Dinobot (1996)

Height: 13cm to top of head (robot mode); 20cm (beast mode length)

Articulation: 19 total points - Ball joint neck; 6 points each arm: Universal joint shoulder, upper arm swivel, hinge elbow, hinged claws; 3 points each leg: Ball joint hip, ball joint knee, hinge ankle.

Colors: Molded fleshtone, translucent orange; Painted dark brown, blue, yellow, red, white.

Accessories: Cyber-Slash Tail weapon

Gallery: 21 images.

Author: ExVee



Dinobot filled a particular archetype, that of the honorable enemy turncoat. In this capacity, even from the first episode of Beast Wars, Dinobot provided the hint that the faction lines within the fiction were not distinguished by black and white concepts of good and evil. In an almost anime turn, we're given the clue that maybe not all Predacons are really that bad. Later we'd see signs that the reverse is true with the Maximals. Yikes...

His skills as a warrior and his knowledge of Megatron and his former comrades make him a valued asset. But while he allies himself with Maximals, he shares few of their values. His decidedly Predacon way of doing things often leads to friction with the rest of the team. His alliance is one of convenience, a means to fight against Megatron. He may use a Maximal activation code, but Dinobot has no illusions - he knows that if the Maximals would ever return to Cybertron, his fate would be sealed alongside Megatron.

Dinobot is, above all else, a Klingon. He lives for his personal honor, and seeks a glorious death in the heat of battle against a superior opponent. However, for most of the show's second season, the opponent Dinobot would face was the concept of fate and predetermination. For how could he seek honor and glory for himself if he was not even ultimately responsible for his own actions?

"The question that has haunted my being has been answered: The future is not fixed. My choices are my own. And yet, how ironic, for I now find I have no choice at all. I am a warrior; let the battle be joined."



Beast Mode

I don't know what suffers worse - the toy, or me. Y'know, the 1990's either never learned or never cared about the real article behind the velociraptor image popularized in movies and TV. Contrary to Jurassic Park, and most or all other popular portrayal, velociraptors were roughly the size of a turkey. Dinobot's show model compounds this problem by inflating the size of his beast mode even more than Jurassic Park, though in fairness many beast modes were upsized by necessity.

The toy has its own share of problems, some more bizarre than others. To start, it's built wide and low to the ground, or at least appears low to the ground. It's hard to say whether the massive, clear-orange rib-like structures under the body are meant to be taken as part of the body, in which case you have to wonder why Dinobot is running around with most of his rib cage exposed. And why he has two sternums... If they're intended to be ignored, Dinobot is technically elevated off the ground a fair bit, though the legs are still set ridiculously wide.

The legs are their own problem, though at this point we're pretty well past any illusion of this truly representing any real anything, dinosaur or otherwise. The feet are styled like some birds with two rear toes. Though in those cases it's usually mirrored with just two toes in front. Dinobot has three, including a tiny, weakly curled slasher claw. Plus on the inside of either ankle is molded a tiny, useless-looking toe with a little claw. Hm. Six-toed feet? Poly-dactylism much? Tarantulas must have really screwed things up when he rebuilt the DNA sequence off that raptor fossil...

Though, for all my picking apart the flaws in the beast mode, there are some nicer bits. The surface detailing over much of the skin has a nice maybe not quite scaly texture, but you can kind of tell what they were going for. Plus there's a few wrinkles added here and there to give the illusion of the skin flexing around a skeletal structure.

There once was a pretty widely held belief that some of Dinobot's beast mode pieces were run from molds for an unproduced Jurassic Park toy. Of course over the years as the knowledge of how the tooling and molding process really works, that becomes pretty obviously a ridiculous assertion. And while it would seem appropriate, you still wouldn't really be able to blame the saddening failure here on the JP molds. The badness all comes from the need to transform.


Transformation

Though you don't absolutely have to do it, there is a bit of a cheat in disposing of the entire tail as a removable piece. In truth it can stay attached if you don't care that it's sticking up the back behind the robot head. And man, with such a simple transformation overall, it's baffling that Mainframe had to interpret it with parts flying loose all over the place. See for yourself.


Robot Mode

The head is a key indicator of this toy's first-year origin, with its Mutant Head mask pieces. It's never really made clear what the Mutant Heads are supposed to represent. But given the original, ultimately abandoned storyline of Beast Wars, it could represent the biological elements trying to overtake the robotic body, or even a Jekyll-and-Hyde type of personality shift. Whatever original intent came with these seems to have been lost once the TV show neglected the feature for budgetary concerns. In Dinobot's case, the Mutant Head resembles a questionably-proportioned, scarcely-detailed, translucent dinosaur skull. Dinobot is of the style of toys using a hinged mask design for the Mutant Head, so while the mask can be opened to reveal the robot face, it can't be entirely hidden. However, it is easily and non-destructively removable. A fact that has led to a great many absent Mutant masks in today's secondary market Beast Wars toys.

Dinobot's head is attached via restricted ball joint, giving it a fair range of motion beyond simply swiveling, and in fact the stiffness of the joint means tilting the head is far easier than turning it. The mold was designed for the light-piping eye gimmick that was used in the immediately previous Generation 2. But Dinobot, like several other early Beast Wars has this neutralized with opaque plastic and/or paint. Pity... Dinobot doesn't have a mouth - that was a creation for the show model later in the process. Indeed, most everything about Dinobot was pretty heavily reimagined for the CGI model. It's almost as if the modellers didn't like the toy.

It might be vaguely clever how they got Dinobot's beast mode legs up to form his robot arms, with the flanks swiveling around in their entirety. Nobody seemed to take note to getting the panels secured in robot mode, though. In beast mode they're kept in place by the tail, but for robot mode it's really just friction and good thoughts keeping the arms up where they're meant to be. Compounding this, the shoulder swivel is quite a bit stiffer than the swivel to which the side panels articulate around, meaning any attempt to pose the arms will probably end with everything having to be repositioned. Plus, the shoulders end up sitting rather high. So high that they make the head look sunken in by comparison. heck, the top of the shoulders are more or less even with the robot head's eyes.

The "hands" are really just a claw structure made of the oddly numbered and grouped toes of the beast mode. Lack of a wrist joint generally prevents them holding anything by themselves in any useful way, as do the slightly weak hinge joints at the base of the "fingers". Instead, the claws have a 5mm hole at the center, which Dinobot's weapons are meant to plug in to.

The torso is mostly unremarkable. The tail connector can be posed multiple ways on its double hinge and with the tail weapon can be repurposed a couple ways. The dinosaur head takes up the whole front side of the torso, but if you lift it out of the way you can see odd skeletal details molded into the translucent orange plastic.

The legs utilize wide-ranged ball joints for surprising posability. The knees can bend back farther than 90 degrees, as well as swivel freely, and the hips are only limited by the body panels they eventually run into. The lower legs look like freaky skeletal framework that somebody forgot to add skin and muscles to. The translucency adds to the hollow appearance, making the whole thing look really weird. In comparison, the feet are downright normal, albeit looking like he's wearing dinosaur skin shoes. The ankle is a hinge that can go backwards a ways, but that has limited benefit for posing. Not that it matters, anyway. The feet are large enough to balance the toy in many postures with and without the somewhat weighty accessories in hand. One problem this toy doesn't have is being thrown off balance.


Accessories

-Cyber-Slash tail weapon

Possibly better known to its friends as a Veloci-Rotor Blade, Rotary Blade, or Rotate-Blade. Formed from the dinosaur tail, the hinges open to make a pair of blades curved to the point where their effectiveness as blades in the traditional sense is dubious at best. Through an entirely too fun gear system, pushing the button on the base of the weapon causes the blades to spin. A 5mm peg on the base of the weapon allows it to plug into the hole in the middle of either of Dinobot's claws.

The sword is technically a part of this weapon. The conicalsegments of the blade make it clear this is meant as a stabbing weapon instead of a slicing or hacking blade. Good thing, too, since Dinobot can only hold it in a thrusting position. In beast mode, the final segment of the blade becomes the tip of the tail. There's a space in the spinner for the sword to plug into the middle, either for beast mode storage or to make an even more ridiculous weapon.

The show demonstrates the spinner portion as being effective for many purposes over the course of the series. Though by some accounts, the effectiveness of the rotate-blade against a Transmetal is questionable.



Things to Look For When Buying Loose

It's usually obvious when the tail spinner is missing, but the sword may or may not be concealed within it. Plus, as with any of these early toys, easily-removed Mutant Masks are commonly missing. There's a few small pieces that you should check to make sure are still there, too. These include the hinged flap on the back of the beast mode neck, the dino forelimbs, and the hinged jaw.


Closing Remarks

By rights, Dinobot should have been a star of the first waves of Beast Wars. It had excellent articulation, a fun accessory, and a transformation that was complex but certainly not frustrating. Though, let's be honest, this beast mode wouldn't be the one to get Kenner any awards for realistic toys. Even among the good, the toy has some deep flaws. But, over the course of eleven years, this mold would get recolor after remold after recolor, right through 2007, making it possibly the most prolifically reused figure from all of Beast Wars. And the only reason I can think of for such a legacy to fall on this of all toys is the old standby: It's a dinosaur.

Still, even with its flaws, I can't find it in myself to give the toy a very bad score. It might suffer against modern engineering, but it was a leader among its true peers. And given that you have practically a rainbow of mold reuses to choose from, there's probably at least one to satisfy anybody's tastes. Just, uh, avoid 1997's Grimlock. It suffers of Gold Plastic Syndrome.

Dinobot is certainly Good, he just kind of has to shine through the rough a little bit.


-ExVee