Botcon 2016 Tarantulas
There's two points that need to be made about this toy before we look at it. The first concerns the choice of character: expanding the three member Tripredicus was always going to require adding two new members and since both Tarantulas and Ravage are shown to be agents of the Tripredicus council in the Beast Wars cartoon series they are the obvious choices. Tarantulas also fits nicely into the "reminiscing about the TFCC/Botcon" theme that runs through the club's toys in their last year, 2016: The club did a Tarantulas as part of it's third subscription series.The second concerns the choice of toy to turn into Tranatulas: As repaints go I've had difficulty seeing the point of using Rook as a new version of Tarantulas. The colours are inspired by the Transmetal version and I've just seen the light! Tarantulas transforms into a motorcycle, like Groove so using Unite Groove would have been sensible. But Groove only exists in Combiner wars as a Legend: his replacement as a limb is Rook! So Tarantulas becomes a Rook repaint.
Tarantulas swaps blue & grey for black and white for a bluey green matching the Transmetal version quite well. The dark rook vehicle looks great but the robot is simply stunning nailing the Transmetal version to a tee!
I'd like to use the Ida Arms Micron, that came with Airachnid with him but sadly the peg on the rear of Ida doesn't project back far enough to lock tightly in the fist hole on Tarantulas. The peg under Ida does but that results in a right angled claw hand.
Other than that it's a fabulous toy and the real highlight of the Botcon 2016 Predacus set.
Unite Warriors Roller
Roller is the latest Rook repaint to be announced but the first time this toy mould has been used in Japan when he was released on April 30, 2016.Google Translate describes the toy thus, from the TakaraTomyMall page for Unite Galvatronus which he's a part of:
WANDERING ROLLERThis sounds very similar to the version of Roller seen in IDW's More Than Meets The Eye and indeed the cartoon in the Grand Galvatron boxset shows him consuming an Energon drink through a straw just like in the MTMTE Comic.And separated from one's fellow during the battle, the original Autobot warrior who was wandering Between dimension.
The deformation to Roku-rin armoured vehicles. I continued to wait for the relief of alone fellow he was torn absolute lonely soul. He was considered to be abandoned to the trust to have the fellow is dominated by despair and guilt, leading to soon have a strong grudge energy. It has been summoned to this world sensed the energy to Unicron. It had lost some of the stored by long wandering, we are holding a particularly strong hatred against the convoy commander is a symbol of Cybertron.
In vehicle mode Roller takes Rooks white and swaps it for silver, mostly by virtue of painting over green and dark grey plastic, giving a vehicle mode that's the same colour as a variation on the Roller packed with the original Prime. Meanwhile in robot mode Rook's blue is swapped for grey and his grey for red with the non painted parts that were white now appearing to be green.
The resulting toy looked very nice in pictures, as you can see in this gallery but in hand the red is very VERY bright red/orange and your eye is drawn to them. MTMTE Roller is a shade more muted. I'm not sure about the green parts either, the illustrations I see make me think these might be better in pale blue.
The amount of silver paint scares me, I'm worried this will get scratched something chronic in years to come. It's a nice deco, but I worry about it's durability. And, for a toy that excited everyone when they saw it, I think it's probably the weakest of the Galvaron limbs deco wise in hand.
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