If I'm being completely honest with myself, my primary interest in Transformers: War for Cybertron: Chapter Three: Kingdom is as a vehicle to deliver me additional Dinobot toys.  Yeah, I mean, I'm not ever gonna turn my nose up at More Beast Wars Action Figures, but they're side dishes to this main course.  Cue ObiWan_thats_why_im_here.gif.

Regardless, I'm in a weird place, Dinobot-toy-wise, as we live in a post Masterpiece Dinobot world.  I already have the perfect representation of Dinobot in plastic form, there's zero chance that a $30 mass release Dinobot is going to approach that level of accuracy, and so... I'm not sure what I'm actually asking for in Dinobot toys in this moment in time.  Anything Dinobot would likely please me, because I'm here for the General Dinobot Content.  Like, any style direction for him I'm game for.  I've got Super Accurate, let's see what else we've got up Dinobot's sleeve.  

Kingdom's seeming goals for Beast Wars characters in Kingdom are "more-realistic animals with animation-accurate robot modes."  And as such, Kingdom Dinobot slots right into those priorities, with the caveat that he's a more-realistic 1990s Jurassic Park velociraptor, not an actual Velociraptor mongoliensis, which was more like a turkey with teeth.  Kingdom Dinobot is large, he's scaley, and he's got slappers not clappers.  He's pretty successful at his chosen goals, though his wrists are pretty limp-looking due to how they gotta fold up to store inside his ribcage, and he's got his robot mode's double thumbs sticking out of the back of his raptor feet.  His robot legs hide surprisingly well underneath the torso.  I mean, they're obviously there, but at the low-end of "obvious."

Dinobot's robot mode head looks like it's the Masterpiece toy's CAD information scaled down.  Which is to say, it's perfect.  It's the Dinobotest.  It may be my favorite thing about the toy itself, though it's in a bloody battle with the way his dino thighs split and become his robot mode torso.  It's an idea that solves so many problems perfectly.  Problem 1: Dinobot's robot arms don't look like velociraptor thighs, especially his big golden shoulder pads.  Problem 2: Where does Dinobot's fake raptor head chest torso come from?  Problem 3: If Dinobot's robot mode torso weren't stored in the velociraptor torso, it'd be easier to hide his giant robot legs up in there!  So, like, BAM, this elegant solution to this multitiered problem.  

It does negate any dino-hip articulation, however.  The transformation execution is more important to me than this, though.  Articulate him at the knees and below all you want in the meantime!

His sword is purple.  In the show it's often silver chrome and kinda pinkish in some lighting, the latter of which was reflected in his Masterpiece toy.  His Kingdom sword is just full-on purple, though.  I like it, honestly, if only because I see it as a reference to Beast Wars co-story editor Bob Forward's legendary "purple-headed pole of pontification."  If you don't like the purple sword, that just means you're not a cool nerd like me who gets things.  

His rotate blade doesn't rotate.  ...and considering how he transforms, it's easy to see why.  His finally proportionally-large head takes up all that space back there for any push-lever gearing.  Pretend it spins, just like you pretend G1 Megatron's fusion cannon shoots things.  

The place to be is robot mode, though.  What a fantastic action figure he is here.  His arms have so much movement, aided much by his articulated wrists that not just rotate but bend to and fro.  He's got waist articulation, which is a new one for a mass release Dinobot, and his neck lets his head tilt as he pleases.  And, of course, the now-standard ankle tilts.

My one actual real gripe is the dropping of tan/gray stripes from his chest in robot mode between the back-of-the-box renders and actual production.  Those would've really helped!  He looks kind of paintbare in robot mode because all of his dino mode stripes vanish themselves during transformation.  I feel a small need to match the tan/gray paint and put those stripes back myself, matched only by my probably larger need to have a "stock" Dinobot to display with my otherwise unaltered Dinobot collection.  I can't start hand-painting them NOW.  And, again, I already have the perfectly-decoed Dinobot in the Masterpiece, so...

Kingdom Dinobot's good.  

I may have once related through the webcomic medium about how, for a while, there was an arms race between Hasbro and Takara to make a more show-accurate Dinobot.  There was the original toy, and then Takara put a gold helmet on it and de-pinked it a bit, and then later Hasbro tried to do more-show-accurate colors from scratch (badly), and then Takara tried to one-up them again (to limited success), and then Hasbro had a new Dinobot toy which was sculpted to look more cartoon-accurate, and then Takara painted it to match...

Kind of felt like, you know, a game that would go on forever.

WELP I THINK IT'S OVER NOW.

Witness Masterpiece Beast Wars Dinobot.  He painstakingly recreates both the robot mode and the beast mode from the CGI cartoon, and somehow transforms back and forth.  For good or ill.  See, the problem with Dinobot's CGI robot mode is that it's clearly not anything that can transform into a raptor.  It's just a robot with fleshy arms and a flattened-out raptor head on the chest.  Everything else is robot.  How does it become an organic, scaly velociraptor?  Well, in CGI, it happens through replacing one model with the other in a fancy way through which hopefully you won't notice.  Slight-of-hand, mostly.  

And the problem with Dinobot's CGI velociraptor mode is that it looks like garbage.  I mean, all praise where it's due -- this was 1996 computer animation for television.  But, like, it's, uh, not a good velociraptor.  I like to think the completely new Cyber Raptor models for the third season were a "hey look we can make a good velociraptor CGI model we swear" moment for the crew.  

What I'm beating around the bush at is, uh, yeah, this toy transforms from a robot IMPOSSIBLY into a terrible, terrible velociraptor.  On purpose.

And I love it.

Please take me seriously when I say this toy turns inside out.  It does.  The walls of the velocraptor torso are all robot bits sculpted on the inside, and the walls of the robot torso are all scaly on their insides.  To get from raptor to robot, you open up the torso, shove the velociraptor head inside, and close up the robot torso walls around it.  The raptor head doesn't become the robot chest, despite that being the original transformation and the CGI model's intent.  It hides away inside the torso while the stomach of the velociraptor unfolds into the flattened, torso-shaped velociraptor head chest the CGI model had.  This achieves the purpose of the endeavor: to have a Dinobot robot mode that looks like the CGI.  

The velociraptor mode is definitely the second priority.  It does its best, and doesn't QUITE achieve the actual shape of the CGI raptor, with its giant torso and slightly undersized head.  But it tries.  ...to be a terrible velociraptor.  

Again, I love this.  SOME toy should try to be the terrible show model and succeed.  And this is that toy.  No expense spared!  

His rotate blade still spins when you push a lever.  This is important.  A Dinobot without his rotate blade is no Dinobot indeed.  He still has his segmented sword.  

What's extra this go-round are a lot of smaller things and one big thing.  The big thing is his giant display stand with the giant display arm.  Dinobot is a pretty large, heavy toy, and sometimes a dude needs support.  Especially in velociraptor mode, where like 99% of the weight is in the torso, which is not centered with the legs, and the tail is like a few grams at most, so it's not great at standing.  The stand helps.  It comes with a translucent piece that plugs around his stomach.  There's a different piece for robot mode that wraps around his butt.  

He also comes with the Golden Disk!  The Voyager "Sounds of Earth" one.  This is a season one toy, and the second Golden Disk, the alien one, had no association with Dinobot until season 2.  There's both a translucent stand for the disk and a little attachment to help Dinobot hold the disk in his hands in either mode.  

Dinobot also comes with FOUR different faces!  There's default, angry, smirking, and LASER EYES.  Laser eyes face comes with a further attachment that plugs into his eyes and makes him look like he's shooting laserbeams.  The mouth on each is articulated, so you can achieve an incredible range of expressions across the four options and their variants.  Put two button batteries into his head, press the button at the back of his skull, and his eyes glow red.  Hold down the button and the eyes glow green for the laserbeam attachment.  

Pros: It's goddamn fucking Dinobot and it's beautiful, even the parts that are ugly, because it's goddamn fucking Dinobot.  He comes with four faces with articulated mouths.  He's massive and huge and scaled properly to everyone else in the Beast Wars Masterpiece range.... which is why he's massive and huge.  He's incredibly impressive to behold.

Cons: Takes a while to transform, what with the flipping inside out.  His weight is not distributed evenly and so most poses require the stand.  Some people have had problems with one of the shoulder ratchets.  He's $200.

For me, I mean, the pros and cons were irrelevant.  It's a toy of Dinobot.  I was gonna have it.  

Yay, 3D printing!  It's getting to be not-crappy!  Now that Shapeways (the online 3D printing folks) has introduced a new material, black high-def acrylate, and my pal Trent Troop had a Dinobot head to purchase, I was like, yes, I will try this thing.

Shapeways' high-def acrylate, which currently only comes in black, is pretty close to looking like normal-ass molded plastic.  You don't see any layers in the plastic, like you're looking at a toy made out of lasagna, and the sculpted detail is very fine.  The only downside, at least for this project, was the piece comes in black, and I needed to make it gold and blue.  This meant.... base coat layer!  I was painting like some kind of adult, with preparedness and forethought and everything.  Whaaaaaat.  Luckily I had some medium gray acrylic paint sitting around from when I was painting up my BotCon Ratchets.

After that, it was only a matter of getting the gold and metallic blue paint on there.  After using plain-ol' Gold Leaf, I decided the gold needed to be a little more orangey-er, and so I mixed some orange into my gold and painted it again.  At this point, I think I've started to lose a little of the sculpted detail, but, eh, I don't feel like scraping it all off and starting over.  It looks nice, though!  I like it.

Trent/TheRobotMonster's got over 100 heads to choose from in his Shapeways store.  There's some Optimuses, some Pretender Monsters, Skeletor, the goddang Sogmaster, Krang, Rung and Tarn... there's a bunch there.  And all you gotta do is screwdriver away the head on the Titan Master toy itself, replace the head with the new one, and screwdriver the screw back in.  Easy cheezy.  You can make any Titans Return headmaster guy into Dinobot.  Or the Sogmaster.  

Slash is a Transformers velociraptor with feathers.  *points to review title*

Yeah, some folks don't like this thing.  It has some faults.  But it's a friggin' feathered dinosaur.  *points to review title again*

I mean, he's not, like, a great feathered velociraptor, by which I mean it's not terribly accurate to what we currently think dinosaurs like that looked like (for example, the totally made-up forelimbs), but it's a damn sight more accurate than those fancied-up lizards from Jurassic Park!  I'm lookin' at you, Beast Wars Dinobot.  

Part of folk's problem with him is his limited articulation. Mind, he techgnically has full articulation, it's just shallow.  He has elbow joints that don't really do anything because of the bulk of his arms, and he has fully-functional legs if the thighs weren't so short or constantly getting in their own way.  He has a lot of stuff going on and it all wants to be going on in the same confined space.  

But other than that?  This dude is beautiful.  The dark teal and lime green are together one of my favorite color schemes to come out of Age of Extinction's toyline so far.  Part of my brain keeps suggesting that maybe he'd make a great Beast Wars Dinobot redeco, and then the rest of my brain reminds me that, dude, that'd be going from this glorious color scheme to friggin' brown.  BROWN.  That is a serious step down.  

And, again, feathered dinosaur. 

Can't understate that.