Blackarachnia

Height: 15cm to top of head (robot mode); 7.5 cm overall height (beast mode)

Articulation: Robot Mode: 15 points total - Double jointed neck, ball joint shoulders, ball joint elbows, swivel waist, ball joint hips, thigh swivels, hinge knees; Beast Mode: 18 points total - 6 points in secondary spider legs consisting of hinges and swivels, ball jointed pedipalps, 10 points in main spider legs, consisting of hinges, swivels, and ball joints.

Colors: Molded black, purple, clear red; Painted gold, red, purple, black.

Accessories: Grapnel Hook

Release Data: Released early June, 2008 in the United States. Released rather a bit sooner many other parts of the world...

Gallery: 20 images.

Author: ExVee



Blackarachnia started out as a promising young recruit at the Autobot Academy. Accidentally abandoned on a hostile alien world by her teammates, she did the only thing that she could - merged with the organic monsters that swarmed the caves in which she was trapped. Emerging as a technorganic mutant, she vowed revenge on the Autobots that had left her behind, and joined the Decepticons in their war of conquest.

The cartoon expands on the circumstances of that bio note somewhat, but suffice to say that among Animated, Blackarachnia so far holds a singular distinction, that of converting into a beastly alternate mode. Longtime fans of Transformers will of course recall Blackarachnia as having figured prominently into Beast Wars and its sequel Beast Machines, where these beast modes were far more common.



Beast Mode

The beast mode is, as with each past toy in this lineage, a representation of a black widow spider. In truth, none of the toys named Blackarachnia have been fully credible black widows. The first was a recolor of something vaguely meant to pass as a tarantula, the next was more in line with the form and somewhat the color of a black widow, but only in the most basic senses, plus it was all meched out. The third came closest to the form of the black widow, but they just gave up even trying with the colors by then. Of the three previous, this toy's beast mode draws most, at least in form, from the Beast Machines version, which was one of the more anatomically accurate spider Transformers to have come along. Animated Blackarachnia improves on this bit of realism, though in doing so they've lost some black widow proportion accuracy.

The legs of the beast mode have some particular quirks that none of the official documentation is really equipped to cover. First, let's define some concepts. As a spider, the toy has eight legs. Four of these become limbs in robot mode. We're gonna call these "main legs". Then there's the other two pair, which are basically ornamental in robot mode. These are the "secondary legs". The secondaries and the tips of the main legs are all composed of soft plastic. The secondaries have much more limited articulation, one set actually only articulating on a swivel at its base. In playing with the toy, the conclusion I've reached is that the greater weight of the body can either be primarily supported by the secondaries, or the main legs, but never both at once. I haven't found any combination that lets the load be deployed evenly, and further I've found it's usually easier to set the weight on the main legs. Beyond this, the packaging seems to not exactly have any idea of the way to pose the legs to look reasonable or give any illusion of the figure standing up. What I've come up with will be demonstrated in the gallery, but the best way I can explain here is to set the forward main legs (the ones that become the robot arms) so that they land between the pair of secondaries. This is the only way I've managed to get a balanced appearance, since there's aesthetic issues for me with having all the big legs on the rear half, and to help keep as many legs as possible on the ground at once.

Moving along, I'm of the opinion that the toy is slightly mistransformed in package - like that's never happened before. The robot head comes with the face pointing down so if you turn the spider on its back, you see the robot head looking back at you. Besides the straightforward objection to this, there's a good reason to partway transform the toy and turn the head around. Once you do, you'll find that the abdomen can only sit properly in just one position without popping the head up through it. This position is the generally associated posture a large spider takes where the top of its abdomen is well above the line of its head. It's a much more natural looking pose for the toy, and helps disguise one of the very few obvious robot bits. The other visible parts being the robot hands which you just can't do anything about.

Most of the interesting and practical articulation for this mode is not in fact in the legs, which have only a certain amount of flexibility, not much of which is practical for posing in this mode. At least, not without employing the grapnel. No, the interesting part is in the head. Spiders have two main moving parts on their heads. First is the chelicerae, the mouth parts. Then there's the pedipalps. These are basically the spider's hands. Among other purposes, they are used to guide food into a spider's mouth. Sometimes they're big enough that they look like a fifth pair of legs, and for larger members of the arachnid family, can actually be used in walking. Anyhow, both structures are reproduced, and articulated for Blackarachnia. The pedipalps are mounted on fairly restricted ball joints, and at least on mine, one of them likes to pop off pretty easily. The ball joint mostly just lets you rotate the pedipalps a little bit, or bring them together slightly in front of the mouth. The mouth parts themselves are hinged, but difficult to manipulate with the pedipalps in place. It's not altogether a lot of articulation, and using it can be a little troublesome, but it certainly gives you an opportunity to make the beast mode a bit expressive, and show a little personality.



Robot Mode

Still retaining characteristics from previous toys to bear the name, the robot mode much more heavily draws design cues from the two Beast Wars toys. Mostly the only real element that could be linked to Beast Machines is the extra pair of eyes above the "main" eyes. Otherwise, the face skews heavily to Transmetal 2 Blackarachnia, with hints of the first cartoon model in the helmet shape. Of course, in this case the entire rear half of the head is unpainted, translucent red plastic. It actually makes it a little bit harder to get a good glow out of the eyes since the input is much less focused. Opaque surroundings would otherwise tend to funnel the light towards the eyes. Even shining the brightest LEDs I have into the back of the head, it's difficult to get an even glow that doesn't seem to shine out one side more. The only spot of purple on the head, the figure's mouth and surrounding area were of course painted. Sadly this has softened the molded detail somewhat, and the mouth is somewhat lost among the field of purple. The neck is a double joint system. The lower joint is primarily for transformation, but can be coordinated well enough to extend the useful poseability of the neck. The lower joint is simply a hinge type only allowing forward and back motion, so while it doesn't add a lot, it can aid some expressive poses. The neck also has a callback to Beast Wars, as the figure's faction insignia is here, as with the pre-Transmetal cartoon model.

The figure's torso is about as thin as you'd expect for a female action figure. There's some clever bits in forming the torso. The chest is formed from the spider head, which sits at an appropriate angle to suggest the bust line. The chelicerae open forward to appear as abdominal muscles, while the pedipalps can be rotated to the sides in order to fill out the "hourglass" shape. Much like with the arrangment of the legs in beast mode, this step is not represented especially well in either the packaging photos or the instruction sheet, just fiddle with it until they lay flush against the contour of the middle torso. There's a swivel joint hidden between the mandible-abs and the pelvis. The beast mode junk restricts its range of motion, but pretty much just down to a natural twist. The beast mode's sub-legs stick out the back, from just below the arms. Again, official documentation does not adequately depict how to deal with this, but you'll quickly find the best way to get them out of the way. Or just see the gallery for my way. They don't really bother the rest of the figure very much, though as they're soft plastic you'll want to be careful that nothing comes to press them out of shape. Afterall, she'll need them to stand on later.

The spider abdomen can be dealt with a variety of ways. The official position is to fold it down against the legs as much as possible. To the other extreme, you can raise it up and wedge the base under the spider legs. Otherwise, you've got any point in between, depending how much back you want your toy spider robot to have. Moving right along... Finally, the pelvis vaguely reflects Beast Wars, with the red rectangles representing the original version's spider eyes, and the red hourglass meant to evoke the "tattoo" on the stomach of the Transmetal 2.

The arms are probably the least interesting part of the figure, without any particular inspiration evident from any previous toys. Each arm has a spider leg-end attached to the forearm on a swivel, so they can be moved out of the way. The rest of the time they can point forward as big stabby-stabby spikes. The real loss here is that the arms are somewhat woefully under-articulated. With only single ball joints at both the shoulders and elbows, and nothing for a wrist or forearm, poses are quite restricted. Blackarachnia can't even do a decent hands-on-hips pose. That should be a basic requirement for any female action figure, if you ask me. The hands are fixed in pose, and as such are basically useless for holding her included accessory. It can loosely wedge between the thumb and fingers, but it's certainly not secure enough for any good use. Thankfully either forearm has a slot cut into it which will more or less securely fit the accessory, but in either case the restricted arm articulation makes posing issues.

The legs are next most boring. However, these actually have a not-so-obvious thigh swivel. Much like the waist joint, the swivel is kind of buried in the detail of the inner thigh. The legs have a pretty good range of movement. The hips are a little bit restricted by some surface detailing, and the squareness of the pelvis, but there's quite a range of poses you can work out of the jointing as is. The knees effectively bend 90 degrees. It's actually a little less since there's a kind of odd back-canting thing going on as a result of the legs needing to be a certain shape for beast mode. Similar to how the spider leg-ends on the arms swivel around, the spider ends switch places with the robot ends. In theory, the upper end is supposed to peg into the back half of the leg. In practice, while the peg might fit into the hole, the peg is very short, and the tolerances seem loose to the point where there's just no hold. It doesn't seem to me that this will be a big problem, aside from making the spider ends where they don't exactly rest flush with the back half of the legs. Blackarachnia's feet are quite small, but this is conveniently manageable since there's not a great deal of mass to be supported. Thankfully, Blackarachnia has heel spurs so she won't go toppling backwards. You might need to adjust the angle of the toes slightly to make sure she doesn't end up rocking forward, as the angle where they seem to "click" into place sometimes ends up being the slightest bit too far to leave the feet planted firmly and flatly.


Paint and Deco

The paint work is mostly pretty good. But consistently falling short of the mark are the red paint operations. The four spider head eyes all have spotty coverage, uneven edges, and noticeable splotchyness. The pelvis fares little better. Otherwise, there's only a slight error with the gold paint on the forehead. While it's not the greatest Hasbro paint QC I've ever seen, I've had worse toys than this. The only intentional move here that I take issue with is the entirely unpainted back half of the head. I kind of covered that in enough detail in the main part of the review, so I won't rehash here. I will say though that Hasbro's paint department did a fantastic job color matching to the purple plastic. It's practically indistinguishable.



Accessories

-Grapnel Hook

It's okay, I didn't know what a grapnel was at first either. My research tells me that it's simply a proper name for a certain type of anchor, typically associated with the more general idea of a grappling hook. Though, the picture references I found don't really match the toy's accessory. Regardless of naming issues, this is a really sweet accessory. The claw or hook, depending how you want to call it, is a three pronged affair. The two top prongs are independently articulated from each other, though they don't always want to be. The string is attached to the single bottom prong. This claw is amazing. It's been able to grab just about anything I put in front of it, up to a couple centimeters (near enough an inch) thickness, even with square edges. It'd probably be able to hold on a little bigger edge, but I don't seem to have one handy. This is most likely the single best grappling anchor accessory Transformers has ever presented us with. Not only does the claw hold on strong, but it connects to the figure very securely in beast and robot modes - assuming you don't try to use the hands. Blackarachnia can be safely, securely, and without worry hung from just about anything the grapnel will hook onto for as long as you choose. It works very well in beast mode and with just a little work you can get a very nice dangling pose.

The string sadly is only about 8cm in length (just over 3 inches), which hurts playability with other toys. But for just hanging the figure off other stuff, unless you're set on hooking it onto a light fixture and want it dangling into the middle of the room, you're gonna be good. The only thing that doesn't work satisfactorily is being hand held, as mentioned earlier in the review. The grapnel has a specific place to plug in for each mode. In beast mode, it fits into a space under the abdomen. In robot mode, it can plug into the upper back, or either forearm. The abdomen position could still be used in robot mode, but might be less useful. Not as ugly though. Did you know grappling hooks are traditional accessories for toys named Blackarachnia? The only toy that lacks it is Beast Machines Blackarachnia.


Closing Remarks

Among a series of fairly unique designs, this is a unique presence of its own. Able to add a whole separate dimension to the existing Animated design style, Blackarachnia brings some fun alt mode flexibility to the party. While there are some sticking points, nothing is terribly severe, and does not significantly impact my enjoyment of the toy. Not to mention it has one of the most fun and widely usable accessories I've been able to play with in quite a while.

Since Blackarachnia is part of the first round of Animated toys being made available at general retail in the United States, I've gotta say that it's a great way to get introduced to the line. Should this be indicative of the majority of the other toys, I think we're most assuredly in for a treat. Blackarachnia ranks Excellent.

-ExVee, 6/9/2008