Once everyone found out that Grimlock was gonna be in Fall of Cybertron, of course everyone wanted him as a toy. I mean, hello. And hopefully not as a stinkin’ Deluxe! Voyager or go home, Hasbro! Well here he is, guys! Your Fall of Cybertron Voyager Class Grimlock!
And he is of agreeable size to overwhelm Shockwave and bite his hand off, yes.
He’s not quite the Grimlock of the mind’s eye, however. In fact, I think in general folks seem to be kind of disappointed in him. I think he’s all right, but let’s go over what some of these stated disappointments are.
First of all, there’s the tail. This I think is kind of unavoidable. Grimlock’s video game model has a long-ass obviously-segmented tail, similar to Transmetal Megatron’s. Now, that has to transform into robot legs somehow. The video game model got to cheat that tail away and have the legs sort of appear out of nowhere, but this is a $22 toy, so breaking the laws of thermodynamics is kind of out of the budget. What Hasbro and/or TakaraTomy decided to do was just give Grimlock real robot legs and then sort of sculpt the segmented stuff down the sides. This results in a better looking robot mode, but his dinosaur mode obviously has two legs shoved up its ass. It’s not elegant-looking.
Another thing that bothers folks is how hollow he is on the underside of the dinosaur mode. The toy needs a lot of room for the amazingly elaborate shoulder jointing to have room to maneuver, so if you look at the toy’s underside, you’ll notice a whole lot of empty space. I was kind of expecting this, especially since Animated Grimlock a few years ago had a similar deal. I suppose there could be a big clamshell deal going on with the torso, but considering how the dinosaur head and neck collapses into the back of the torso in robot mode, I dunno if that would have worked out well in both modes.
Grimlock is also not painted as much as folks hoped. He’s got gray thighs and hands when they should be black (or gunmetal gray in this case) and so he looks a little sparse. I’ll probably fix that later, myself. (Not sure if I have gunmetal gray hanging around or if I gotta go buy some.) He’s got plenty of paint everywhere else, though.
That’s what other people say about him. Here’s my positives and negatives. First of all, oy, those complicated shoulder joints count for both. First of all, they exist so that the dinosaur hind legs can bury themselves inside the torso at an angle instead of being inelegantly bolted to the sides of the torso as they are on most Grimlocks. I like that! I don’t like how this gets me into trouble. Since the jointing is so complicated, I once wormed them so far away from how they were supposed to be oriented that it was kind of rough to get them back. I also wish his sword and shield were bigger. They’re so massive in the video game, and so dinky on the toy. They’re not required to be a certain size to stow in dinosaur mode, so making them a bigger size would have been more satisfying. One thing that I do very much like are his electronic lights. They glow up real super bright in both modes. It might be a function of the LED light being red. I think I recall those glow the best. You gotta yank back and pull hard on the lever to get it to go, though.
He’s basically every Grimlock toy ever, but with a sword and shield. He transforms exactly how you expect with some few minor surprises, the end.
(And, yeah, it’s likely tyrannosauruses had feathers of some kind. Feathered t-rex remains haven’t been found, but feathered remains of their ancestors have, even as adults.)
