Beast Wars Transmetal 2 Blackarachnia

Hoo ha, came in the mail today. Actually I was expecting Tigerhawk since the check for this one (well, eCheck) cleared only three days ago. I guess the guy got it out that very day because as far as I know this took one day to get here. From Arizona (I'm in New York), no less. I guess they take those delivery confirmation packages seriously.

Anyway, Blackarachnia is a big old hunk of Transmetal goodness. The spider mode, while it has its problems, is probably the best looking spider Transformer (which includes Tarantulas, TM Tarantulas and BM Blackarachnia), though the front leg things (which are her robot arms) could do with being shorter. I think they messed up her front pedipals with the Beast Machines version because that one needs an extra set of legs and this one could certainly do without them. But I digress.

First off I'd like to mention the color scheme, which i like a lot. She's mainly purple and pink with some black and yellow thrown in the mix. Very nice, me thinks. It's also a big horkin' spider (hehe, I love that word, horkin'), completely dwarfing TM Tarantulas and BMac Blackarachnia. Pretty cool.

However, unlike those who it dwarfs (particularly the BM version), this spider has some troubles standing on its own eight legs. Actually in the package the upper legs were rotated 180 degrees to allow her to fit in the box (as US packaging uses the same size box for each toy). This is also the cooler looking spider way to have her legs, but sadly she's reduced to crawling on her belly. However, swing her legs around and all is well. With some trouble you can manage to balance her on her legs, but her huge abdomen houses nearly all her robot bits making it very heavy and the ball joints on the spider legs just aren't tight enough all the time. Usually she ends up flopping on her butt.

The gimmick is okay. Pull out her mandibles and they're attached to a string with retracts and stuff. It's not on a strong enough mechanism to pull the spider up (which would have been cool) nor can you lock the string into place (which also would have been cool), so overall I'm pretty disappointed by this. The other 'gimmick', and I use the word loosely, is her interchangeable spark which is Maximal on one side and Predacon on the other. Why it is, I'm not sure, as she was on the Maximal side long before she got her TM2 body, but oh well. If you ever need an extra Pred spark for whatever reason, I guess it's good to have.

Transformation is pretty complicated, though not enough to make you go insane. I actually needed to check the directions for one part, and usually that doesn't happen, so give Black Arach some credit for that.

Robot mode is you classic backpacker. Blackarachnia wears her entire spider mode on her back, which wouldn't be a problem if she could pull it off (as Rampage has done), but her legs aren't the strongest things, though you can get her to stand with minimal problems. She's more stable than deluxe Beast Machines Primal anyway.

As they did in beast mode, her robot arms pose a problem here as well. Don't get me wrong, they look really cool, but she has some elbow joint limitations, so there are a few poses I would like to do with them that can't be achieved. There's also problems when she holds her weapon, which is the string retracting mandibles. The peg hole on her hand works fine, but her thumb gets in the way sometimes, and it's tough to use the weapon usefully anyway as most things will end up knocking spider-lady over.

Ah yes, an then there's the infamous bra. For reasons I'm not sure of right now, Hasbro decided to affix a blue piece of plastic over her red shiny one (well, more of a pink). Of course her chest were already in proportion, so now she appears almost freakishly chesty and, as it's been put before, losing the battle with gravity.

You can easily remedy this however. What I did was take out two screws so the chest assembly, which includes her head and some black plastic allowing the assembly to slide up and down, cam come free. Then with a screwdriver chip away at the blue glue stuff on the inside. It should chip away fairly easily as the glue they used melted the plastic. Then the ol' bra should pop right off. Heh, just like in real life! Well, actually, some real life bras are even more complicated than this. And you aren't allowed to take the girl apart before you remove it either. Well, not legally anyway.

You're left with a better proportioned she-spider, and a more show accurate one, but, as was expected, there are um, holes in her chest. They're a bit off center, but generally in the right spot, so um, apparently Blackarachnia is cold (or maybe holes imply the opposite of cold, I'm not sure).

Ahem, anyway, before this review goes any more downhill, let me mention her lone gimmick in this mode. Her kicking action. It pretty much sucks. Wind her waist around and push her head back and she kicks and stuff. Whee. Her legs will also thwack into the spider part hanging over her ass, which stops the motion. It's not all that much worth it. I for one would have taken some firing missiles over that. Ah well.

Also interesting is the possibility of an obliterated vehicle mode. Attached to her abdomen are two wheels of sorts that are pretty useless and her backpack includes some weird pink missile/thruster dealies which were probably tail pipes in the spider-bike or whatever mode. If it was anything like TM2 Megatron's crappy vehicle mode, though, it's probably better they left it off the final toy.

Overall Blackarachnia is a pretty neat toy, though not without its flaws. These were pretty scarce when they came out, and now they are even harder to find. Many people on eBay want $45 a pop, but that is not even close to worth it. Most of the time they won't go over $25, which is a good price to pay, and sometimes you even luck out like I did and the final bid ends up at $20.50 (with my max being at $25), which was pretty cool. Paying more than $25 is silly though.