Bot Reviews: Transformers: Kingdom Deluxe Waspinator

Every Transformers show has goons, henchmen, dumb bad guys who exist to get quickly defeated by the heroes. But nobody gooned like Waspinator. This hapless Predacon was at the bottom of the food chain in the Predacon ranks during Beast Wars, and turned being cannon fodder into an art form. He was dim-witted, had a strange, buzzing voice with a quirky speech pattern (referring to himself in the third-person, and giving everyone else nicknames), and was constantly getting blasted, beat up, smashed, and otherwise blown to bits, yet always came back for more, even as he grew to bemoan his lot in life.

Waspinator did the job of being a jobber so well, it even saved his character from death, as positive fan response kept him from getting killed off, and kept him around all the way to the end of the show. Since then, he’s become one of the more popular, well-known Beast Wars characters, even making it into the hall of fame.

Waspinator had a Deluxe toy in the original line that was, for the standards of the time, decently accurate to his show’s design (and it would be reissued a few times over the years in even more accurate colors). Thanks to his popularity, he actually got a brand-new Deluxe back in 2014 as part of the Thrilling 30 line, and I’ve heard decently good things about it, but never owned it, due to having a reissue of the original.

So, Kingdom’s release is his third spin around the Deluxe scale (well, fourth, if you count his Animated iteration), and aims to create a figure that’s somehow distinct from the previous efforts. I never owned the older update, so this guy’s getting evaluated on his own merits.

Robot Mode

At first glance, Waspinator doesn’t feel very show accurate. But compare him to a Mainframe render, and you’ll see he’s more accurate than you think.

The main things that look different are his wasp mode legs, wings, and the dashes of purple on him, and I have more to say about that later on.

Sculpt-wise, he’s really close to his show model, a fairly standard insect-former design, with a lot of spiky, flared bits. His wasp-like mutant face is pretty impressively captured, too, and capture his kind of blank, gormless look very nicely.

The big problem, visually, is those insect legs. On the original toy, his robot legs formed his rear wasp legs, and in robot mode, the remaining two dangled off each arm. The show’s redesign of him introduces something that’s impossible to replicate in plastic, in that it depicted those two arm-mounted legs just shrinking into his arms, so he was always going to be more kibbly than his show design. So, out of necessity (and a desire to have his rear wasp legs look more natural) This version’s got two insect digits sprouting out of each ankle, and one on each elbow. They’re all pre-posed in curved form, and aside from looking a bit jumbled, they tend to get in the way when posing and handling him.

The ones on his legs, in particular, are meant to flare upwards, but don’t seem to have an ideal position where they’re out of the way, and easily collide with his arms and wings, or else you need to totally rotate them to flare outwards, as additional foot support, which looks even more awkward in person.

He just likes to get in his own way, which, funny enough, fits the character. It does help if you place his wings upwards, like his show model typically had them, instead of down, like the toy and instructions. Those wings are also way bigger than the show model, but again, they shrank on the show, so it’s a concession to reality.

On the upside, Waspinator’s colors are actually really lush. He’s got a lot of deep, foresty green, along with bright yellow and black, and some brown accents. It’s surprisingly vibrant in person, and he’s got a lot of little painted details, that, again, match his show model particularly well, including the circles on his shoulders that no previous version has ever gotten right. He’s got translucent purple on his eyes (and a painted version on his wasp eyes) and wings, which, again, feels instinctively inaccurate. But on the show, those parts were a kind of blue-purple iridescent that most toys interpret as grey or white, so this is an equally valid way to do it, and it feels like a tribute to his Animated version, where those bits were explicitly purple.

Construction-wise, Waspinator’s got that problem with his bug legs getting in the way, which I’ve said enough about. But he’s got another issue that gives a bad impression out of the box: His waist likes to come undone.

Granted, once you get it properly locked in, it does stay in, and can survive posing or a good shake, but it still feels like it should peg in harder. He’s nice and stable on his feet, though, even if you’re not doing anything funky with his ankle-legs to support him.

Once you get past those insect legs, Waspinator’s actually really nicely articulated, with bonuses like ankle tilts and swiveling wrists, as well as wings that are mounted on a ball joint each. It looks like he has no waist joint, thanks to how it pegs in, but he does, and his wasp-head mandibles can move to help facilitate the twist.

Another clever thing about him is the way his feet clamp closed for transformation, as you can half-close them, and balance him on them, to make him seem sort of like he’s hovering. Of course it can, sometimes, be a pain to pose him, with everything bumping into everything else.

Waspinator’s lone accessory is his stinger-gun, which can stash inside his wasp stinger when he’s not holding it. This time around, though, his weapon didn’t turn out looking very good. It basically just looks like the butt of a wasp, and not like a weapon at all. From the very bottom, you can kinda-sorta-maybe see a bit of sculpted gun detail, but it’s barely present. This needed a flip-out end, or something, to imitate the missile detail used on the show model.

A good feature that he does have, though, is lightpiping. The purple in his eyes is translucent, and so’s the back of his head, so his eyes glow really well if you hold it up to light. That’s actually impressive, because not a lot of figures do that these days.

On top of that, Waspinator has a lot of War for Cybertron weapons ports, unlike most Beast Wars updates in Kingdom. He’s got one on the back of each of his forearms, the backs of his shins, the bottoms of his feet, and one where his weapon stashes in his stinger. On some level, they feel a bit wasted, though, when they have to get around his insect legs.

Transformation

This transformation has the broad strokes of Waspinator’s original toy transformation, with the big difference being that his robot legs spin around and fold up into his robot body, instead of pretending to be wasp legs, and his hands hide a lot better. And just like the original, the broad stokes of this are easy to remember, but this time, there’s a lot of little pegging you need to do to make sure everything is securely in place around the middle of his body, where his arms and legs meet.

So the first time you do this, there’s a lot of squinting and fiddling, as you make sure several things are pegged in at once. It’s a case of “once everything is in, it’s in,” but getting there can be fiddly, and you need to make sure his wrists are rotated a specific way, too.

Wasp Mode

It’s a weird thing to start with, but I really like the purple on his wings and eyes in this form. It gives this giant wasp even more 90’s rubber insect toy energy than it already has.

It’s a good-looking bug, and this mode emphasizes all the chitenous sculpted details on his stinger, body and head.

This wasp mode is trying really, really hard to hide his robot kibble on a design without many good hiding places, and to its credit, it does do a better job than the original, or (from pictures) the Thrilling 30 version.

It helps that much of the yellow on his robot bits is hidden, and what remains is a uniform shade of green, mostly, and balled up into a fairly convincing insect-shaped silhouette, like on Kingdom Blackarachnia’s spider mode.

I was expecting this guy to be a statue outside of his wings, but pleasantly, this wasp’s a little more poseable than you’d expect, in that his head can raise and lower, and his mandibles can move.

Those wings have a nice axis of rotation, and his legs can swivel. It’s not much, but more than I’d thought. Mostly, he’s just here to look buggy.

Overall

Waspinator’s a figure of contrasts. I really like his colors and his sculptwork in both modes, but those robot mode legs just get in the way both visually and practically, and make him messy and a bit bothersome to pose and handle. Plus his weapon doesn’t visually work. But his wasp mode’s alright.

It’s interesting to compare him to my original (or, rather, my 10th Anniversary reissue with tweaked colors). Comparing the two, the Kingdom one’s more accurate, and has a better looking wasp mode (the original just had his fists right out there), but the old one didn’t have the leg-crowding problem, was quicker to transform, and had a shooting missile.

This one’s mostly got accuracy going for him, so I supposed it depends on how important to you that is.

As a whole, he’s not outright disappointing like Kingdom Scorponock, but he’s definitely not as great as the other Beast Wars updates, in that he has actual problems. So he’s more of a “only get if you’re getting the whole cast” type recommendation.

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