Posts tagged with "waspinator" - 1
Posted January 12, 2022 at 10:36 pm

Thrilling 30 Waspinator was pretty good!  A very good Waspinator!  Perfect, even, if you let the foggy haze of "i last touched this thing when I put it on a shelf five years ago" take over your cognition.   And it helps if you bought the expensive Japanese-convention-exclusive version with actual paint on it.  And if you didn't care that its knees couldn't bend more than ten degrees.  Or that its wings couldn't point upwards in robot mode without some fussing, or that his eyes were a glassy spooge color, or that he was weirdly a mechanical wasp of some sort, not organic, or--

Yeah, we're in Transformers' years of diminishing returns, sure.  Taking characters/toys you were pretty pleased with and doing them just a little bit better, just better enough, to realize the older one was GARBAGE actually!  THROW THAT OLDER TOY IN A BIN AND FORGET IT DOWNSTAIRS FOREVER.

That, sure, but also sometimes there's some new things that you like that you hadn't considered, like, hey, what if we sculpt Waspinator's wasp mode after an actual wasp?  It changes the eye shapes on his chest (making him less cartoon accurate), but it's actually pretty neat!  I like that!  And a wasp's stripes on its ass aren't actually a cartoonish set of perfectly horizontal stripes, so what if we shaped them more organically?  That's also neat!  I like that.

And you know what's GREAT???  Every single Waspinator until now has cast his upper shoulders in nylon plastic because they're always balljoints, and balljoints work better if they have a little texture and sturdiness to them.  So, nylon.  But you can't paint nylon with factory paint, so Waspinator never before could have had the big yellow circles on his shoulders that he did in the cartoon.  But Kingdom Waspinator's shoulders are finally not balljointed!  They're universal joints with regular plastic!  And so at long last, the big yellow shoulder circles.  Phew.

Also, the now-standard waist articulation, useful knees, and ankle tilts are also pretty helpful.

There are some things the original still does better: I miss the flip-out stinger in the singer gun.  New Kingdom Waspy's stinger gun is just the solid yellow piece with the weapon detailing lightly sculpted into the underside.  But that's not a huge deal because I like leaving that weapon stowed so as to keep the striped butt portion intact.  

And maybe you'd like him as big as he used to be?  Maybe.  I'm fine with Waspinator being shorter.  He shouldn't be a tall deluxe.  (aka the size all deluxes used to be but now sometimes some of them are shorter for scaling)  

Kingdom Waspinator is a good Waspinator!  They actually paint his head!  I mean, I had the fancy Japanese convention one for that reason, but this one cost like a third what that one did, and everyone can buy it not just a few thousand people, so.  That seems nicer.

When does Terrorsaur get here so I can do a Kingdom Predacon groupshot, huh?

(original retail version thrilling 30 waspinator pictured in the comparison photo, not the fancy japanese convention one with paint)

Posted June 1, 2016 at 2:15 am

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.

Posted December 14, 2013 at 11:30 pm

Man, Waspinator is the one guy in this wave of Generations Deluxes that is always hard to find!  He was missing when I got the other three in Austin (no worries, he was bought up by the dude who sent me there), he was the lone member of the wave when I found them yesterday, and there was just one lone Waspy remaining when I finally found him this afternoon.  He's not shortpacked or anything -- there's two of everyone in each case, and most places seemed to have multiple cases.  Folks are just buyin' up Waspinators and leaving everyone else.  

In your face, G1!

When folks learn we're getting new toys of old Beast Wars guys, they often wonder why.  It's an understandable viewpoint if thought about in the abstract -- I mean, usually fans want modern reimaginings of characters who are from Before Articulation, and Waspinator is definitely on the After side of that wavefront.  Usually folks want new toys of old dudes just to get those dudes with articulation, and Waspy's original toy doesn't fall short there.  

But once you get the original (well, mine's the Japanese release with bright green shoulders instead of pea green) next to the new one, you realize, oh, hey, Hasbro/Takara's gotten a lot better at things that aren't articulation in these past nigh-20 years.  Next to the new Waspinator, old Waspinator looks like someone blindly put him together out of mud.  Increased show-accuracy aside, new Waspy is just much more crisp and solid and visually interesting.  He's got a lot more going on.

Waspinator's lost his spring-loaded missile launching (he still has the stinger gun though) while picking up a wing-flap gimmick.  Pull on the lever on his back and they either swing forward or clap together, depending on how you have your wings placed into the balljoints.    He's also lost the head-swapping "mutant head" gimmick, but I wouldn't be surprised if the "robot" head exists in the tooling somewhere so they can pump out a Buzz Saw redeco in the future.  

Waspinator also transforms a little differently.  Instead of transforming Waspinator's robot legs into some amazingly oversized wasp legs, the legs instead try to hide themselves underneath the insect mode.  Well, "try."  They're pretty obvious under there, because they're actual robot legs, but they do run along the contour of the body.  It's also better, I think, than trying to do it the old way.  I prefer the insect legs to look like insect legs, even if they're sprouting out of robot parts.  

He's basically a perfect Waspinator toy, if what you're looking for is a toy of Waspinator-the-character, not toy-that-will-become-Waspinator-the-character.  But if you'd rather the latter, then you probably already have that one.  

Like the other Deluxes from this wave, Waspy comes with a comic book issue that features him.  It's not a great issue, but hey it's a comic book, and I'm sort of happy that Waspinator has been inserted into this continuity.  It's fun to see guys like Jhiaxus and Optimus Prime interact with him.  And since Wheelie's in there, too, it's not like Waspinator's the guy with the most annoying speech gimmick.  

Posted August 4, 2013 at 9:16 pm
I tell you what, I did not care a lot about Megatron's new stealth bomber body when it was introduced in IDW's first ongoing Transformers title.  I mean, I didn't hate it.  It just kind of existed.  It was  undoubtedly a thing, just not a thing I gave a lot of thought about.  And it had a big M on his forehead, which I'm not sure if I love or hate for its goofiness.

But then Hasbro decided not only to make a toy of it, but to also commission of comics about the toys they were making to include in the packaging.  And so we got this amazing comic book both written and illustrated by Nick Roche.  I wish Nick Roche would write more.  Hell, I wish he would draw more.  .... while he writes.  He also both wrote and drew Spotlight: Kup, which is another fantastic Transformers story, easily one of the best.  The connect between what the story wants to do and what it actually does is strong.  Not an inch is wasted.

You might roll your eyes at a "Spotlight: Megatron" issue because, yeah, oh boy, FINALLY, there's gonna be a focus on Megatron, leader of the Decepticons, ABOUT TIME, but the comic book lives up to and exceeds your expectations.  We see Megatron returning to life in a new body amidst his crumbling army, and we see how we begins to build that army back up again.  He has a way of things, a formula, and center to that formula is Starscream.  However, Starscream's as much in shambles as the rest of the Decepticons, and so Megatron literally spends the issue beating Starscream back into his usual self again.  And Jesus God, is it slashy, and not in a kind way.  By issue's end, you have a perfect idea of how Megatron's brain works.  It's brutal, but amazingly executed.

ANYWAY NOW I CARE A BUNCH ABOUT THIS PARTICULAR MEGATRON BODY I GUESS.  Thanks, comic.  Stupid excellent storytelling.

Stealth Megatron is a Deluxe.  This means he's on the small size for towering over much of your collection as he should, but there's a Starscream who's arriving on pegs at the same time who is just about the right size relative to him.  Legends Starscream is also an IDW comics design, but a discarded one that was never used for Starscream himself (just Thundercracker).  Also, this Starscream comes with a tiny Waspinator partner/weapon.  I'm just piling on the reasons to own these things, aren't I.  And so I've been having my Deluxe Megatron smack my Legends Starscream around my desk since Megatron arrived in the mail.  They're a good pair.

Despite Stealth Megatron's Deluxeness, he's pretty meaty.  His arms have a great mass to them, and he just looks like this intimidating chunk of dude who could mess you up... so long as you don't put him next to anybody else in his size class.  He transforms by bunching up into this pentagon-shaped thing, and then you tear his arm cannon in half and plug them into the ends for wings.  It's a little complicated and messy the first time you try it, but on the second tries and beyond it gets pretty simple.  The learning curve is fairly short.

And of course the comic book comes with it.  If you don't own the comic book, pick up the toy just to read it, dammit.  (Or here it is on Comixology.)
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