While Transformers: Generations: War for Cybertron Trilogy: Kingdom dumped all the first season Maximals on us at retail, it was relatively light on first season Predacons!  I mean, this makes some sense.  Maximals are good guys and sell better, and they have folks like gorillas and cats and whatnot, while Predacons have two spiders and a fire ant they couldn't even sell the first time.  And so we got Megatron and Blackarachnia and Waspinator and Scorponok (and Dinobot labeled as Predacon on his packaging), but no Terrorsaur, Tarantulas, or Inferno.  Whispers tell us Tarantulas and Inferno are due in this year's (and next year's, because of covid??) Legacy toyline, while Terrorsaur is a last-minute addition to the Kingdom toyline as it goes right out the door.  

Terrorsaur's the fourth and final installment of Amazon's exclusive "Golden Disc Collection," and he's the one that comes with the titular Golden Disc accessory itself!  Well, okay, it's *a* golden disc.  The storyline and packaging tell us this exclusive set is built around the Voyager probe Golden Disc, but Terrorsaur dopily comes with the Alien Disc.  Whoof!  Great job, guys.  Wrong Golden Disc accessory.

He's a heavily retooled Kingdom Airazor, and mostly that means we get a pterosaur that perches like a bird.  Pterosaurs weren't dinosaurs, and thus weren't ever party to that whole bird arrangement, and so while part of me is like YAYYY TERRORSAUR another part of me is like HRMPH NOT BIRD.   But it's not like Terrorsaur ever transformed into a good, organic pterosaur anyway, I guess.  

At least Airazor is a pretty good toy to be retooled from, right?  Nearly all of Airazor is replaced with new Terrorsaur parts, other than a few robot parts and internal engineering bits, and so the two look completely different at a glance, albeit having similar silhouettes.   The original Terrorsaur transformed backwards from Airazor, with the beast head going on the back and the tail going on the chest, rather than vice versa, and so to bridge that gap, Kingdom Terrorsaur has a fake pterosaur butt on his chest.  The beat head folds back over his robot head and joins the real pterosaur butt on his back.  

In addition to the Wrong Golden Disc, Terrorsaur comes with three other accessories.  First, his rifle.  And second, two forearm spikes that come in a wadded up tissue paper baggie on the back of the card.  Don't miss that and throw it away.  The forearm spikes can stay plugged in during both modes, unlike Airazor's big forearm weapons.  So that's nice.  You don't have to swap them to Terrorsaur's legs after transformation to beast mode and back again.  

All three of the prehistoric animal guys on Beast Wars were pretty big on the cartoon, and Terrorsaur himself was larger than most of the other Predacons.  A Deluxe Class toy is a little smaller than would be proper scale, but a retool of Airazor is probably going to net you an Airazor-sized guy.  You can cheat his torso a little taller by not compacting it during transformation to robot mode, thus increasing his height, but it looks a little awkward and exposes an unsightly mushroom peg.  I might do it anyway.  

This guy's currently sold out on Amazon (and HasbroPulse) but there's at least two ways to get this mold in the future.  Target's reportely getting Terrorsaur in more toy-accurate colors as an exclusive at some point, and there's also rumblings of a Fractyl redeco.  And there's probably a few more ways they could redeco this toy later if they choose to.

Thrilling 30 Waspinator was pretty good!  A very good Waspinator!  Perfect, even, if you let the foggy haze of "i last touched this thing when I put it on a shelf five years ago" take over your cognition.   And it helps if you bought the expensive Japanese-convention-exclusive version with actual paint on it.  And if you didn't care that its knees couldn't bend more than ten degrees.  Or that its wings couldn't point upwards in robot mode without some fussing, or that his eyes were a glassy spooge color, or that he was weirdly a mechanical wasp of some sort, not organic, or--

Yeah, we're in Transformers' years of diminishing returns, sure.  Taking characters/toys you were pretty pleased with and doing them just a little bit better, just better enough, to realize the older one was GARBAGE actually!  THROW THAT OLDER TOY IN A BIN AND FORGET IT DOWNSTAIRS FOREVER.

That, sure, but also sometimes there's some new things that you like that you hadn't considered, like, hey, what if we sculpt Waspinator's wasp mode after an actual wasp?  It changes the eye shapes on his chest (making him less cartoon accurate), but it's actually pretty neat!  I like that!  And a wasp's stripes on its ass aren't actually a cartoonish set of perfectly horizontal stripes, so what if we shaped them more organically?  That's also neat!  I like that.

And you know what's GREAT???  Every single Waspinator until now has cast his upper shoulders in nylon plastic because they're always balljoints, and balljoints work better if they have a little texture and sturdiness to them.  So, nylon.  But you can't paint nylon with factory paint, so Waspinator never before could have had the big yellow circles on his shoulders that he did in the cartoon.  But Kingdom Waspinator's shoulders are finally not balljointed!  They're universal joints with regular plastic!  And so at long last, the big yellow shoulder circles.  Phew.

Also, the now-standard waist articulation, useful knees, and ankle tilts are also pretty helpful.

There are some things the original still does better: I miss the flip-out stinger in the singer gun.  New Kingdom Waspy's stinger gun is just the solid yellow piece with the weapon detailing lightly sculpted into the underside.  But that's not a huge deal because I like leaving that weapon stowed so as to keep the striped butt portion intact.  

And maybe you'd like him as big as he used to be?  Maybe.  I'm fine with Waspinator being shorter.  He shouldn't be a tall deluxe.  (aka the size all deluxes used to be but now sometimes some of them are shorter for scaling)  

Kingdom Waspinator is a good Waspinator!  They actually paint his head!  I mean, I had the fancy Japanese convention one for that reason, but this one cost like a third what that one did, and everyone can buy it not just a few thousand people, so.  That seems nicer.

When does Terrorsaur get here so I can do a Kingdom Predacon groupshot, huh?

(original retail version thrilling 30 waspinator pictured in the comparison photo, not the fancy japanese convention one with paint)

Hasbro's been poking at some enjoyable buttons for me this past year.  We got a new Dinobot AND a retool/redeco of that Dinobot as Grimlock.  We got a toy colors Galvatron.  We got a Shattered Glass Goldbug (who I can steal a head from to give to Bumblebee).  And this year's PulseCon exclusive is... Beast Wars Ravage?  C'mon you guys, it wasn't even my birthday.

This is the second Beast Wars Ravage toy -- the first, "X-9" Metals Jaguar, was a retool of Transmetal Cheetor, reusing only the toy from the legs down and the cheetah's forelegs, with everything else essentially being new.  The robot face became the janguar face, and the robot arms had no where to go in beast mode so they just kind of hung underneath.  You could open up the chest to reveal a sticker of your choice.  I chose a screaming, drunken G1 Megatron, because obviously.  This sold for about $30 at the time, but now will cost you hundreds of dollars if you can even find it for sale.  

So, you know, a newer one is nice!  

Covert Agent Ravage is similar in execution to the original -- it keeps Kingdom Cheetor's robot from the legs down, plus the cheetah's forelegs, with everything else once again being essentially new.  The two big differences are 1) this transforms into an organic, furry beast instead of a robotic one, and 2) the robot arms actually have a place to go!  You open up the abdomen, stuff the arms inside, and the furry backsides of the forearms poke out the top of the beast to fill in the shoulders.  A greater attempt at Beast Wars cartoon accuracy is made here, with the robot head looking more like the Tigatron CGI model as it did in the cartoon, rather than Generic Robo Cat.  Unlike the cartoon, the head is sculpted furry to match the rest of the organic beast mode, and so while it looks more like CGI Beast Wars Ravage, it does have a furry rather than metallic texture to it.  

And, of course, since it uses Kingdom Cheetor's legs rather than a Transmetal Cheetor's legs, this Beast Wars Ravage has the distinction of looking more like CGI Ravage from the waist up, rather than from the waist down.

Benefits to this newer Covert Agent Ravage include: the head can turn.  Metals Jaguar's head was completely immobile, as it was on a telescoping series of hinges to accommodate the transformation.  Neck articulation is built into this new Beast Wars Ravage, though, and the requisite War for Cyberton-era ankle tilts are also present.  Covert Agent Ravage has two show-accurate rifles that he can wield in his hands or holster on his hips.  

He comes with an original 1984 Ravage, albeit with the microcassette deco painted on both sides of the microcassette mode for the first time -- there's no jaguar side and microcassette side to this version.  Both Ravages come packaged with a cardboard diorama of the interior Ravage's Beast Wars spaceship, including a cardboard sleeve to put G1 Ravage inside.  The idea is you can pretend Covert Agent Ravage can transform into the other Ravage's cassette mode, as he did (magically and impossibly) on the cartoon.  

This PulseCon exclusive was made for me.  I like it.  It's not currently sold out (and is priced above the Free Shipping threshold), so maybe give it a looksy.

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.  

In the margins of Transformers: War for Cybertron Trilogy: Kingdom's spread of Beast Wars guys, Hasbro's trying to round out the 1985 guys the previous two parts of the Trilogy left behind.  That's right, we're finally getting to Tracks.  I mean, we're not gonna get to Skids this trilogy apparently, even though we've done like 4 Sideswipes, but we'll get a Tracks!

Kingdom Tracks feels a lot like Kingdom Rhinox to me.  This Tracks is fussy and you worry you might break it, and its transformation doesn't feel as streamlined or as enjoyable as most of WFC has been so far.  WFC seems like it had things down to a science, transformation-wise, and Tracks feels like he's off the field somewhere.  Hasbro was having a bad day when they designed both Rhinox and Tracks.  

Tracks' legs are a mess of thin panels that... don't really lock well together?  There's some shallow tabs that connect the outside of the shins and the feet with the rest of the shins, and, well, it's not enough.  And maybe I'm doing some thing wrong, but I feel like I have to push parts through other parts to get them into place.  

And most of Tracks' vehicle mode roof is a pair of thin translucent plastic parts that pile up on his back, which normally I wouldn't mind, but what bothers me about them is trying to push them into place in car mode.  It's not very elegant, and I feel like I just gotta push too hard to get tabs locked in.  I don't wanna end up with broken tabs.  

He also feels a little loose, which might just be my copy, and I brushed some floor polish on him anyway to mostly solve this.  

Tracks is NOT like Rhinox in that he looks exactly like Tracks!  He's not based on some weird video game version of Tracks with ears or something.  And there's no ugly gaping transformation hinges on the front of his legs.  He OPERATES like Rhinox, but he doesn't belong to Rhinox's weird visuals department.  And so at least this Tracks looks like he works next to your other WFC toys.  

Tracks, because he's Tracks, has a third flying car mode.  You untransform his arms and flip the wings out.  There's also tailfins to pull out, but they also want you to stack his guns back there between them, and his guns are as tall as his tailfins, so I'm not sure how useful or purposeful those tailfins are.

Anyway, Kingdom Tracks is good if you want something that looks like cartoon Tracks on your shelf.  He's not a great Transformer.  

Don't get me wrong, I love Titans Return Galvatron's jet mode.  I love that jet mode.  It barely looks like a jet, sure, but I like it.  I think it's a good altmode for Galvatron to have if you're not gonna do a space gun.  To quote Marge Simpson, I just think it's neat.  BUT, like, dude, that guy had no head articulation.  And that guy's head looked like one of those tourist-trappy things where they cut a hole in the picture and you put your face through it, but not really threw it, more like a few inches behind it.  It was a crucial blow to that otherwise pretty dang solid Galvatron toy.  

Galvatrons have had trouble over the years, huh?  The first one, honestly, is an amazing toy on its merits -- electronic, incredibly poseable for its time, large and imposing -- but many folks will tell you he's absolutely the wrong colors.  They changed them between toy production and animation.  And then there was the Generations Deluxe, which was just an absolute dogshit toy.  It was neat that it transformed from a gray tank into a purple robot, but, like, at what cost, man, what cost.  And clearly too small for a Galvatron.  Then the Titans Return one, which folks thought was finally gonna be Our Guy, but then the head was immobile and dumb-looking.  And then... I guess he was a Combiner Wars torso.  That was neat, I suppose, but probably not what folks were looking for.

But here, it looks like Hasbro and TakaraTomy knuckled up and decided, okay, we're doing this right.  We're so doing this right that we're gonna do him at Leader Class pricepoint just to make sure he's got the budget we need to do him right.  Throw in some accessories to fill out the packaging window, why not.   

And, hey, I'd say they've mostly succeeded with Kingdom Galvatron.  Folks will have quibbles, for sure.  Some don't like the areas of damage deco on his chest, arms, and ankles.  Some don't like exactly what shade of purple he is.  Some don't like him because he was stolen from factories months ago and photographed by somebody's camera with an extremely unflattering lens focal length.  Some don't like that earlier samples of him have a shoulder misassembly that leaves his arms a half-centimeter lower.  (Personally, I think it just makes him look more like Floro Dery's design -- dude loved dem low shoulders.)

In hand, though?  I'd say this one'll be hard to top.  It has the gravitas you want a Galvatron to have, which is not really something afforded to a Galvatron since Transformers: Energon.  Kingdom Galvatron is a wide, beefy boy, and a head taller than Megatron.  He's got presence.  He doesn't have skinny arms or thin thighs.  He didn't skip any leg days.  Kingdom Galvatron looks like he can fuck you up, which is what you want a Galvatron to look like.

His head turns!  His barrel can mount on either his forearm or his bicep!  (and not inside the elbow, restricting movement)  He's got waist rotation and ankle tilts!  He's got double-jointed elbows (for transformation) that allow for even more poses.  

If Galvatron has a real weakness, it's his cannon mode.  Not because it's bad, because it isn't, but... I dunno, if I weren't into Transformers, I'd wonder what on Earth it is.  It's an extremely faithful-to-the-cartoon cannon mode.  It's just, y'know, kind of a weird thing to behold outside of context.  So he gets down on his elbows, which have treads on them, and moves his cannon from his arm to his torso?  S'just weird.  But it's "accurate," and these toys aren't for kids who don't know who Galvatron is anymore, so whatcha gonna do.  

Galvatron comes with three accessories (if you don't count the two pieces that make up his arm cannon).  First is a Matrix-on-a-chain deal that fits either over his head or over his barrel in cannon mode.  In cannon mode there's even a little tab to help you secure it in place.  He comes with two replicas of his Unicron-granted spaceship, which he can wield as separate blasters or combine into a larger blaster.  You can also attach them on his back in robot mode or on either side of his cannon mode.

I'd be happy to buy this guy in many other decoes.  Toy-accurate gray?  Yes.  The same thing again but a bluer purple?  Sure.  Give him a new head and call him Straxus?  Why the heck not?  This toy is good and I like it.

Get it?  RINO?  Rhinox In Name Only?

Okay, fine, that's not actually something I believe, I just thought it'd work.  But it's not strictly true, so I guess it's not funny.  Well, I'm not rewriting the title of this thing.  We're doing this live!!!  LIVE!!!!

Anyway, after Kingdom toy after Kingdom toy just knocking Beast Wars out of the park, Rhinox feels like a... departure.  In more ways than one!  All the other Kingdom toys follow a very specific design motif pattern: realistic animal mode transforms best it can into a recreation of the cartoon's CGI model for the robot.  Optimus, Rattrap, Blackarachnia, Cheetor, Megatron, Airazor, Dinobot (well, a realistic... Jurassic Park animal...), all these follow that pattern.  And then along comes silly ol' Rhinox, whose robot mode is... seemingly based directly on the Forged to Fight phone game Rhinox?  With the big ear muffs and the weird nose and the robot mode loosely translated from the Thrilling 30 Rhinox toy from seven years back?  It barely looks like Rhinox in the same way everyone else looks like themselves.  Who asked for this?  Nobody asked for this.

And on top of all that, like, it's probably the first legimately bad transformation experience in all of the War for Cybertron trilogy of toylines.  It's not fun!  It's anti-fun!  His legs are a nightmare of panels that need to push through each other every step of the way.  And it's not like it ends up looking nice after all that effort.  The giant ugly open seams are on the FRONT.  What on Earth.  Who let this happen?  So many questions.

I mean, it does get some things better than previous toys in new ways.  The rhino chest jaw being a faux part that folds away instead of becoming the actual rhino's lower jaw results in some better show accuracy AND a rhinoceros head that doesn't have a jaw that hinges at the very back of the skull, muppet style.  And the robot feet are fake rhino feet as well, so you're able to have the robot foot poke out between the rhino toes, rather than out the back.  Everything else seems like a weird step backwards.  

It's not a fun toy and I hate it.  It doesn't pose unawkwardly, it doesn't look nice even stood statically, it's a murderous chore to transform, and its rhino mode honestly looks like a potato.

The only thing engaging about the toy is how off it feels from all the others in this toyline just by merit of not being great.

Every round of reimagined Beast Wars characters usually only goes so deep.  You always get your Cheetors, Primals, and Megatrons, and maybe also your Dinobots, Waspinators, and Rattraps.  But Transformers: War for Cybertron: Kingdom is the first time we've been able to scratch beyond that surface to some other characters.  In that respect, Kingdom Airazor is the first genuinely exciting Beast Wars character to appear in it!  Airazor's last beast toy was in 1998, the Transmetal.  (It was redecoed for Armada in 2003.)   There've been two vehicle mode style Airazors from BotCon since, one being Energon Slugslinger with a new head and the other from the Slipstream retool of Windblade.  But again, both jets, and both retools and redecoes of other toys.  Kingdom Airazor is just... a new toy of Airazor, from the ground up.  

And it's pretty dang good!  It spends a lot of its budget on hinging the heck out of her wings, which helps with falcon poses.  They can fold up beside her body for when she's perching, or they can spread out for when she's flying.  They're jointed enough they can fold in on themselves enough to minimize their size in her silhouette in robot mode.  (They shrunk a lot during transformation on the cartoon.)  They're nice, big expressive wings.  

She transforms by wadding up her robot mode a bunch, just like the original toy, though stuff now has places to go and lock in, rather than just hanging underneath loosely like originally.  Though it looks like a mass of robot parts from underneath the bird mode, it still achieves the rough shape of a bird, so it still feels right.  My lone complaint is how robot-techy her legs are.  On the show, they were round and organicky, and if the Kingdom toy attempted a more show-accurate look in at least that one respect, her legs would work better visually in either mode.  They oddly stand out amongst the rest of her toy, which borrows heavily from the CGI model.  They really wanted to give her robot legs, I guess.

Airazor comes with two wrist-mounted weapons that can unplug and replug under her beast mode tailfeathers.  She's as articulated as you expect from a War for Cybertron Trilogy toy, including the waist articulation and ankle rockers.  Her neck in either mode has a good range of motion, and the falcon's beak opens.  

A pretty solid toy all around, which is what Airazor deserves after so dang long.

Huffer was one of my favorite Transformers when I was a kid.  This happened because 1) he was a toy I owned and 2) he was featured in one of my first comic books.  In the cartoon, Huffer sounded like if Mr. Slate from The Flintstones were a whiny Peter Griffin, and in general he just wants to go home even though he can't.  He was a little orange forky-handed minitruck, he made reluctant friendships with big meaty trucker humans named Bomber Bill, and I loved him.  

Kingdom Huffer is the first attempt by Hasbro to actually try to make a new Huffer that's named Huffer?  In Transformers Cybertron, there was Armorhide, a new Huffer in all but name.  He was a tiny truck that transformed into a tiny robot with Huffer's head.  BotCon 2007 would do that toy in the proper colors and connect the rest of those dots, and that one's been My Huffer since then.  There was Power Core Combiners Huffer, which was an orange truck but didn't look much like him except in the extreme abstract.  And there was a redeco of a smaller-scale Optimus Prime toy with a new Huffer head, but that... well, it was a small orange Prime with a Huffer head.  

So here's Kingdom Huffer, who's A Huffer!   He's got the entire semi cab on his back, as is appropriate, and his arms still turn into the giant-ass smokestacks (but with humanoid fists at the end, instead of the original toy's sporks), and he's the cartoon's orange and lavender-ish colors.  Like the recent Cliffjumper, Warpath, and Bumblebee/Cliffjumper toys, he's an undersized Deluxe Class toy so that he can be in scale with other recent toys.   He's not quite as short as Bumblebee/Cliffjumper, but he's still a bit smaller than a regular Autobot car.  

He comes with a shield and a rifle.  The rifle can split in half and join with the shield to form a truck bed for the vehicle mode, if you want.  I've read from others that his rifle is basically a "Spartan Laser" from Halo.  Possibly lightly plagiarized.  Huffer's one of the few 1984 Transformers whose altmode seems to actually be made up rather than being something real that these days you'd have to license, so I guess this "borrowing" is merely checking off that box in a different way.  

Kingdom Huffer has a slightly more complex transformation for what you'd expect a Huffer toy to pull off.  You gotta open up his torso, fold the front set of wheels out of his torso (though the hinges there are stronger than the pegs for the wheels, so they pop out a little too easily), configure his arms, fold out his heels into the truck's trailer hitch and... well, okay, it's not that complicated.  Mostly the wheel hiding and the leg folding are the new wrinkles. 

The truck cab backpack is thankfully on a multi-part hinge, because you'll be pulling it out of the way whenever you want to fit your fingers in to turn the robot's head.  And I've got tiny girl hands, so imagine how much more difficult it'd be for real men.  Other than this small roadblock, Huffer is a pretty luxurious action figure for a Huffer.  He's got the now-typical waist rotation and ankle tilts, and all of this is stuff Huffer's never had before.  He can now do sweet action poses, which is apparently something this Huffer is capable of when he's not being a whiny butthole.