Dave's Beast Mutant Rant: Razor Claw One of the three Wal-Marts in town that I frequent must have gotten in a single case of new Deluxes this week. They had two Razor Claws and two blue Rhinoxes, but no Poison Bites and no orange Rattraps (and yeah, I asked if there were more in back). Note, the name is Razor Claw, not Razorclaw, so it's not exactly a name reuse. CAPSULE Razor Claw: Good raptor mode, interesting transformation, so-so wolverine mode. Points for effort, but only mildly recommended. $9.76 at Wal-Mart. RANT Note, I have taken it upon myself to edit the techspec note and not only correct gross errors but also generally improve the style. After all, I'm not constrained to a particular wordcount. MUTANT: Razor Claw Modes: Raptor/Wolverine Function: Warrior Motto: "Greater dooms win greater destinies!" Razor Claw's reputation for loyalty and self-sacrifice is unmatched within the Mutant faction. He goes into battle with Crusader-like enthusiasm; relishes tearing Predacons apart in both dinosaur and wolverine modes. He does not care for Maximals, but realizes that their existence is necessary in order to ensure the survival of organics like himself. He is also secretly jealous of their ability to assume robot modes. The tremendous speed he has in wolverine mode borders on teleportation, while a negative ion shield in dinomode protects him against energy weapons. STR 6 INT 7 SPD 8 END 8 RNK 5 COUR 8 FRP 7 SKL 9 Avg 7.25 According to the packaging the Mutants are a third faction, the results of what happens when a Fuzor gets hit by Megatron's anti-transformation virus (not that this happened to Silverbolt, but hey). They have a new faction symbol that resembles the three crossed ellipses used to symbolize atomic power, but with some differences. The cards use the Transmetal II background patterns, but with a modified logo. This makes them pretty easy to pick out on a rack full of Machine Wars. Also, the techspec art treats the mode-not-packaged-in as the robot mode. Throughout this review, I will occasionally be mentioning little tidbits that aren't in the instructions, but probably should be. I'll be prefacing them with UF:, for Undocumented Features. Raptor Mode: 7" (18cm) from snout to tail tip and 3.5" (8.5cm) high at the hip in proper raptor horizontal-torso position, this raptor is mostly dark green with black stripes and orange spots. Note, it's packaged only partly in this mode...in order to fit it in the standard bubble, it has the wolverine tail deployed instead of the correct tail tip. Anyway, the forearms and toes are made of a pearly very light green plastic that doesn't really go well with the rest of the body. I think it would have been better to have a brown body and tan forearms for reasons to be discussed later. The chest area looks kinda squished, and is in fact inside-out, an artifact of the transformation process. Gives RC a lean and hungry look, but also exposes some ugly seams. Jaw is hinged, and forelegs are ball-jointed at the shoulder pretty much how Dinobot (and Dinotron) has them. The rear legs have three main joints each, plus lots of toe articulation. The inner claws can raise up to become the standard attack claw of the various 'raptors. The middle two claws on each foot are linked together and can move on a hinge to help various poses. The outer claws are strangely on ball joints and move outwards rather than up and down. This does help with pose stability, but looks kinda odd. The large number of stiff joints does let you keep RC in a fairly wide range of standing poses. On the left thigh is embossed the Mutant faction symbol, and it's picked out in silver chrome. If you pull up a spring-loaded hatch at the back of the raptor's skull, you reveal RC's robot head. As others have commented, it looks kinda like an Andalite head, complete with eyes at the ends of the antenna stalks (these eyes are the raptor's eyes, clever). The only real wolverine mode kibble is the rear legs of that mode hanging along RC's stomach, and they're not terribly obvious. If you ignore the orange toes. More on that later. Transformation: A fairly clever inside out origami transformation, with a bit or two you need the instructions for the first time. Reptile skin patterns are almost all hidden and fur patterns revealed. UF: Rotate the thighs 180 degrees on their long axis to hide the reptile patterns (and the faction symbol). Just hold onto the body and the lower leg and twist the thigh around. Also, if you splay the ball-jointed claws out a little, it makes the feet better resemble mammalian paws. Well, a LITTLE better. Finally, push the thighs on what are now the front legs forward as far as possible to make them part of the body. This makes the forelegs shorter and leaves the remaining sections only as thick as the new rear legs. It's still not pretty, but it's not as bad as the instructions would do it. Wolverine mode: Okay, a valiant effort, but it just has too many problems. First and foremost is the color. Everyone knows that wolverines are not green and silver...that's the Spartans (so sue me, I have a job interview at Michigan State next month). But seriously, the green color scheme really hurts any chances this toy had of maintaining the illusion of being a wolverine. Although I suppose you could call it a Beast Boy action figure. As a little side problem, some genius decided to paint the rear claws orange. That is just wrong. Unfortunately, even if the colors were fine, there's a couple of major proportion problems in this 5" (12cm) long wolverine. The forelegs are just not working. Either you have the shoulder joints too far forward by following my UF advice, or he has freakishly long and thick forelegs. And the raptor claws just don't pass for wolverine paws, even with the sideways toe trick. Then there's his tail, which comes out from between his legs rather than from the top of his rump. Making rude comments about this positioning is way too easy, so I won't do it. Finally, his undercarriage junk is pretty bad, although it's hidden better than it might have been. Weird Alternate Mode: From wolverine mode, straighten the forelegs and splay the toes all the way to the side. Tilt the back up a bit, and raise the rear legs up and over so that the toes point forward. Raise the head a little as well. With the head pointing to the left, he should look a little like a 3 from the side. I call this the walkermech mode, with the orange toes being energy claw launchers. Hey, ya do what ya can. Overall: Basically, this toy runs into the same problem that the Animorphs did: both modes are supposed to look like something we know. There's no robot mode cop-out where proportions can be messed with and kibble shoved aside. So you end up with one mode that looks right and one that doesn't really come that close. All things considered, they didn't do too badly, but the choice of colors REALLY hurt the toy. It's certainly worth a look, though. Dave Van Domelen, notes that there's way too many scraping joints to allow for a home-repaint job....