It’s Scorponok month, so I guess its a good time to review one of our TFOTM’s toys.Presenting: BEASTWARS SCORPONOK
Scorponok, one of the original members of Megatron’s Darkside crew. He was one of the predacons who stole the Golden Disk artifact from the Cybertron archives during the Beast Wars era.
Review
I will review Scorponok in three categories:
- Sculpt (Form and Color)
- Articulation (Movable Parts and how can it be moved)
- Fun Factor (How did I enjoy it)
Sculpt
Beast Mode
As his name suggests, his alternate mode is a scorpion. The scorpion is around 6 inches long from head to base of the tail, with a 3 and a half inch bodywidth while it pincers adds a full 3 inches to its length giving it a total of 9 inches in length. Add the tail and you get a full 14 inch of scorpion on you hands.
The sculpt of the scorpion is very simple. Not too much details except for bumps on the pincers and a few muscle linings.
The body of the scorpion is painted black with a few red parts for legs and muscles. The eyes are painted red and so is the tip of the tail, creating an aggresive look for the arachnid’s main weapon. Its pincers are colored gray along with his mandibles.
Robot mode:
Robot mode follows the same color scheme as the scorpion except the legs share the same color with pincers.
Like all Beast Wars toys, Scorponok comes with a mutant head. The mutant head is more of a mask that splits open in the middle to show Scorponok’s true face.
The sculpt for the Robot is ok, not overtly detailed except for the pincers, but the show character itself isn’t really detail heavy so I guess its an alright translation from TV to toy.
Articulation
Scorponok is pretty well articulated with ball-jointed hips, dual jointed shoulders and arms and pin joints for feet and knees. The tail and pinchers are also articulated.
Unfortunately, because of its large scorpion tail, the toys suffers a bit from balance issues though the toy can still be posed simply standing up or crounching a bit.
Fun Factor
The toy has two gimmicks. First of is Cyber Bee… yes the little spybot is included in this toy. Cyberbee is part of Scorponok’s right pincer and using a small switch on the toy you can launch the bee to do some heavy duty spying.
When the bee is deployed it stretches out from its curved position and displays more of the yellow and black trademark of a bee on its thorax.
Another gimmick has to do with the tail. The tail of scorponok has a small plastic nub that when pushed, forces the tail to move forward and backward creating a stabbing motion with the tail.
There is still something I’d like to point out. I don’t know if its just the toy I got or this is a problem of Scorponok, but his parts are aften dislodged from being secured especially when in robot mode. (To ensure that the toy remains in one form, some of its parts contains pegs that can be inserted into holes within the toy locking the pose and securing the parts.) This becomes a major problem since while posing and/or playing you may accidentally dislodge the part, forcing you to connect them again. This happens more in robot form than in beast form.
Overall
Simple toy design. Alright look. A bit lousy on the way the parts are secured. I give it a B (score between B- and B+)
Thanks to Fero McPigletron for lending me his Scorponok for the review.