Beast Wars Tarantulas

Robot Mode: Like most Beast Wars toys Tarantulas gives an excellent showing as far as resemblance to the TV character goes. His posability is also quite good. In other matters, though, he falls a bit short. He hasn't got any hands, just the spider mandibles. The overall look is pretty plain. On the weapon side, Tarantulas has a launcher stored up his ass (so to speak), which can fire missiles (his spider legs, which detach) or the grappling hook, which is connected to his behind by a piece of string. The last one strikes me as pretty silly, to be honest. Tarantulas also has the two-heads-gimmick. The more inhuman one is the one he sported in the show, the second one was used for the Black Arachnia repaint. Overall Tarantulas is an average figure, but no more than that.

Beast Mode: As you might guess from the name, Tarantulas transforms into a Tarantula spider. He only has seven legs here, as I'm missing one, but apart from that the spider doesn't look half-bad. The grappling hook gimmick works in this mode, too, enabling Tarantulas to fire his hook from his behind. Sadly only four of the eight legs are mobile, restricting the posability of the beast mode. All in all a decent beast mode, but that's it.

Remarks: Tarantulas was definitely one of the most fun bad guys ever. Always scheming, always delighting in being evil, and with one of the best evil cackles I ever heard. Sadly the figure doesn't really do the character justice. It's rather plain and the grappling hook gimmick, while fun in theory, falls a bit flat. In my opinion the Transmetal version of Tarantulas is by far the superior toy. Still, this one is the original and the one that got re-issued as Black Arachnia. So I give him some extra points for nostalgic value and call him slightly above average.

Rating: C+