Bot Reviews: Transformers: Legacy Deluxe Tarantulas

Kingdom was so close to completely updating the cast of the first season of Beast Wars, which is why I’m glad that Legacy is picking up the stragglers, to finish it off, even if they’re also laying down the gauntlet of updating the casts of the later two seasons, with Transmetal II Megatron coming up.

One of the two latecomers that Legacy is getting around to is this guy, Tarantulas, the creepy mad scientist of the Predacons. When he wasn’t cackling, or attempting to literally eat his enemies, he was a schemer, with his own, traitorous, if vaguely-defined agenda, who did a better job at being a back-stabber than the Designated Starscream Copycat, Terrorsaur.

We never did really find out what was up with Tarantulas, though, with vague hints that he’s tied to either Unicron, or Jhiaxus’s Cybertronian Empire. Beyond Beast Wars, meanwhile, he’s most well-known for a turn as a villain in the IDW Comics miniseries Requiem of the Wreckers, and its one-shot followup, Sins of the Wreckers, where he was tied into the histories of Springer and Prowl.

His original Deluxe Beast Wars figure was one that I never really got to own or handle, though I’ve heard it’s one of the better ones, and visually, it was actually decently animation-accurate, aside from the unpainted grey face, so this update’s a bit more obligatory, and a bit less due to a burning need (outside of the original not being available).

It’s a bit funny, too, that one of the first Kingdom Beast Wars updates was Blackarachnia, who began life as a repaint of his original toy, and we’re only now getting to the original. Either way, he’s long overdue, and I was eager to add him to my Beastie Shelves.

Robot Mode

Tarantulas isn’t the tallest Deluxe, but he’s beefy, and that’s before the spider legs come into play. Despite their shared origins, he shares precisely zero tooling with Kingdom Blackarachnia, and it’s kind of interesting comparing them side-by-side, and seeking kind of funhouse-mirror warpings of the same design cues between them.

It’s almost boring to say at this point, given Kingdom’s track record, but Tarantulas is nice and screen accurate. It’s a freaky, odd design, with claw hands, huge pecs, and so forth, and the weirdness is all faithfully replicated here.

The spider head on his pelvis is now fake, instead of his alternate mode, and it has nine “eyes” sculpted in, like the show, instead of a real-life-accurate eight. He’s got a big of a backpack, compared to the show design, but, like Blackarachnia, it’s within reasonable bounds, and can rock back and forth a bit to get more out of the way.

His head is the nicest bit of him, feeling like a downscaling of a Masterpiece that doesn’t yet exist.

He has a weird, monstrous face, with a visor, and strange mandibles, and that’s all replicated here, but more importantly, it gets that elusive sense of character right, something even the good Kingdom updates have sometimes struggled with.

When I checked a screenshot, of the show, too, I noticed that the designers even sculpted in specific animation details on his upper arms, where his spider legs attach, so they really got detailed on his design. Those spider legs are his big issue, though.

See, on the original figure, and his CGI model, they folded and pointed towards his back, out of the way. It’s an orientation that Kingdom Blackarachnia replicates, too. But on Legacy Tarantulas, they’re backwards, and are stuck curving and pointing forwards. Granted, he could aim them like this on the show, to shoot machine gun blasts out of them, but usually, they were more out of the way, and they do feel like they’re in the way, here, since they’re either stuck pointing forwards, or flared out in a way that takes up a lot of room. And thanks to how they’re sculpted, you can’t, say, rotate the knee joints (they each have one) to make them point backwards. It’s the kind of thing an extra joint, like a mushroom peg, on his arms might have fixed. As it stands, you can swivel each leg assembly back fairly far, but it only sort of helps.

Tarantulas’s colors are charmingly ridiculous, and accurate. He’s deep purple, with lime green, black, and bits of yellow, looking for all the world like a 1987 or 1988 Decepticon, with garish extras like yellow stripes on his claws.

He’s nice and vibrant, with tons of paint on his face, in particular, including his visor, mandibles, and forehead eyes. He doesn’t quite have all his deco from the show, but a lot of what’s left off (like some black in the centre of his torso, and various colors on those mid-arm spider leg connectors) seems to be due to the needs of the transformation, and he still looks very well-painted. As a bonus, while it’s hard to spot, there’s a Predacon logo added to his right thigh.

For a guy with a big backpack and fairly small feet, Tarantulas is, fortunately, nice and stable, and comes with good articulation, though it gets a bit odd uptop. He’s got ankle tilts and ankle rockers, a waist that can move pretty well despite his backpack, and a ball-jointed head, but most importantly, double knees, thanks to his transformation, and I’ve found that they let him loom and crouch in really characterful ways.

The funky situation with his arms, though, is that he technically doesn’t have elbows. But it’s hard to notice, because he has a forearm joint that’s a bit too high to be a wrist swivel, and a bit too low to be an elbow, but sort of works as both, especially given how ambiguous the shape of his arms are with his giant claws. Meanwhile, he’s got two different bicep swivels, one too high, and another too low. Make no mistake, they still all work, and his arms are plenty bendable. It’s just conceptually strange when you really look at it.

And, again, each spider leg has a not-terribly-helpful knee joint, and the assembly attached to each arm can swing backwards, but not rotate, which would have helped.

Tarantulas comes with two accessories. One is his classic missile launcher, with a big, bladed missile permanently fused to it. It’s something I criticized during my Blackarachnia review, and it’s still true here: While I don’t expect a spring-loaded missile launcher these days, I would have liked the missile to at least be removable, if only for the sake of doing some accessory combinations, on top of all the times he used his weapon without a missile on the show.

I also find myself wishing it had even a bit of color to it, it’s solid black, unlike Blackarachnia’s more painted version. On the upside, unlike hers, there’s a Weaponizer port on the back of it.

Tarantulas’s other accessory is a horizontal, handheld buzzsaw. This is actually a shout-out to his later Transmetal body, which saw him wielding a vertical version of this vivisector, but they gave it to this form, instead. It’s cast in black, with a silver-painted blade that, sadly, does not rotate. It does have a peg on the back of it, for weapon combinations, though. Plus, I’ve had luck giving it to both Legacy Road Rocket, and my vintage Transformers Prime Knock-out, to imitate weapons and accessories that both figures were missing.

Speaking of Weaponizing, it’s a tad bit disappointing that the only ports Tarantulas has on him for that purpose are on the bottoms of his feet. On the upside, I appreciate the stealthy sculpting at the base of his claws that lets him hold his weapons well, as well as any other compatible accessory.

Transformation

Tarantulas’s transformation is easy enough after the first time, though it has a few wrinkles. Due to the fake beast chest, he kind of transforms backwards to the original toy, with a waist twist. The wrinkle is, basically, that his backpack/spider butt really needed more clearance, and when manipulating it, rotating his waist, and folding his legs into it, it feels like I’m fighting for room. That, plus getting his robot folded up and pegged in is a bit of a pain. I found luck by kind of splaying them out to the sides, and folding them in sideways.

Still, I do appreciate that he’s way easier to convert than Blackarachnia was.

Tarantula Mode

I’m a bit arachnophobic, and Blackarachnia’s black widow mode was realistic enough to ping that phobia a bit. This guy doesn’t register on my fear scale at all, just because of how goofy he looks.

To be fair, that’s mostly in the colors, but the sculpt is one that feels like it’s being a bit less realistic, and a bit more “soft,” with the juxtaposition of a clear attempt to do a realistic, eight-eyed face, right next to a pair of claws up-front that aren’t realistic at all. I think. I ain’t Googling that.

I’m not complaining though, it’s definitely the Guy from the Show, and he’d be terrifying if he were realistic, since I’m pretty sure this is basically a 1:1 scale Tarantula.

He’s cleaner in terms of robot parts than Blackarachnia was, with only the bottom being a bit kibbly, and some rectangular gaps up top due to the transformation. He’s also got his bladed missile really clearly hanging out of his backside (it stashes in there as part of the transformation), but you can always leave it off him if it bugs you.

For colors, he’s still mostly purple, yellow and black, with less green. Again, he’s not perfectly show-accurate, he had more color around the face on the series, but it looks right at a glance, and feels colored enough.

In this form, he doesn’t have much in the way of articulation, really.

Each leg is jointed at the knee, but you can’t move them at the body at all, without undoing his transformation. You can swivel and bend his claws, if you like, at least.

I will say this as a positive, though: His legs are strong enough that he can balance on them without needing to lie on the floor, which is great. That, and, you can get a degree of expressiveness out of him by swiveling individual legs, which I also like.

For features, the only thing he’s really got going on is his weapon storage, which, outside of the butt-missile, includes the ability to stash his buzzsaw beneath him. I wasn’t expecting much, but I do kind of wish we could have made a Heavily Armed Spider.

Overall

Reading that back, I sound kind of down on Tarantulas, don’t I? I’m really not, though, I quite like him. He’s a really good representation of this character, he gets the look and feel right, and is really accurate. He’s solid and poseable in robot mode, and has a solid (if less poseable) spider mode.

The transformation’s a bit fussy, and those spider legs are a bit disappointing in both modes, but neither of those is a dealbreaker to me. He’s definitely not the strongest of the Kingdom (and Legacy) Beast Wars updates, but he’s middle of the road. It says something about how Kingdom’s been so strong, though, that the middle-of-the-road average is probably higher than standard Transformers to me, and I hope I never get to the point where I take for granted how great it is to have show-accurate Beast Wars updates at retail. If you like the character, and are building the cast, he’s a must-have, and as a random figure, he’s workmanlike, but good. And if you’re a turbo-nerd like me, it’s academically interesting how different he is from his former repaint, Blackarachnia.

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