC Overbite!
