Home Special Features Evolution Revolution: A Beast Era Retrospective
Sky Shadow
Height: 14cm to top of head (robot mode); 18cm overall length (beast mode)
Articulation: 11 total points - Ball joint neck; 2 points each arm: ball joint shoulder, ball joint elbow; 3 points each leg: ball joint hip, ball joint knee, ball joint ankle. Plus additional articulation specific to beast mode.
Colors: Molded green, clear yellow, dark blue; Painted red, green, dark blue, yellow.
Accessories: Missile
Author: ExVee
An intelligent, brilliant colored robot, Sky Shadow is one of the most charismatic and popular of the Predacons. A good statesman and leader, he acts as one of Megatron's most trusted counselors. In actuality however, he despises everyone and wants nothing more than to rule the Predacons with his own, "more imaginative techniques." He is an expert in concealment and surprise-assault tactics; with reptilian patience he can lie for days in wait and then suddenly attack with a powerful turbo-missile, or convert to robot form and overwhelm unsuspecting Maximals with his devastating saw-edged pincer. Powerful wings allow him to hover over targets, giving him a distinct advantage with targeting accuracy and in reconnaissance missions.
You can tell that while the tech specs started lining up with the show more starting in the second year, you still end up with a wildly different Beast Wars just for the need of all the extra toy characters.
Fuzors was not a long-lived sub-branding for Transformers, and mostly seemed to serve as a bridge between the second year and the Transmetals. We can kind of see here where the concept could be troublesome. Making good blends of very different animals is never the easiest task while trying to keep any semblance of realism or credibility. Though, then there's Injector... I'd say that we've only really scratched the surface, but that's hardly true. Silverbolt and Sky Shadow constitute fully one-half of the Deluxes, and Quickstrike and Buzzclaw account for a third of the Basics. With four reviews, we've covered nearly half of the entire subline. It wasn't long for this world, was it?
Beast Mode
It seems in Fuzors that really good fusion of the component animal forms was sadly the exception instead of the rule. Sky Shadow proves this to a degree, though others could make a stronger case. This is supposed to be the combination of an iguana (or as close to an iguana as Beast Wars tended to get) and a dragonfly. But when you get down to it, if you popped the wings off, there's not enough particularly dragonfly left to stop this from just looking like some flashy lizard. The sadder part of that? The toy's tail is supposed to look like it's made from the rear quarters of a dragonfly. Though it's woefully short for a realistic shot at a lizard, it sure doesn't call out its origin very loudly. Then in a bizarre turn, there's a bug head facing backwards stuck in the middle of Sky Shadow's back. It's been a while, but I don't remember a dragonfly having such large, crushing mandibles like that... A bit more subtle is two sets of three little insect legs molded alongside Sky Shadow's flanks. Nice detail touch there, though maybe just one pair of vestigal-looking insect limbs would have been a better anatomical fit.
Sky Shadow is articulated pretty well, with ball joints at the shoulders, elbows, hips, knees and ankles. The "wrists" on the forelimbs are just hinges, and the insect legs along the sides are completely immobile. The joints are pretty strong, and the feet are big enough that you can even pretty easily get the beast mode standing on just the rear legs if you wanted. The head is intended to be immobile, but I find that it'll try to move and make all the surrounding structure start to come unpegged. Just in the few minutes I've been writing so far, I've had to put the head and neck back in to place and snap everything closed several times. The jaw can open on a hinge, revealing a row of tiny blunt teeth and the vague impression of a tongue, though all of it is unpainted. It can be a little hard to get the mouth to open since when closed there's no obvious spots to get in and pry it apart.
Both pair of wings are articulated. The forward pair are connected to double hinges, allowing the wings to swing forward and up. The rear pair of wings are attached to the rear-facing insect head, and are gimmicked. The bug head has a small knob in the top that acts as a lever. This allows for a questionable flapping action. Questionable in that the wings only move backwards with the tips generally beating on the tail. The knob can lock in place to hold the wings in their open position, but this gets them in the way of the more frontward wings and prevents much of their movement.
The tail is completely immovable, though it's not without its own tricks, either. There's a lever near the base of the tail. When pressed toward the end of the tail, it triggers a pressure-based missile to fire out the end of the tail. So, maybe that rear-facing bug head is supposed to be the tail gunner? And that sure does look like some weird face the missile shoots out of...
Transformation
Though it can be fairly obvious what parts make up the robot arms, the neat surprise is how they're both moved into position at the same time. The strangest part of the whole thing is that the front legs of the beast mode seem to be intended to point up, with the feet flanking the robot head. There's thankfully nothing forcing them to this position, so you have options of how to dispose of them for robot mode. The wings, though, that's a bit more of a problem...
Robot Mode
One of those Beast Wars figures where the robot has very little in the way of mechanical detailing. If it weren't a Transformer, it actually wouldn't be a half bad Power Rangers monster.
Okay, I mentioned the wings being a problem. The toy in designed to where the better articulated pair of wings ends up in the chest of the robot. But since they're not articulated that well, you're stuck with only two real options. Both involve the wings pointing up along the torso. One way has the wings flat with the torso, kind of giving a broader-chested appearance. This has the drawback of limiting the shoulder articulation since the wings then cut in front of the arms. The other way is to set the wings at a right angle to the chest. Frees up the arms very well, but it looks kind of goofy. I suppose a middle step could work, with the wings angled just enough to clear the arms, but stopping before it looks really stupid.
I have my suspicions that Sky Shadow may have been designed by the same person that did Transquito and maybe Bonecrusher. My ironclad reasoning for this is that Sky Shadow is yet another example of a Transformer that vomits missiles. I'm sorry, but I just really can't figure out the design appeal of having a missile launcher in the mouth of the robot head. I'm largely just thankful that no such toys were used in the TV show. The head is ball jointed and has an extensive range of articulation, mostly owed to how the head is oriented and stowed for beast mode. It also follows Transquito's footsteps in having an extremely alien insectoid appearance. It's been suggested the head resembles the Alien from the movie series of the same name, though I can't help but get a faint Predator vibe...
Wings aside, there's little of note about the torso. The aforementioned beast legs are a funky little issue themselves if just for the fact that you seem intended to drape the feet over the shoulders as some strange kind of clawed epaulets. But since there is no design element forcing this as happened with the wings, you've got choices. Stick them up from the back, arrange them out to the sides, or just simply let them drape down the back. Please, anything but the lizard-foot necklace. They're so out of fashion this year. The way the torso comes together locks down the waist swivel, and even unpegging the offending pieces gains you very little movement. best to let that one go and opt for overall stability instead.
The arms are a mixed bag. While both share the same basic articulation, they're otherwise very little alike.
The left arm is slightly more to the normal end of things. The beast head is attached to the end of the arm, but it's not the "hand", surprisingly. Folding back the head reveals a three-fingered claw concealed within. The digits are very short and lack the angling necessary to allow a grasp on anything. Were they pointed inward a little more the space would be just about right to hold the missile's shaft. What I find slightly odd is that the lizard head and hand are oriented in opposite directions. The lizard head is oriented so it's right side up and pointing forward when the elbow is bent, while the claw is pointing up and back at Sky Shadow. It's not a very natural posture, though it may arise out of necessity here to be able to work in the claw at all.
The right arm ends in the insect head/wing assembly gimmick platform detailed in the beast mode section. The wings form a very giant claw in robot mode, and of course the way the move in beast mode makes a lot more sense this way. Since the lever can only lock the claw in the open position and the action is pretty loose, the claw is sadly useless for actually holding anything. Any object big enough that it wouldn't fall straight out of the claw would be too heavy for the mechanism to hold. Locking closed would have been nice since odds are the figure could have managed to hold Basic Beast Wars figures. As it is, the other joints are strong enough that they should support the weight, and it might be possible to balance a Basic on the claw. But it really would have been cool to have that as an actual action feature for the toy.
And wow, Sky Shadow can really see what he's doing - he has eyes at the ends of both his arms!
By contrast, Sky Shadow's legs are almost uninteresting. Having the more or less typical level of ball joint articulation, they can move freely and the knees in particular have quite a range of flex, for being single-jointed. Some of the only outright mechanical detailing is present on the legs, with generic little technobits on the insides of the lower legs. At the time Sky Shadow was made, ball jointed ankles were pretty uncommon. In fact, off the top of my head I'm not sure if any toys besides Sky Shadow and Terrorsaur had them at this point. Besides the obvious boost to the posability of the beast mode, they give some pretty good posing options. Combined with the general good balance of the toy and the big feet, Sky Shadow can be stable in many poses. For me, I've always thought that the ability to stand on one foot is a good test of a figure's articulation, and Sky Shadow passes easily.
Accessory
Just a missile. It's of the pressure-launch variety, meaning no spring is involved. You press on the back end of the missile until the force overpowers the strength of the plastic holding it in. These are typically favored for budget applications where it's not practical to have the more complicated spring mechanism, but it's also handy for instances where there's limited space. Like a head. Sadly in any case they don't usually fire very far. To get a good deal of range, the plastic holder would have to be stiff enough to resist the pressure for a good while, and at that rate it'd probably just as soon snap as it would bend enough for the missile to pass.
The missile itself it pretty simple. The head of the missile is styled with what to me looks like tiny clawed digits all around it, which very possibly makes Sky Shadow's robot mouth even weirder and more Alien-like. The enlarged part of the shaft that holds in the launcher is not a ball (or "marble" as sometimes called), but more of a flaring of the sides. It means that you have to load the missile the right way or it won't catch and lock into place. I hate when they do that.
Things To Look For When Buying Loose
The missile is the most obvious point here. While it's not vital to the function of either mode, it does help lock the tail together in beast mode, and the lack of it might not be obvious in photography. Pretty much anything else is going to be major body parts that should be apparent in any kind of picture. Just the same, if all you're able to see is a beast mode shot, best make sure the robot head is still back there.
Closing Remarks
One of the weaker efforts at a Fuzor, overall. It really went too far to one kind of animal and the portion of the other feels too tacked-on. The fact that you can easily remove the majority of dragonfly bits and still have a functional lizard seems to speak to this.
Despite Sky Shadows shortcomings with his subline's gimmick, the toy itself is really nice. There's an engineering choice here and there that seems a little questionable, but most everything comes together to a pretty strong result. Sky Shadow is a Very Good Transformer, even if probably not the best example of the Fuzor concept.
-ExVee
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