General Sea Clamp

Allegiance: Predacon
Size: Voyager (comes in a 5-pack with General Cicadacon, General Ramhorn, Predacon Tarantulas, and Ravage)
Difficulty of Transformation to Robot: Easy
Difficulty of Transformation to Torso: Medium
Color Scheme: Dull gray, moderately pale red, and some light milky gray, silver, black, light orange, very dark purple, and light lime green
Individual Rating: 8.4

(NOTE: Because this is a repaint, this is not a full-blown review. This mainly covers any changes made to the mold and the color scheme, and merely compares it to Combiner Wars Silverbolt. For a review on the mold itself, read the review of Combiner Wars Silverbolt here.)

    Most of the homages in this boxset are stretches considering the source material, but Sea Clamp is definitely the biggest stretch-- compare the above pics of the toy with Sea Clamp's original toy. The only callbacks to Sea Clamp's original design are four leg-like gray "dashes" on the lower arms that look a bit like lobster legs in vehicle mode, along with a gray paint app around the cockpit and along the nosecone that look a little like the head and antennae shape of a lobster. Pretty much everything else is more of a loose homage to the Tripredacus Council member seen in "The Agenda, Part I" in the Beast Wars show, with similar colors and head shape. It's a bit odd that Sea Clamp of all of them is the biggest toy, though, given that in the show he seemed like the smallest. (Then again, I guess that's another small nod to the original Tripredacus toy.) Like the other "original Tripredacus" members in this set, Sea Clamp's color scheme is mostly a fairly pale red that's honestly a rather boring shade. His other main color is a dull shade of gray, which contrasts with the red decently I suppose, but itself isn't an exciting color either. This doesn't make for an attractive color scheme, particularly in vehicle mode-- I really wish they had gone for Sea Clamp's original toy colors, here. Fortunately there are a fair number of paint apps that aren't just those two colors. There's a pretty good amount of silver-- on lines on the side of the nosecone, on the tailfin, on the weapon port on the nosecone front, and some silver paint on the lower robot legs and parts of the robot chest. The plastic counterpoint to this silver-- visible pretty much solely in robot mode-- is a light milky gray, which unfortunately is that really boring shade of the color. I wish FunPub had made the shade a bit more metallic or something to get it to stand out more. There's also some black and very dark purple along the sides of the legs-- mostly for the Predacus torso mode, which really help those pieces pop, at least. As minor accent colors, there's some orange used on Sea Clamp's lower legs, cockpit windows, and robot eyes, and some light green on the backside of his shoulders (again, mostly for torso mode).
    Sea Clamp has a new headsculpt for his robot mode, which is fairly spot-on to the show model, though the eyes aren't quite as sunken-in. It's definitely an ugly head, but intentionally ugly-- the crest in the middle of the head and face is odd, but certainly unique, and he's got a mild scowl on his face. It's also fairly proportional, though given the mold's construction, he doesn't have the hunchback he did on the show. Other than the headsculpt, Sea Clamp has the same changes made to the mold as Scattershot, but no other changes specifically made for this incarnation.
 

Predacus (Combination of Cicadacon, Ramhorn, Ravage, Tarantulas, and Sea Clamp)

Allegiance: Predacon
Individual Rating: 8.6

    The combined form for the five toys in the boxset-- named "Predacus" this time around and not "Tripredacus", since there's 5 members instead of 3-- is certainly a more solid-looking combiner, mold-wise, than the original Tripredacus, in the arms in particular. There's a wonderful headsculpt just for the gestalt mode, which is pretty much as close as FunPub could get to the original Tripredacus headsculpt given the size dimensions of the chamber that the head has to fit into for the other modes. It even has the purple antennae piece that is a separate, movable piece! I love the utterly monstrous look of the head, but there are a few definite differences between it and the original Tripredacus' head-- the antennae is significantly shorter, the head is painted silver instead of white, and the lower portion of the head is a bit wider than the top, which wasn't the case in the original. I do love how well they replicated the eyes, the purple lines on the toy, and even some light green bits. That said, my complaint with Predacus as a whole is similar to my complaint with most of the rest of the set, and that's that the molds just don't fit him that well. Forget the whole "5-bot instead of 3-bot combiner" thing, the colors are completely different, with the top being mostly a rather bland red and gray (though the dark purple, orange, and black paint apps on the chest look pretty good and help to break up the chest some, and shares at least a few minor details with Tripredacus' chest). Ravage and Tarantulas are both black-ish, which works color-wise as the legs and helps to "separate" them from the "main" three components. I do like that color separation, but the colors just aren't remotely similar to Tripredacus, and I really REALLY wish FunPub had colored the Tripredacus members like their original toys. (Of note is that, of course, given that these are Combiner Wars toys, you can swap appendages, but above is the "recommended" configuration, which works better as if you make Ravage and/or Tarantulas arms, it sort makes the color scheme less cohesive.)

    I have the same general comments for both Sea Clamp and Predacus-- the molds themselves are great, and the new headsculpts are pretty good, too. However the molds themselves bear VERY little resemblance to their originals, and when you add in color schemes that also have no resemblance to the original-- even if I get the train of thought behind "show colors" for the Tripredacus members-- it makes the toy look basically nothing like the original except the headsculpts. It just doesn't work, especially for expensive BotCon pieces. You can really tell this idea was "shoehorned" in when Hasbro mandated FunPub change their set to mostly Combiner Wars molds, because so few of those molds work for Beast Wars characters. As such, this is one of my least favorite BotCon sets-- all the more a shame since, as of this writing (10/18), this has been the last BotCon.
 

Reviews by Beastbot

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