Here is another post in our series of "i bought another beast wars toy because it was painted a little better than the beast wars toy i already have." Today's subject: LG-EX Waspinator!
Like TakaraTomy's Generations Rhinox, so too was their Waspinator heavily metallic. This didn't look nearly as weird on him, since wasps are all chitinous (I looked that up, thank you) and less leathery than rhinos. But it meant his yellows were gold, and so even though it painted his face a little better than the domestic Waspinator, I passed. I did reconsider a few times, but that version of Waspy's pretty popular and so he's hard to find on the secondary market. ... thankfully, because then this version was announced.
Bye-bye, gold! Hello, more-accurate yellow. And, important to me, they've finally painted the bee stripes on his robot head antenna. They don't tend to do that! Probably because that's a hella lotta paint operations. I mean that's... *counts* 12. Twelve paint operations spent on 1% of his overall surface area. If you've got a paint budget, you're not gonna blow it all on danged antenna. But dammit, it's appreciated. Thank you, limited-release convention exclusive!
My to-be-imminently-replaced domestic Waspinator has more differences to catalog, versus his replacement. I love the darker green around his eyes. I love the brown tusks on his cheeks. I love his mouth having yellow in it.
I do like the darker green replacing the lighter lime green plastic on his body. It makes him a more uniform color, but the additional yellow paint operations balance that out, plus it calls attention away from how made-of-robot-parts his wasp mode is. His thorax is now a homogeneous patch of dark green at a quick glance, rather than a jumble of green with some lime green biceps and fists thrown in there.
I do kinda miss the Predacon symbol that was on the domestic version's beast mode. Ah well.
Briefly, foolishly, I give my brain the luxury of believing that, yes, this is it, this is the best Waspinator, I don't need another ever again unless it's like a Combiner Limb or something. And then I remember that, oops, oh, right, they've just started making Masterpiece Beast Wars toys. In a year or several, we might have a Masterpiece Waspinator. And once again, what was once sufficient will then be insufficient.
But that's probably not for a while. I can enjoy this one until then.
ADDENDUM: There is also a redecoed Rattrap from this set, but I didn't bother getting him. Either he wasn't different enough or my current Rattrap is fine or any combination of the two.
