There are some images here:

https://news.tfw2005.com/2021/06/10/kingdom-waspinator-revealed-435262

....I kind of hate it. I knew that Generations Waspinator would be a very, very difficult toy to top, so apparently Hasbro's solution was "don't even try." It looks awful.

Zob (I mean, I'll buy it, but...)

On Friday, June 11, 2021 at 5:51:21 PM UTC-5, Zobovor wrote:
> There are some images here:
>
> https://news.tfw2005.com/2021/06/10/kingdom-waspinator-revealed-435262
>
> ...I kind of hate it. I knew that Generations Waspinator would be a very, very difficult toy to top, so apparently Hasbro's solution was "don't even try." It looks awful.
>
>
> Zob (I mean, I'll buy it, but...)
This is going to be really tough. Thrilling 20 Waspinator is still really good,but this guy looks good too. Maybe I'll get one to be Waspinator and 1 to be Starscream possessed Waspinator? This is going to be a tough call. He looks beautiful. I guess it will come down to if the great cheapening trickles down to the construction details on this guy.

On Friday, June 11, 2021 at 5:48:18 PM UTC-6, Ob1k...@att.net wrote:

> This is going to be a tough call. He looks beautiful.

You and I had such vastly different initial reactions. I had to go back and look again to see if I was way off base.

My visceral reaction, without doing a critical analysis or picking apart specific aspects of the toy, is that it just looks off. It just doesn't look good.

I do recognize on some level that Kingdom has set a pretty high bar, and that a lot of the other Beast Wars updates have ranged from pretty good to extraordinary. The head sculpts, in particular, have been consistently excellent, pretty much all through Siege and Earthrise and Kingdom (with the singular exception of Earthrise Megatron) so I've come to expect this level of accuracy. And for some reason Waspinator just doesn't hit the mark.

It's like they went out of their way to differentiate it from the Generations toy from 2014. But the Generations toy was already such an excellent sculpt, that they had to make Waspinator look worse just to make it look different. And they still basically cribbed the design wholesale, using most of the same transformation and engineering ideas (the way the arms tuck away, the way the robot legs fold up, etc.)

The color profile on the Kingdom toy does seem to be a marginal improvement, with the yellow shoulders and the painted stripes on his robot head antennas. But the overall styling, especially of the robot mode, seems like a huge step backwards. Thicker insect antennae, thicker insect legs, weird color choices, and robot mode details that look like somebody was trying to reproduce them from memory instead of actually looking at the CGI model of the character.

There's a lot of discussion about this on the message boards, too. There seem to be two factions. One group of people weren't collecting toys eight years ago, assume that anybody who prefers the Generations toy must just be living in a superficial nostalgia bubble, and are basically going, "Well, the new toys aren't even supposed to be accurate to the source material, so don't get worked up about it." The other group doesn't think the Kingdom edition is accurate, preferring the earlier Generations release and can't figure out why anybody would like the Kingdom version better.

I think we were all just assuming that Kingdom would finally offer us the definitive versions of the Beast Wars characters, and in a way it's a shame that they haven't delivered on that promise.

Zob (shrugs aggressively)