Beast Wars Fox Kids Repaint Waspinator
Every once in a while a cool toy comes along. Well, once in a while was a while ago.
Back in the beginning of the Beast Wars toy line Waspinator was released in his cool green and
yellow paint scheme. It was excellent. I don't have that toy. However, I did purchase the
Fox Kids repaint which was released around the same time as the Transmetals. They were made
to celebrate the moving of Beast Wars to Fox Kids. I own three of them. Dinobot, Rhinox
(both reviewed already) and Waspinator.
In beast mode, as his name would suggest, Waspinator is a giant wasp. Amazingly, if you
peg his robot arms tight enough, he can actually stand on his bug legs. An impressive feat
for an early Beast Wars figure. Most bugs weren't able to stand until the TM and TM2 line.
Of course the thing that may strike you first with the repaint is the color scheme. Instead
of being green and yellow, this Waspy is gold and a light blue. It looks kinda like someone took
a picture of Waspinator and then used the negative for the color scheme of this one. It's not
horrible, but it could have been a lot better.
Amazingly there's very little robot part showing through. If you flip him on his back you
can see his robot arms clearly, but other than that he's pretty much kibbleless. Very nice.
Transformation isn't overly hard, but pretty cool and gets the job done all right. Flip up
his robot waist, fold up his legs, unfold his arms and split his beast head and fold it down as
well. Tada, Waspinator!
Robot mode is well done, and essentially without any kibble. His beast abdomin hangs off
his butt and he has bug legs on his arms, but other than that he's done well for himself. It's
quite poseable, with ball joints everywhere except for his elbows (which is made up for with
some upper arm swivel joints). You can also remove his stinger for the standard (with early
BW stuff, like Cheetor) body parts gun. His missiles are cleverly hidden under his wings.
Very neat.
And then of course there's the mutant head phenomenon. Unlike many other mutant head
owners (Rhinox, Dinobot, Megatron, etc), Waspinator has two seperate heads instead of one
that gets covered or repositioned to form the second. Open up his chest and back pieces and
spin the thing around and tada! It's a non-Waspinator head. Actually, this head would get a
lot of use if not for the show. The more show-accurate head is really horrid looking. The
normal head, oddly enough, looks like it should be on an Autobot from G1. Weird.
All in all, Waspinator is one bad-ass bug. This is one of the best deluxes from the early
line. Sadly the original colored one is quite hard to come by these days, but the repaint
you can usually pick up for $10 - $15. If you can't find the original, this one is a worthy
substitute. If it weren't for the odd color scheme, he'd get a score of 8.
