These are not my toys. They belong to my son, but the ones I pre-ordered haven't shown up yet (I just got a shipping notification from Hasbro Pulse today), and I have some time to kill before I have to go back to work tomorrow, so here we are.

These guys are part of wave three, along with Wingfinger and a reship of Earthrise Wheeljack in Kingdom packaging. They also retail for $23 at most shops now instead of $20, inevitable victims of inflation. (Every time I finally get comfortable paying x amount of money for Deluxes, they go and jack up the price again!)

SCORPONOK

In 1996, the Kenner version of Scorponok was part of the $15 Mega Beast assortment, typically characterized by a larger size than the $10 Deluxe Beast assortment and/or an additional gimmick. Shipping in a case assortment with Polar Claw, he had one claw with spring-fired missiles and another that could pop off and auto-transform into his menacing cyberbee. He also had a spring-loaded tail attack gimmick.

Despite this, in the show he was depicted as tiny (he was about the same height as Rattrap and Blackarachnia), and the CGI version of him was rendered in grey and purple tones instead of the jet black and translucent blue of the original toy. So, the new Scorponok looks nothing like his old toy, but he does look a lot closer to how he appeared in the series.

He's a short little thing as a robot, only about 4 1/2" in height (there are already leg extension parts you can buy via third party, but I imagine they would screw up the transformation a bit). But, as I said, he's supposed to be small. He's grey and light purple, which is a bit oversaturated but otherwise accurate to his CGI appearance. The head sculpt, in particular, is dynamite. Spot-on. I can practically hear him shouting, "He's a smirker! MANGO!"

His left claw opens to reveal two red-painted missile heads, which sadly do not launch or even come off. The right claw has a tiny cyberbee that attaches via five-millimeter peg. It doesn't have articulated wings or anything, but it does fit nicely inside his claw (on the 1996 toy, the claw itself detached and split open to form the wings for the cyberbee). The outer claw parts are connected with plastic knobs, not metal pins, and tend to pop off a lot. Also, I can't get the robot chest to close fully on my son's copy; it will be interesting to see if the one I pre-ordered ends up the same way. One other minor flaw is that his right foot has articulation in the ankle than his left foot lacks, due to the asymmetrical nature of his transformation.

Transformation kind of takes a Siege Spinister approach, doing two different things with the robot legs. One of them tucks away into the hollow scorpion tail, while the robot chest splits in half to make space for the other one. You can tell which one is which because one of them has a curved heel spike, which nestles nicely inside a gap in the scorpion tail to help secure it. This is also the impediment limiting his left ankle movement as a robot. I find the scorpion head very difficult to unfold. It's hard to grasp.

I'm generally pleased with the scorpion mode. I love the way the scorpion legs are staggered (the front and back legs are individually articulated; each pair of center legs move together on a single ball joint) and his body's curvature seems authentic and natural-looking. I can't get past the head, though. Once again, to the toy's detriment, Hasbro opted to model the toy after a real animal instead of trying to more closely match his CGI portrayal. In the show, Scorponok had red eyes and cartoony pupils, with almost absurdly comical supervillain eyebrows. The final head sculpt for beast mode may be more realistic, but it's derpy and doesn't look anything like the loyalist Predacon dunderhead we know and love.

I guess I'll be getting a third-party head replacement at some point, because the reason why I'm buying these toys is because I love the television show and the characters who inhabit it, not because I really needed a herpy derpy scorpion in my toy collection. Deliberately making the new Beast Wars toys realistic makes them inauthentic, which I think was a bad move.

Overall, I think he's a good addition to the new Beast Wars collection. Aesthetically he's quite good, but he's got a bunch of engineering flaws that bother me, and that drags down my opinion of the toy as a whole.

TRACKS

I think Tracks as a character is way too full of himself for him to ever be a favorite character of mine. Visually, though, he's got one of my favorite Autobot designs, and they don't always get him right. The Turbo Tracks toy we got in 2010 was authentic-looking for the character, but it was a veritable engineering nightmare, with floppy joints and a fidgety transformation and an awful, awful flight mode. It was acceptable considering what the G1 homages were ten years ago, but with the renewed focus on Sunbow scale and accuracy, it no longer hits the mark.

Tracks has already become infamous in the fandom as a flawed toy, with numerous complaints about him popping up on the message boards, branding him as a disappointment. He's got his flaws, of course, but I honestly don't think he's that bad.

As a robot, he's five and a quarter inches in height. He's designed specifically to resemble the Tracks from the cartoon, complete with a tiny faux car canopy on his chest. The head sculpt, once again, is straight on the money. So great. He's a bit hollow when viewed from the side, but that's a minor thing. He's C.O.M.B.A.T./F.O.S.S.I.L. ready with spots to mount pegs on the tops of his shoulders, sides of his arms and legs, his feet, and his back. He's got mounting spots for blast effects on his left wing, the top right chest, and both his lower legs. The lack of blast effect pegs on recent toys suggests to me that he might have been designed for Earthrise but got held back. It seems weird to drop them from the Kingdom toy line only to bring them back again.

He comes with a one-piece dual-blaster that mounts on the trunk piece above his head, and another small handheld black beam gun (the G1 toy had a much larger weapon the size of his arm that wrapped around his hand, Aerialbot-style, but in the show he carried a very tiny handheld pistol). The guns can accept blast effects, too.

There are some decisions Hasbro made that I don't like, such as printing his product number in red ink right on the front of his leg. (You guys really couldn't have printed it on an inside panel that wasn't so overtly visible?) The wings are missing a colored stripe, but the wings are also made of thermoset plastic, which Hasbro generally won't paint. Also, the fenders on the sides of his legs flop around a lot. There are technically locking tabs in existence that might have been intended to hold them in place, but they're so short and nubby that they basically serve no function. These are an integral piece, and absolutely necessary for the toy to stand up, so it's a bummer they're so damn floppy. They should have caught this in quality control testing.

Transformation borrows a lot of ideas from the Takara Masterpiece toy. They've gone beyond being Masterpiece Lite and they've just become Masterpiece 2.0, basically. The robot feet are actually connected to the side panels on the legs, which rotate to reveal the front wheels. There are opening flaps on the fronts of the lower legs that enable the upper legs to tuck inside. Where do the robot feet go? Inside the car canopy, of course. After much fidgeting and finagling. More or less the entire backpack turns into the rest of the car mode—the truck, the roof, the front windshield, and a piece of the hood, covering the faux roof that is the robot chest. The chest actually collapses a bit to make room for everything else, which is a neat trick.

His car mode (about five inches long) may not be an officially-licensed Chevrolet Corvette, but it's close enough to my eyes that it makes virtually no difference. He's the right shape and style in every perceivable way that matters to me. I guess he's a little on the cartoony side, like they were about to put him through the Throttlebot squishifier but only got to about ten percent before they reached Freeway proportions. Rather than doing a flame deco based on the 1985 toy, they went with a single-color red flame, which is totally the Sunbow cartoon look. It's honestly kind of great. (Tracks was doing flame deco long before Hot Rod came along and pretended he invented the look.) You can plug his cannons and his pistol to the trunk if you want.

Flight mode is arguably a minor modification of the vehicle mode than a true third transformation, akin to the G1 Omnibots (who all still need neo-G1 toys, incidentally). The robot arms pop out and the four wings pop out—the same two he's got in robot mode, plus two more that are tucked away inside the trunk area (they're obvious, because the visible side when they're folded up isn't painted blue to match the rest of the car). The robot arms form the sides of the car, so chunks of it are now missing, but the arms themselves close the gaps relatively well. It's authentic enough to the G1 toy. At least it isn't that awful, awful Turbo Tracks flight mode.

I don't think he's terrible. I love the look and shape of his car mode (this is definitely one toy they won't be recycling as Wheeljack!) and his robot mode, even with its problems, looks good and Sunbow-accurate. The leg panels are by far the biggest flaw. He's on the slab for a redeco as Road Rage (female character!), who will have a different head sculpt and is slated to be a Target exclusive.

Zob (will be buying that one, too, because toys)