Got these guys from Hasbro Pulse yesterday, in three separate boxes. I probably could have ordered them together, but what if I found one of them at Walmart or something? I'd rather have the option to just cancel a single toy purchase. (Of course, then I run into issues like forgetting how many active orders I've placed. Hasbro just told me I'm getting a second Jhiaxus that I totally forgot about. Oops!)

I did not order Knockout. Not because I have no desire for a red Jazz, but because it's not Jazzy enough. If they sold Jazz in red, I could pretend it's Double Feature, the generic background character from the Marvel Comics adaptation of The Transformers: the Movie. But, they didn't do that.

ELITA-1

Her name is parsed on the packaging with a numeral, but I prefer to spell it Elita One. It just makes more sense to me.

So, we've gotten other Elita toys in the past. Not counting live-action movie toys that appropriated the name for Hasbro's evil purposes, the first toy arguably meant to represent the G1 character was the Power of the Primes version, but it was a weird afterthought, a "what else can we do with Starscream besides just sell him as Thundercracker/Skywarp like we always do?" Why did Elita One need to turn into a jet? Why did she need gigantic Samus Aran armor? Nobody has the answers to these questions. Then we got the Netflix version in 2020, a remold of the Earthrise Arcee toy. More feminine, to be sure, but extremely Arcee-like.

So, this is the first toy that might have been designed specifically to resemble Elita as she appears in her only cartoon appearance, "The Search for Alpha Trion." And yet, this won't be a unique mold at all, because we know she's already on the slab for a redeco as Minerva (and she might actually be a pre-deco, since the toy seems more designed with Minerva in mind). It's funny... she's Optimus Prime's girlfriend, the Lois Lane of Transformers, and yet she's still not considered important enough to get her own dedicated mold.

In robot mode, she stands at five inches in height. Her styling is such that it draws strong inspiration from the G1 animation model—the "shirt collar," the upside-down T design on her torso, the kneecaps. The head sculpt is very good, and manages to capture how the sides of her helmet are squared off but the top is rounded. The color scheme is pretty close to animation, with a healthy mix of rose pink, a lighter pink, and an off-white.. She has little bumps on the tops of her shoulders, but they're not quite the Optimus Prime style smokestacks that she wears in the show.

Also, her legs radically diverge from the lithe, feminine look—they're big and chunky and boxy, but the alternative to doing this, as we've seen, is to basically stuff the entire vehicle mode into a huge backpack, and fans practically rioted when they did that with Earthrise Arcee. She does still have a pretty big backpack, mind, but at least her legs are integrated into the vehicle mode so the backpack doesn't do ALL the work.

They showed off on the Hasbro livestream some months ago how parts of the backpack could be manipulated and reconfigured so that the shoulder pads could be positioned up and over her shoulders. They didn't come right out and say this, but this is probably the intended configuration for Minerva.

She comes with two blue translucent weapons. One seems to be loosely based on the pistol she carried in "The Search for Alpha Trion," as it's got the same basic shape and design, but with a lot of extra pegs and peg-holes and things added to it. The other I recognized right away as looking almost exactly like G1 Nightbeat's gun, so it's clear that this will be Minerva's weapon of choice.

She's kinda-sorta C.O.M.B.A.T. compatible, as she has peg-holes on the sides of her lower legs, the undersides of her feet, the sides of the shoulder pads, and in her back. Not her forearms, though, and not her actual shoulders per se.

To transform her, the backpack unfolds into the hood and cockpit and spoiler for the car mode. The legs form the rear wheels and fenders. One conceit of her vehicle design is that her robot head pokes halfway up through the center of the roof. The toy isn't designed to transform this way, but they added a faux Elita head piece for the roof, which plugs into the holes on top. She's fidgety, and it's hard to get all the tabs properly lined up to lock together her arms and legs and the fenders.

The car mode is... huh. A bit odd. If you watch the episode in question, we never actually see her full vehicle design. The only time she appears in car mode, she's partially hidden behind Optimus Prime, so we don't see the back half of her vehicle form at all. The Floro Dery animation design did surface somewhat recently, in black-and-white, and I did a full-color mock-up of what it probably looked like in January 2021. I'm not sure if that gave Hasbro enough time. This toy might have already been in development by then. I don't think they used the Floro Dery design for reference at all. A lot of fans have said that her car mode looks like the Homer car from a season two Simpsons episode, and I'm hard pressed to disagree. It's ghastly. But, maybe I'm just disappointed they didn't use my color model, and my disappointment is "coloring" my perceptions.

In vehicle mode, she's four inches long. Her robot feet hang off the back of the car, but they don't lock in place well at all. They just kind of flop around. Also, even though her robot legs are integrated into the transformation, the rest of her is not. She suffers from pretty much the same problem as Earthrise Arcee, in that the backpack forms most of the vehicle mode, so the undercarriage shows off Elita One's robot mode, at least from the knees up, in all its glory.

I want to reiterate again how ugly the car mode is. Like, it's really, really, really bad. There are so many things wrong with it. People have already digibashed it into Minerva's color scheme, and while it vaguely evokes the character, it ain't no Porsche, that's for sure.

Also, she looks oddly constipated or something on her packaging artwork. There, I said it.

Well, they're getting there. They're inching slowly towards doing better and better toys of Elita One. But, this isn't the definitive version of the character. Something tells me we won't get that until Takara does a Masterpiece version of her.

PREDACON TARANTULAS

I was a little worried about how they would massacre my boy. Tarantulas is my favorite Beast Wars character, and I was also fond of the 1996 toy even before I saw him on the show, back when I thought he was some kind of ninja or something. They really did some of the Beast Wars characters dirty, but they've also done some exceptional homages, so it really could have gone either way.

I'm here to tell you, he's SO GOOD.

Tarantulas stands at five inches tall. His styling in robot mode is based directly on his CGI model, which of course was based on the 1996 Kenner toy, but with some creative liberties taken. They used the "mutant head" for his robot design, and they captured his sinister look perfectly. Mainframe changed up the colors for his robot design—where the toy was translucent purple with grey as a secondary color and some green arms (he had parts that were gang-molded with Waspinator), Mainframe went heavy with the green and used it for his shoulders and elbows and hips and knees and ankles and even his "teeth" in robot mode. Hasbro has successfully reproduced that look here. They didn't get every single paint application (he's got sculpted lines on his upper legs that mirror the design on his spider abdomen, but they're not painted) but overall they did a killer job.

The only weirdness, and really the only thing about the toy I kind of don't like, is the way the spider legs mounted to his arms are spread out really far. On the original toy, all the legs were connected to that black bicep piece, but on this toy the base of the spider legs is a chunk that extends well past the tops of his shoulders. It's weird, but it's not the worst thing ever.

He comes with his harpoon launcher (it doesn't really launch) in black, and he also comes with a pizza cutter that's meant to evoke the accessory that came with the Transmetal version (the blade is painted silver). There are already conversion kits you can find on eBay that add an extra wheel, so that your Tarantulas toy can transform into a spider-cycle mode the same way the Transmetal version did.

Transforming him is almost exactly the same as the Kenner toy, only with a few minor changes. On this version, the spider mode head is hidden in his backpack, and it swings up and covers the robot head. The robot legs tuck into the spider abdomen instead of becoming part of it, and his harpoon can store under the abdomen in a similar position as the one on the original toy. The robot claws become the pedipalps, just as with the Kenner toy, and the robot shoulders are likewise tucked under the spider's body in a similar manner.

The spider mode is about 5.5" long. The spider legs are articulated at the mid-point only, but they're sculpted in a natural-looking pose (much better than having them super straight because two of them pop off and turn into missiles). His coloring is also really good. It's a very nice shade of purple. He seemed to appear in multiple shades of purple when he was unveiled online, depending on whose photos you looked at, and I was concerned that Hasbro had botched his colors. But, he's pretty much perfect.

There isn't as much of a strong difference between the Legacy beast mode and the CGI beast mode. He actually had nine eyes in the show in spider mode, and the toy has eight, but it still looks like the character to me. It's not overwhelmingly bad like some of the other Kingdom/Legacy sculpts have been.

They did a really good job on Tarantulas. He's one of my absolute favorite toys from the last few years. They knocked this one out of the park.

DECEPTICON WILD RIDER

Not sure why they're parsing his name as two words, now, when it was Wildrider during G1. Oh, well. Whatever gets his correct name on the packaging, I suppose. None of this Brake-Neck nonsense like during Combiner Wars.

So, the toy in robot mode is precisely five inches tall. He's predominantly a dark grey color, with arms that are painted mostly red, a red face, and a silver metallic painted chest (this piece was die-cast metal during the G1 days). He's definitely the plainest-looking of the Stunticons, but not all of them can be bright, cheery colors like Drag Strip. The fidelity to his cartoon appearance is quite good, though he's missing the prominent Decepticon symbol on his chest. The head sculpt is particularly excellent, and includes both the chin guard as well as the spikes protruding from the sides of his helmet. Also, we seem to have the long-awaited return of the blast effect compabibility. By accident or design, there are two small pegs on his lower legs that will accept them.

Incidentally, some fans were complaining when Wildrider was first unveiled that the front of the car just folded onto his back. This is how the G1 toy transformed, so I don't think it would have been a problem. With that said, the hood of the car separates into pieces, with the side fender sections popping off and swinging back on an articulated arm. This functionality isn't required for car mode or Menasor mode, so the only reason it seems to be there is just for its own sake, to break up the hood so it's not just one big chunk of car on his back. He comes with two identical pistols, which he can carry separately or can plug them together, Seacon style, to form a single dual weapon.

To transform him, the robot head tucks into a chest compartment, the backpack swings down to become the car hood, the front windshield closes up like Combiner Wars Breakdown, and the legs do this elaborate and complicated song-and-dance number complete with encore performance. It's just crazy. It's definitely not the pull-the-legs-and-you're-done from G1.

During G1, Wildrider transformed into a tiny little Ferarri 308, and this version comes very close to that styling. In this mode he's five inches long. He's objectively better, with translucent red windows and red-painted racing stripes on the sides. He's a weird, almost greenish-tinted shade of dark grey, and the hood is particularly green. I would have been fine with a more neutral grey, but I guess this is fine. The car mode is solid and holds together really well, and you can plug his twin guns into the top, just behind the roof, so he can do his Chromedome impression. The car mode is super sexy. It's really great. I'm very happy with it.

For Menasor mode, you just fold his hood up and out of the way and plug him into the back of the existing leg framework. As you plug him in, he presses on a bar that causes the spring-loaded trapdoors to close, revealing the greeblies and tech details. (There are no Menasor combination instructions in his own instructions at all. Motormaster's instructions only show how to connect Drag Strip and Wildrider, so presumably Dead End and Breakdown will have additional instructions.)

Speaking of instructions, Wildrider's step-by-step transformation instructions really confused me, because they seem to be based on a prototype version of the toy or something. They show locking pegs that aren't there, and they also show you opening up hinge on his legs much wider than the toy is designed for. It's really tough to get his feet tucked away in the way they tell you to. I figured it out, eventually, but it's rare that the instructions are just outright incorrect like this.

But, overall he's super cool. I will buy him again if they do a G2 version in yellow.

Zob (the more G2, the better)