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Series: Beast Wars
Year: 2000
Allegiance: Mutants
Class: Deluxe Mutant
Function: Warrior
Greater dooms win greater destinies!
Razor Claw´s loyalty and self-sacrifice is unmatched by any of the mutants. Goes into battle with crusader-like enthusiasm; relishes tearing apart Predacons in both dino mode and wolverine mode. Does not care for Maximals but realizes they are necessary for a total organic existence. Secretly jealous of their ability to convert to robot mode. Tremendous speed in wolverine mode borders on teleportation; negative ion shield in dinomode makes him impervious to firepower.
Prelude: Know that I am Razor Claw… with a space. Never forget the space, because there is already a Razorclaw in Beast Wars (and in G1, Universe, Combiner Wars, etc.), but while I share that Razorclaw’s name letter for letter, I am NOT he. I am Razor Claw. Now you know it, I know it, and knowing is half the battle, don’t you know? Let’s say go!
Raptor Mode: Razor Claw, like the other Beast Wars Mutants, does not have a robot mode, but transforms between two different beast modes. The first beast mode (or the second, there isn’t really an order to this) is a raptor. And if we’re talking Beast Wars figures that transform into raptors, let me just say that this is a much, much better raptor mode than that of Dinobot. It’s sleek, has muscular legs, and even a (slightly) articulated tail. The mouth opens up, the arms are on ball joints, it can spread its toe claws, and there is almost nothing visible of the second beast mode. The legs are fully articulated, so running poses are no problem. Almost the entire body has a textured surface to make it look like dinosaur skin and the green color is broken up by black and orange spots.
Like all Mutants, Razor Claw has a robot mode head hidden on his beast mode, the last remnant of his “lost” robot mode. In his case it’s on the neck of the raptor mode, with the raptor’s eyes actually being the tips of the head’s antenna. Very nice, though the head does not stay visible due to the panel being on a spring. He is the only Mutant, though, without any extra hidden robot parts, so there is only the head to hint at his mechanical nature.
Bottom line, a brilliant raptor mode. If they’d managed to make Dinobot’s raptor mode look like this and still transform into a robot, it would have been perfect.
Wolverine Mode: Razor Claw’s second mode is a wolverine. The transformation is surprisingly complex for a Deluxe class figure, as it basically turns inside out (again, parallels to Dinobot). Now a lot of pictures I’ve seen online (including the one on TFWiki) have the wolverine slightly mistransformed with the raptor’s arms sticking out very visibly underneath. They actually need to go through the same hole the raptor’s head goes through, so they form a patch of brighter “fur” on the wolverine’s chest. All in all it’s a pretty ingenious transformation and the only slight downside is that the tail of the wolverine sits a bit too low.
Now here’s the weird thing: the wolverine is all-green. And it really didn’t need to be because, as I said, the raptor turns almost inside out and pretty much every bit of visible “skin” of the wolverine was inside the raptor and vice versa. You can see it because the wolverine has a slightly different texture, vertical lines imitating fur rather than horizontal lines imitating dino skin. So one could have made the wolverine brown or black (as they are in nature) and only the insides of the front legs and parts of the underbelly would have remained green. If you look at the toy’s profile card, it actually shows a brown wolverine.
Designer Tim Bradley, who created this figure, actually admitted that the all-green coloring of the wolverine mode was a mistake, as he had colored the toy solely from the raptor standpoint without considering that the color wouldn’t work for a wolverine.
Coloring aside, the wolverine looks pretty cool. The proportions are a bit off – rather small head and very big forelegs – and the foot claws don’t entire fit a mammal, but overall it’s a surprisingly decent beast mode as well. The raptor mode is better, simply due to much more natural-looking proportions, but Razor Claw’s second beast mode does pretty well, too, apart from the colors.
Remarks: Much like the other Beast Wars Mutants, Razor Claw was originally developed for the ill-fated Animorphs line, only to be repurposed as a Beast Warrior when that toy line folded. Given that he does not have anything resembling a humanoid body in either mode, odds are he was not intended to be one of the kids, but rather one of the alien Andalites.
To be honest, I didn’t much care for Razor Claw at first glance. Compared to Icebird, he seemed far less exciting and the fact that both beast modes are the exact same shade of green is a bit of a point against him. This is a toy, though, that you come to appreciate more and more the more often you hold it in hand. The surprisingly complex transformation, the fact that it actually does turn completely inside out (almost), and the great detail work on the two different “skin” textures makes me like this guy a whole lot. That only leaves the question why they called him Razor Claw, given that we already have a Razorclaw in Beast Wars (never mind that Universe guy who’d have you know that his name is Razorclaw, too).
So bottom line: a great toy if you’re a Beast Wars fan and/or appreciate the complexities of toy design, which are on full display here. One of these days I might be tempted to try and give the wolverine mode a brown coat of paint, we’ll see.
Rating: B
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