Back when, uh, thieves first unveiled Kingdom Blackarachnia to the world, one stolen sample came with an extra face piece for Blackarachnia that mimicked her original toy's head.  When you get stuff "borrowed" off the assembly line, you can end up with more or less pieces than will come with the final production toy, and extra parts included in the tooling for later releases are produced along with everything else, so it's no big surprise that extra face was there to grab.  But "original toy head" is a bit of a misnomer.  It resembles the toy head, sure, but it more accurately resembles the packaging art head.  

And so I am full on for Transformers Kingdom "World's Collide" Blackarachnia, because she not only has a head based on the original packaging art, but her deco leans heavily into that direction as well.  This could have been a simple original toy colors redeco, but no, this toy goes hard.  

Let's go down the list:

• Blue iridescent sheen on black areas?  Yes
• Leopard print on the boobular section?  Yes
• Three boomerang shapes painted on each claw?  Yes
• Pale yellow/greenish face (instead of the toy's white)?  Yes
• Black harpoon instead of gold?  Yes

It's all very satisfying!  I mean, strict toy colors would have been interesting enough, honestly, but this feels like a very worthy deeper-dive.  The original Beast Wars packaging art gave us a glimpse into an alternate universe of these characters before Mainframe's cartoon series took them in a different direction, and it's good to see a window back into that world.  

Blackarachnia comes in the Target-exclusive World's Collide 4-pack, of which they produced maybe six.  Four of them are on eBay.  

Hey, did Masterpiece Blackarachnia pass you by cuz it was like 100 bucks?  Did you wish you could get essentially the same toy for $20?  WELL HEY.

'Cuz Kingdom Blackarachnia is a $20 version of the Masterpiece.  That's such an apt description of it that honestly the rest of this review is just noise.  It's the Masterpiece, but a little smaller, with fewer pieces, and with less paint.  It's not got quite the articulation of the Masterpiece, as it's without a lot of the joints in the arms and torso -- it's also one of the very few War for Cybertron Trilogy toys that doesn't have waist rotation -- but again, it's the $20 version.  It transforms the same.  Pieces go the same place.  It looks like it's borrowing from the same CAD files.  

Kingdom Blackarachnia's a smaller and much less expensive toy, so it does lose a few more things besides articulation.  On the Masterpiece, the torso flipped around so that one side was robot tummy and the other side was spider thorax, but Kingdom Blackarachnia's robot torso is just spider thorax.   Her robot head's a tiny bit smaller, proportionally, probably because there's less room to stash it.  

But it does do one thing nicer than the more expensive one -- besides, you know, the simplified transformation making it a more fun toy to convert.  Beast Wars characters in Kingdom try to have more realistic animal sculpts, and sometimes those are allowed to supercede the importance of robot mode accuracy.  And so Blackarachnia has textured spider abdomen on her thighs.  They much better integrate into beast mode this way, rather than having a big ol' spider abdomen cap flanked by two... thighs.  

It also helps the beast mode that there's not the hourglass deco right there on top.  On real black widows, that's underneath!  But it's on top in the cartoon, so it was on top in the Masterpiece.  But Kingdom doesn't aim for complete show accuracy as a rule, and so you get the proper more-realistic abdomen markings.  

Anyway, I recommend the toy.  It's Blackarachnia!  And it's, like, the Masterpiece but for way cheaper.

Hey, did you know that Masterpiece Blackrachnia's boobs are actually smaller than original toy Blackarachnia's boobs?  Hard to believe!  I mean, technically they started out being Tarantulas's pecs and looked more like a pair of golf balls, but it's somehow true!

Anyway, here's MP-46 Blackarachnia.  She's about the size of a large Deluxe Class toy.  (She's practically identical in size to Animated Blackarachnia, for example.)  I mean, you can tell she costs more just by looking at her -- she's ... a lot of paint and her parts count is massive.  But this is what size Blackarachnia's gotta be if she's gonna be in scale with everyone else in the Beast Wars Masterpiece range.  She wasn't a large gal!  The shortest character on the show, actually, ranking below Quickstrike, Rattrap, and Scorponok.  

Her size is relevant insomuch as she has to transform from one thing into another thing, and the two things share essentially zero parts.  Masterpiece Dinobot was also like this, and what he did to get from velociraptor to robot was... turn entirely inside out.  He was a Popple.  But he could do this because he was massively large.  There was enough of him that he actually could turn inside out.  Blackarachnia, though, uh.  She be small.  There's not enough of her to do what Dinobot does.  

She tries, though.

Obviously, by looking at her, the robot mode's accuracy was emphasized.  In robot mode, she's a perfect action figure of the CGI model.  The only thing that's even a tiny bit off is the exact curvy shape of the spider abdomen stuff on her back, and even that's getting picky.  It's hard to tell that she even transforms into something, at a glance.  She's got spider legs on her arms and that's it.  

The spider mode is definitely where all the compromises landed.  Her tiny head and thorax sit atop a massive pile of robot mode arms.  Her robot mode legs are too large to tuck entirely inside her spider mode abdomen.  The thing is, there's just not anywhere for all this stuff to go.  Her two modes are largely incompatible, and she's too insubstantial to be as creative with the transformation as one'd like.  Cramming all the accuracy into the robot mode seems like the best idea between "favoring robot," "favoring spider," and "making both look bad."

Blackarachnia comes with one stand square (Dinobot came with two squares), a support arm for the stand, four web parts that combine with each other to form a complete web and attach to the support arm, and an attachment piece to help you connect Blackarachnia to it in various ways.  This stuff is larger than the toy itself, so even though Blackarachnia is pretty small, you get a big chunk of plastic.   

There's also two alternate heads (nigh-identical smiling and laughing-while-green-eyes-glowing), a harpoon that attaches to the harpoon weapon that forms out of part of her abdomen, a second harpoon attached to a string which you can use to swing or hang Blackarachnia from, and a VR mask attached to a wire and a separate extra wire.

Masterpiece Blackarachnia is a small but incredibly intricate toy that transforms from a 100% perfect robot mode (which is extremely poseable) to a spider-mode that looks okay if you haven't put your contacts in yet, comes with a few extra faces, a large diarama stand, and some weapons.  How much you want this for the price she asks depends on how much you dig Blackarachnia.  

Last year, we got three female Autobot toys in rapid succession: Windblade, Arcee, and Chromia.  And it was great!  But it'd be even cooler if we got female Decepticons, too.  As short supply as female Autobots are, female Decepticons are in even more dire straits!

And suddenly, TakaraTomy over in Japan, they saw this deficit, did some retooling, and BAM, gauntlet cast.  And one of these three new bad guy ladies is Blackarachnia.  She's technically a Predacon, not a Decepticon, but she was a Decepticon once, and she's often a bad guy, and so I'm fine including her in that group.  She's also different in that she wasn't retooled from Arcee or Windblade or any other recent mold, naw, Takara went back and grabbed Animated Blackarachnia from 2007 and used her as a retooling base.  I mean, Blackarachnia's a spider, and there aren't really a lot of spider toys to make stuff outta, so.  

Animated Blackarachnia is a pretty great toy to start off from!   It's actually a fairly inventive transformation, especially with how the arms and legs from from the spider limbs and how the torso is created.  The spider head folds down to form the chest and the pedipalps (which are balljointed) rotate and form the contours of the waist.  Seriously, it's pretty great.  

so what takara did was remove the pedipalps and replace them with new pedipalps that instead fold up and become boobs

I mean, I sort of get it.  If you're going to make a Beast Wars style Blackarachnia, her, um, chesty parts are an important part of the visual package.  Kind of, you know, in the same way you'd want your Jazz toy to have a chest made out of a car hood.  That's just what Jazz looks like!  And Beast Wars Blackarachnia puts the "rack" in "arachnid."  And, so, yeah, on that level, I understand.

But, damn, this does not leave her with much of a torso.  In fact, it merely leaves her with the original toy's spine.  She's got these two globes, a skinny stick to connect those to... well, the middle part of her pelvis that wasn't previously created out of pedipalps, and then legs.  She looks like something from the cover of Youngblood.  

That aside, she does make a pretty good Beast Wars Blackarachnia.  The new headsculpt is absolutely perfect, if set a little high on the neck, the paintjob is a good attempt at hiding the fact that she has hands and not claws (and you're supposed to leave her forearms half-transformed to achieve the look), and she's just generally painted meticulously all over.  You don't notice she no longer has a torso if your room's lighting ain't so great.

But it's just, like, what.