Generations Selects Gulf

Prelude: Fish heads, fish heads, Roly-poly fish heads, Fish heads, fish heads, Eat them up, yum. Uh... yeah, here’s Gulf, better known in the west as Skalor. He’s an extensive remold of the Terrorcon Blot, so this review here will focus mainly on the differences. Let’s say go!

Robot Mode: Gulf’s basic robot mode is more or less identical to Blot. He’s got different forearms and a new head, but otherwise the robot looks more or less the same except for the coloring. Which is the Japanese coloring, by the way, which is somewhat different than that of the Western release. The real differences, of course, are to be found in the creature shell he carries on his back and in the weapons. Gulf’s shell is a good deal larger than Blot’s, making for a bigger rucksack and making the figure slightly prone to toppling over backwards in some poses. The altered shell comes into play in beast mode, of course, but in robot mode it only really makes a difference if you look at him from the back.

Gulf comes with quite a few more accessories than Blot, though. Apart from the combiner fist (see below), he comes with no less than four extra weapons. Two blasters, a big twin-barreled gun, and a sword. The blasters can be held in hand or mounted on his back. The bigger gun is really the tail of his beast mode. The sword, finally, is looking a bit strange because it’s really just one sixth of a bigger sword, meant for King Poseidon / Piranacon. Still, Gulf looks pretty good all armed up and can even use his two blasters as hip guns if he want.

Overall Gulf makes the most out of an already pretty good mold, so no complaints here at all. Thumbs up for the robot mode.

Alternate Mode: Gulf transforms into a robotic coelacanth monster. Unlike the fish it superficially resembles it has arms and legs and somewhat cartoonish proportions. This is where the different beast shell makes the figure look very different from Blot, making him appear almost as an entirely different robot. He’s a fish monster on two legs with guns on the sides of his head, which is basically all you need to know about this mode. Very nice, love it.

Gulf also has a third mode, transforming into a weapon for the combiner robot to wield. It’s basically the leg mode, just with the two blasters plugged into the feet, the tail blaster on the back of the head, and the big combiner peg pointing downward in order to plug into the back of the combiner hand. Not exactly the most elegant gun mode, but pretty much the same as in G1, so no compaints.

Combiner Mode: Gulf can become an arm, a leg, or a weapon for the combiner King Poseidon (or any other Combiner Wars style combiner). More on that once I’ve got all six Seacons together.

Remarks: The Seacons never appeared in the American G1 cartoon. They did score some appearances in the Marvel Comics (which mostly involved getting trashed), but their most prominent appearance was in the Japanese Masterforce series (which also mostly involved getting trashed). Here the team leader Turtler (Snap Trap) was the only “real” robot in the team, all the other Seacons, including Gulf, were disposable drones who never transformed into robot mode. They served as the Redshirts of the series and were usually destroyed rather quickly. There were always more of them, though.

As for the figure itself, Takara-Tomy really went all-out here, turning an existing figure into an almost entirely new one with ample use of extra parts and a new beast shell. Liking this figure depends, of course, on having a certain affinity for the craziness that was Transformers in the late 80s once all pretense of realistic alternate modes were abandoned in favor of science fiction vehicles and robot monsters. If you like that, than Gulf is definitely worth getting. Besides, you need him to complete King Poseidon.

Rating: A-