The real strength of Beast Wars as a TV show was in its characters, and how they transcended their initial roles, with Blackarachnia being a prime example. Blackarachnia was introduced midway through the show’s first season. She was initially a straightforward Predacon femme fatale, and given her design, the people in charge definitely put her there for eye candy.
Well, the robot mode, at least.
However, something about the writing and performance behind her rose above that. Certainly, the fact that she was the most competent of the Predacons, instead of another goon, helped. She was always out for herself, fiercely independent, trying to claw her way to the top, and before the first season was even out, she’d drawn the spotlight to herself, becoming one of the show’s most central, and memorable characters.
Probably the least-accurate Beast Wars toy.
That being said, the initial toy that she was based off of was actually just a straight repaint of Tarantulas, and it was the people behind the show that chose to radically reinterpret it as the exceedingly feminine robot we got in CGI form. So, if you wanted a figure that actually looked like her, you were out of luck.
Points for effort, but this was just a mess.
In 2015, Takara attempted a more accurate Blackarachnia toy in the Legends line, via extensively retooling her Animated toy, and it…only kind of worked.
More accurate, but more expensive.
Then, in 2019, to many people’s surprise, she got a Masterpiece figure. The Masterpiece was hyper-accurate to a design that wasn’t really intended to exist in plastic, and had a great-looking robot mode, but a messy spider mode. Plus, you know, Masterpiece figures are expensive. Now, the Kingdom figure looks to finally replicate her TV show design at a mainline level, after 15 years. Let’s see how it turned out.
Robot Mode
Boy, they really nailed this one, visually. Rattrap was pretty close, but looking at screencaps, Blackarachnia is almost dead-on to her Mainframe TV show appearance, and at a Deluxe scale, too. Just like the show, she’s the humanoid figure of a lady, but with pincer-hands, and spider-limbs on her arms. All the weirdness of the model is there, and it’s trippy seeing details that were loosely based on Tarantulas’s toy, but radically warped for the show (the eyes at her waist, the vestigial eyes on the back of her head, etc.), now replicated in plastic form.
The backpack is a concession to the price and size.
Basically there’s two differences from her show model here: The spider legs hanging off her arms are now black and realistic instead of brownish and thin (a result of her redesigned beast mode), and she has a little bit of a backpack, thanks to the realities of the size and pricepoint. But it’s still waaayyy smaller than it could have been.
Shout out to her headsculpt, too, after Rattrap was “close but not quite,” this actually does translate her funky-looking face (with its strange-black eyes) into plastic pretty much perfectly.
Surprisingly, they don’t seem to have skimped out on her colors or paint apps. Aside from her intentionally-different arms, they pretty much have her whole layout nailed, even little things like the Predacon symbol on her collar, and the spider-leg shadows on her chest. It helps that she’s basically entirely black and yellow. If I had to nitpick, her arms are about 2 percent different thanks to some missing silvery accents, there’s a couple details on her head unpainted, and, strangely there’s a red hourglass on her forehead that’s unpainted on the show, but that’s literally it. She pretty much lept off the screen.
Hot take: Out of all the villains, she was the one with the most braincells. Even including Megatron.
Her stability and construction in this mode is also surprisingly good, and her feet aren’t even that large. Her one flaw is that she’s not quite stable enough to stand while doing a midair kick, which was a move her character loved to pull.
There’s plenty of other good poses you can do, though.
Like any good action figure, Blackarachnia’s plenty articulated, featuring the now-standard ankle tilts, and the not-always-standard wrist (or rather claw) swivels, as well as the rest of the full articulation suite, minus a waist joint, since her torso splits for transformation. Speaking of her claws, they’re not articulated, but considering that they were portrayed as flexible and unjointed on the show, they probably didn’t want to mess the sculpt up with more seams than they needed. neat trick with her claws is that the innermost edges of them are sneakily molded with enough roundness that her weapon, and any other standard War for Cybertron accessory can fit in them.
It’s a shame these two never had a full-on 1v1 match.
Meanwhile, her arm-mounted spider legs are attached to her forearms on a single fused joint, but the second joint of each leg gets a ball joint all to itself. She’d typically have her spider legs fanned out on the show, but I’ve found that I prefer to use the ball joints to fold them away a bit.
Blackarachnia’s lone accessory is a gun with a big, bladed projectile in it, once again looking exactly like the one she wielded on the show. Here’s a downside to it, though: The original toy could fire that missile, and the show replicated this feature, and often depicted her wielding her gun without her missile. Here, it’s one solid piece that does nothing, with a missile that’s permanently in there, because it’s one piece.
She’s looking smug to distract from the fact that her missile is never going to fire.
While I didn’t expect them to replicate spring-loaded 90s gimmicks, it would have been nice if that missile was at least removeable. It could maybe pass as a melee weapon or something, if they wanted to give her something to do with it. As it is, having a molded projectile that can’t fire looks a tiny bit silly.
For other features, each of her spider legs are actually the right shape to have a War for Cybertron blast effect mount on the end of it. On the show, she had machineguns at the ends of her spider legs, so this replicates that effect nicely. That is, if you have enough blast effects (I sure don’t).
She can fire half of them at a time, at least.
Like Rattrap, War for Cybertron weapons ports were obviously not the priority here, though they did manage to include some on her feet and the backs of her lower legs.
Those ports let me cheat a kicking pose, at least.
Transformation
The funny thing is, because Blackarachnia’s TV show design wasn’t even trying to be a proper transforming toy anymore, a bunch of things on this toy that ought to form spider parts don’t. Her hand claws aren’t pincers, and her “pelvic eyes” aren’t the spider’s eyes. Basically, you’re cramming most of her into her spider-mode abdomen, which means that this is a complicated one, but not too complicated, fortunately. It’s not a 30 second thing, but it’s not “pack a lunch” levels of Masterpiece-type transformation.
How everything looks folded up.
It’s also one that took me a few tries to get, thanks to a lot of parts needing to be positioned just-so. One thing that tripped me up is a swivelling piece at the small of her back that you need to tilt slightly backwards, because it’s on really tight and solid at first, and requires force to break it in (and only on the first go). Here’s a pic of how it needs to go:
Don’t be afraid to apply a bit of force to bend it this way at first, you’ll only need to once.
Speaking of things being broken in, there’s a weird design flaw here that, at the same time, isn’t really a flaw: She has a tiny yellow tab beneath her chest that goes into a hole on her torso in robot mode, to lock it down. Thanks to how thin and straight the tab is, it will absolutely break off sooner or later on your copy (and broke off on mine.)
That little yellow rectangle on the black portion is half of the tab stuck into the hole, and you can see the rest of it uptop.
The weird thing about it, though, is that it doesn’t matter if it breaks, because the hinge the chest is on is tight enough that it stays in position anyway. Like, in robot mode, I can hold her upside down and shake her and it’ll stay in place. Meanwhile, the tab isn’t visible in robot mode, and only the hole is visible in spider mode so there’s no ugly broken visual, either. If anything, you might want to snip it off yourself with some nail clippers, just to get it over with, and avoid having a chunk of it get stuck in there, like on my copy.
Spider Mode
Well, this is a nightmare.
So, time to get personal: I used to be intensely arachnophobic as a child, and as an adult I’m…only mostly arachnophobic. And I can call this a good spider mode, because it absolutely pings that arachnophobia, and kind of gives me the heebie-jeebies. It’s entirely down to her proportions, which they nailed. The legs, face, mandibles, giant abdomen…It’s all horrifying. Like, if this is what the 1996 toy had looked like, I wouldn’t have been able to handle it. As for this one, I dropped it behind my desk accidentally, looked down the dark gap to grab it, saw it peering out from the darkness, and shuddered involuntarily. Making this better (worse?) is the fact that this spider’s about the size of a decent Tarantula, or the size of what I remember those really big Dock Spiders out by the lake being when I was little. They probably weren’t that big.
An average work commute in Australia.
It’s a good thing they nailed the silhouette, because in terms of the actual sculpt, she’s marred by the impossibility of reconciling her two modes, with the robot mode being the clear priority. This means that in this form, she’s clearly got her robot knees on the front of her abdomen, shoulder joints beneath her head, robot arms hanging out underneath her and out back, and an entire extra set of spider eyes at the back.
On the original toy, that bit on the back formed her face, instead of Butt Eyes and Butt Claws.
Here’s the thing, though: The fact that it’s still shaped right makes all of this blend together pretty well, and, looking at photos, it somehow turned out better than the masterpiece, in terms of its cohesiveness.
You ever seen a spider try to square up with you?
For colors, there’s now some additional red on her abdomen, and her terrible terrible spider eyes, with the balance having also shifted to include a lot more black on the sculpted-in chitenous skin…eww.
Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right…
For stability, she stays standing pretty well on her eight spider legs, in most configurations, bent or straight. I’ve found that she needs a minimum of four on the floor to stay standing, and you can do whatever you want with the rest. As mentioned before, those legs aren’t articulated individually where they connect to her body, but have ball joints halfway down.
This is about the minimum legs required.
Now, technically, her weapon stashes beneath her body, tabbing into a couple of slots on her robot arms. However, in practice, it has trouble clipping in, and will often just fall off. The reason for this is that her robot arms have to be aligned in exactly the right position, at exactly the right rotation, but there’s not much to let you know that it’s all where it’s supposed to be.
I actually got really lucky during this photoshoot, and got her weapon to stay on the whole time. I was prepared to toss it the moment it fell off.
Between repositioning them a bit, and squeezing it in just the right way (I’ve found that gripping the back of the arm, and the front of the weapon, and squeezing works best, assuming it’s all lined up) it’s possible to get it in, but if something’s even a bit off, it’ll just fall off.
Seriously, this would be the fight of the century.
That being said, you can just leave it off, since it isn’t needed to complete her altmode, and I’m pretty sure real Black Widow spiders don’t have that extra mass beneath their body (I’m not googling that, though.)
Overall
Two members of a small, but proud tradition.
The only issues Kingdom Blackarachnia has has are the odd situation of a highly breakable tab that also doesn’t actually affect anything, and a weapon that really doesn’t like to stay stashed. All things considered, it’s just wild that they managed to translate this impossible CGI design into an extremely accurate robot at a mainline scale and pricepoint, and the fact that it turned out pretty good is the icing on the cake. The robot mode’s essentially perfect, and I can’t really call the spider mode flawed, as much as “the best it could be, given the size and budget” when I’m not shuddering at it. This figure has basically rendered the Masterpiece pointless, by giving you the same thing at mainline prices, and if you’re a fan of the character, or Beast Wars in general, and can deal with a Big Realistic Spider, then this is one to get.
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