Bot Reviews: Transformers: Kingdom Voyager Dinobot

One of the reasons Beast Wars has become one of the most well-loved, enduring Transformers shows has been the strength of its characters. It turns out, when expensive CGI forces you to have a smaller cast than usual, the increased breathing room to flesh that cast out winds up making the whole thing better, and Dinobot became one of the show’s most well-known characters because of it.

This Predacon Velociraptor had a warrior’s code, was obsessed with honor and glory, and quickly turned traitor to the Maximals, serving as their uneasy ally for most of the series. Between his raspy Scott Mcneil-provided voice, his antagonistic relationship with his frenemy, Rattrap, and the trajectory of his storyline in the show’s second season, he rapidly became a fan-favorite, and was even inducted into the official Transformers Hall of Fame ahead of many G1 originals.

On the merchandising side of things, Dinobot’s original Deluxe-sized figure was one of those designs that was heavily altered for animation. While he kept his weapons, and the more basic design cues, almost everything else about him was changed, making that original release a little bit lacking.

It doesn’t help that he had one of the less realistic CGI models on the show, miles away from still being something that worked physically as a transforming toy. I mean, just look at this transformation:

 

The flattening raptor head, the arms that detach and float, the torso that sprouts and grows out of thin air…This was never designed to exist in the physical world, but that doesn’t mean subsequent updates didn’t try.

There was a 2008 attempt at a more show-accurate figure, to mixed success (and weirdly inaccurate colors, unless you got the Takara repaint) and more recently, a giant, complicated, ludicrously expensive Masterpiece figure, which achieved a somewhat animation-accurate appearance via an insanely complex transformation (and was still covered in panels and hinges in both modes).

I love me some Beast Wars, and I love me some Dinobot, but the size, price and complexity of this guy, specifically, was one of the factors that led to me quitting the Masterpiece game entirely. And so, we arrive at Kingdom Voyager, tasked with being the first mainline western figure of the guy to be animation-accurate, and fun.

Robot Mode

As soon as I got this guy out of the box, my first thoughts were “he is very big and handsome.” Dinobot’s a really tall Voyager, or at least, it feels that way. When I stood him up next to Earthrise Starscream, I realized he’s actually only a hair taller.

But something about Dinobot’s proportions gives the illusion of size, especially compared to the rest of the Kingdom Maximals, whom he currently towers over (Voyager Primal having been made deliberately short also helps).

Proportionally, Dinobot’s unusually humanoid in shape for a Transformer, basically a metal man with dino-scales on his arms, and a flattened raptor head on his beefy-looking torso. At a glance, all of his important TV show details are mostly there, and his silhouette is pretty dead on. His arms do feel a tad bit skinny compared to his more jacked appearance on the show, but that’s about it.

In terms of what they had to compromise for the sake of making him a working Transformer, it’s pretty limited. The big, flat raptor head on his chest is broken up by seams, since it’s partially fake (owing to the laws of physics), and he’s got a bit of a kibble backpack, made up of a chunk of his tail, and that’s all, a fair tradeoff for making him work.

And boy, does the rest of the sculpt work, especially his head, which really makes it all come together. It’s 110 percent correct.

The sculpt is dead on, the face is exactly right, and you can practically hear his voice. It’s like they dug up his old Mainframe CGI model and ported it over to CAD. It helps that they didn’t skimp on the paint on that face, properly coloring everywhere except his little helmetside vents.

The rest of his colors are mostly scaly brown raptor skin, with orange-bronze and blue robot bits, and bits of silver (plus red eyes). The one shortcoming of the deco is that his legs are noticeably missing paint apps, namely the “bones” on his legs, whereas the ones on his torso are correctly painted. It’s unfortunate, but they definitely poured their money into the rest of him.

Another thing that’s nuts about this guy: His poseability. Something about the intersection of his proportions and articulation make him feel more like a traditional non-transforming action figure, in a good way, like one of those high-end ones.

He’s got all the modern Siege-and-onward extras, like Ankle Tilts and Wrist Swivels. And his head’s on a ball joint, for all your looking-down-on-others needs.

His hands are my favorite thing, though. His odd-looking raptor-claw-hands have a whopping four joints each: Swivelling wrist, rocking wrist, and two sets of finger joints. They are insanely expressive, and make him incredibly fun to pose in emotive ways.

Dinobot was an incredibly theatrical character (several memorable moments have him paraphrasing Shakespeare), and so this fits who he is to a tee.

The only downside is he’s not very stable. His feet are a bit small, his torso a bit large, and I seem to have lost the accursed Quality Control Roulette on his left foot, which is a bit loose at the ankle on mine. He’s not unstable the way Masterpiece Shafter is, he’s just at risk of falling over unless you’re careful, and definitely needs to have both feet planted firmly on the ground.

For accessories, Dinobot’s got his two trusty weapons, his sword and rotate blade. The sword’s that same pillar of ascending spikes that we know and love from the show, but they made two odd choices: 1) It feels a bit too small for him. 2) It’s purple, instead of silver. This seems to be a game of broken telephone from the Masterpiece, which made it a metallic rose-silver to simulate the way the show would sometimes light it, and the Kingdom one took it a bit too literally. On the upside, he can hold it correctly, instead of the original toy’s perpetual stabbing motion, though part of me wishes stabbing was still an option, but the shape of the handle now prevents it.

His rotate blade is similarly a bit small, but otherwise correct, and you can mount the sword in it, as he would occasionally. The spinning gimmick of the original has been neutered, unfortunately, but you can easily rotate it inside the peghole in his hand, which feels deliberate. You can kinda-sorta stash both weapons on his back, if you don’t mind a tail hanging down, but it’s not something I see myself doing.

Oh, and at this point, I think I can safely say that the Kingdom Beasts have universally checked out of the War for Cybertron weapons-mounting system, as he’s got peg holes underneath his feet, and on the sides of his legs, but nowhere else. Not that it’s a big loss, as he’d definitely look worse with holes all over him.

Transformation

Good news: It’s not a nightmare of tiny panels like the Masterpiece seems to be. Instead, Dinobot’s transformation is mostly about moving bigger chunks, with some panel-fiddling once the larger bits are all in place. In the abstract, you twist his waist around so his legs are backwards, and then fold him in half backwards along his hips, so his back touches his feet. You move his arms down to form his raptor legs, slide his raptor head out down his stomache, and everything else is all panelly adjustments. The process of merging his robot legs into his torso is a bit complicated, though, in that it’s a lot of tabs that all have to be simultaneously lined up and snapped in, but once you get them all in place, they hold. The most fiddly bit, strangely, are the panels that fold over his robot shoulders to make them into his raptor thighs, in that they don’t like to snap together, and get gappy really easily.

I can only sometimes get them to click in and hold, but there’s a lot of massaging involved.

Beast Mode

Most of Kingdom’s beasts are sculpted to be realistic animals, but Dinobot opts to still be a fake, large, scaly Jurassic Park-style raptor, which I can still get behind. Who’s to say that the Transformers didn’t also get their paleontology wrong when they scanned those fossils?

Either way, this mode’s a little awkward, though it’s still a marginal improvement on the original. The main thing is that it’s very kibbly, with extremely visible robot legs underneath him, and his backside plainly on his chest, in a way that isn’t really hidden.

It’s basically the same as the 90s toy, but the legs go the other way, and are slightly recessed into the body. Part of me wishes they’d found a way to hide these parts better. On the other hand, I’m not sure how, as the only Dinobot to do so was the crazy-complex Masterpiece. I do wish they’d made the robot’s legs a bit less orange, though, as I’d have been willing to trade color-accuracy in the name of making them blend better into the raptor’s body. Probably the weirdest detail of the transformation, to me, though, is the way that his fake raptor-head eyes from his robot chest end up on the backs of his thighs.

But anyway, onto some positive stuff. The parts of him that are actually a raptor sculpt did come out great, with skin that’s scaly and detailed, and the two-tone brown colors that really look nice.

Honestly, I think his headsculpt is a bit goofy in this mode, thanks to the way he’s got a toothy underbite when his mouth is closed. I kind of like it, though, strangely. It has personality. He looks a bit annoyed, and he does a shocked expression when you open his jaw. Plus, he has painted eyeballs, painted teeth, and even a painted tongue, a detail that makes me think of the good old 90s’ toys.

The wonkiest thing about his sculpt is his tiny raptor hands, though. For whatever reason, they’re sculpted as permanently pointing down in a way that’s a bit too doofy. A joint in the right place, or a differently-angled sculpt would have cleaned that right up. As it is, he mostly looks sassy, or shocked. To no one’s surprise, he’s not terribly articulated in this mode, another tradeoff for the transformation. Outside of his jaw, his only articulation is his knees (but not his thighs), his claws, and his raptor arms. Those arms are very poseable though, with three joints each, and he can do a lot with them, even if a lot of it is, again, a bit goofy due to a combination of his oddly sculpted hands and face.

Overall

There’s a lot of small compromises on Dinobot, mostly in his raptor mode. His robot mode is near-perfect, really, with only a bit of a backpack and slightly undersized weapons marring it. Meanwhile, his raptor mode is a lot more compromised, and ridden with odd sculpt choices. For all his little issues, though, I think he turned out really good. Importantly, he manages to not be overly-complicated. All his compromises seem to be in the name of making him fun and playable, and he succeeds in that regard.

Man, Kingdom’s Beast Wars updates have just been knocking it out of the park for me, in general. The weakest one so far has been Primal, and that’s sort of by default. Though, I wonder how much of my enjoyment of this line is my own bias towards seeing the cast of one of my favorite shows ever get the Generations treatment, and how much of it is them actually being good. I think it’s mostly the latter, though, it feels like a lot of love was put into them, and it shows, Dinobot included. I look forward to whenever my Beast Megatron preorder gets fulfilled, and for whatever else is on the horizon, if they can keep this pace.