Death's Head
11-01-12, 08:43 AM
I like Cybershark. He’s fiddly, annoying and has some frustrating design elements. However the intent and strength of character the figure has shines through all this. As with Black Arachnia, Cybershark went straight from his original form to a Transmetal 2 body, skipping the intermediary Transmetal form. He also switched alt modes, changing from a hammerhead shark to a great white shark.
The beast mode is fearsome looking creature. A bulky, powerful looking thing that looks like it’s pulled itself together from a sunken battleship. Yet, there’s something ravaged and skeletal about Cybershark’s new body too. The form looks torn and almost destroyed and has been reassembled and patched up as best it could be, such is the impression given by those sinews of twisted metal and all those wires, pumps and cables that form his body. Rather than have a fairly flaccid fish form, Kenner’s designers have given Cybershark a bit of shape to make it look like he is swimming in the depths. How cool is that?
At the top, I mentioned that Cybershark is something of a fiddle. Not a real fiddle with strings and a bow - that would be silly. No, he’s a fiddle in so much that his robot limbs are so tightly packed into his beast mode, that it’s a slow and painful process of slowly shifting panels about to get the limbs out and the robot something like. The legs are the proverbial piece of, just simply dropping out the mouth and dangling about on an axle until you’re ready to clip them to the upper torso. You’ll notice that there is a missile launcher dangling about his backside and you can have bags of fun trying to unclip that so the robot can make use of it later. It’s getting the rest of the figure together that’s a pig. The first place to start is with those fins, the panels to which they are attached flip out on two small arms and then rotate them ninety degrees so they are at right angles to the body – if you don’t manage to pull them off. The clip joints which attach these to the shark body unclip with ease, particularly when you’re rotating these panels as the ball joint is a tough little blighter so in applying the moderate amount of force required to rotate these sections will more than likely cause them to pop off – particularly with repeated play. These same joints are also used for the most irritating part of this figure – the tail section. This you need to split down the middle and then move the sections out to the side, allowing you to get that the robot arms that are snugly tucked up inside and then tease those out to the sides of the torso. This is the bit that is a right old faff. Althoughs bits of ‘shell’ get in the way and there isn’t really enough clearance to get the arms around and about without catching them on various parts of shark. The head lifts out from this same section and the torso then clips onto those legs.
The robot mode is a surprisingly lithe, toned thing. Cybershark is a lanky looking fellow. He’s rather unbalanced due to that huge left claw arm which is difficult to do much with. It spins about, but the elbow joint which powers this mechanism doesn’t have the same sturdiness of a regular ball joint which means it loosens far quicker over time. The right arm also has an element of frustration and awkwardness in that fixed right hand. Posed as he is in my picture, the right arm looks fine but it’s when you come to move that elbow that the ‘flaw’ becomes apparent. The fixed wrist leaves Cybershark holding that missile launcher at awkward angles in anything other than when the arm is left outstretched. It’s difficult to be churlish, given how any sort of moveable joint was at a premium during Transformers 1980s heyday, but little missed opportunities like this that pop up on Beast Wars figures stop some of the figures being as good as they could be.
Cybershark’s deco is decent enough without being out and out spectacular, and the uniform colour scheme does smooth out the asymmetry in the character’s bodywork, which depending on your view is a good or bad thing. Me, I’d have preferred the same colours used but perhaps used to match Cybershark’s patchwork body. Despite all the things working in Cybershark’s favour – superb detailing, an intricate (if frustrating) transformation and a good robot mode – are rather overshadowed by a later use of this mould that injected the mould with a burst of colour and recast it (somewhat more suitably) as a Predacon – RiD’s Sky Byte. Which sadly leaves Cybershark rather bland and unappealing by comparison.
13181319
The beast mode is fearsome looking creature. A bulky, powerful looking thing that looks like it’s pulled itself together from a sunken battleship. Yet, there’s something ravaged and skeletal about Cybershark’s new body too. The form looks torn and almost destroyed and has been reassembled and patched up as best it could be, such is the impression given by those sinews of twisted metal and all those wires, pumps and cables that form his body. Rather than have a fairly flaccid fish form, Kenner’s designers have given Cybershark a bit of shape to make it look like he is swimming in the depths. How cool is that?
At the top, I mentioned that Cybershark is something of a fiddle. Not a real fiddle with strings and a bow - that would be silly. No, he’s a fiddle in so much that his robot limbs are so tightly packed into his beast mode, that it’s a slow and painful process of slowly shifting panels about to get the limbs out and the robot something like. The legs are the proverbial piece of, just simply dropping out the mouth and dangling about on an axle until you’re ready to clip them to the upper torso. You’ll notice that there is a missile launcher dangling about his backside and you can have bags of fun trying to unclip that so the robot can make use of it later. It’s getting the rest of the figure together that’s a pig. The first place to start is with those fins, the panels to which they are attached flip out on two small arms and then rotate them ninety degrees so they are at right angles to the body – if you don’t manage to pull them off. The clip joints which attach these to the shark body unclip with ease, particularly when you’re rotating these panels as the ball joint is a tough little blighter so in applying the moderate amount of force required to rotate these sections will more than likely cause them to pop off – particularly with repeated play. These same joints are also used for the most irritating part of this figure – the tail section. This you need to split down the middle and then move the sections out to the side, allowing you to get that the robot arms that are snugly tucked up inside and then tease those out to the sides of the torso. This is the bit that is a right old faff. Althoughs bits of ‘shell’ get in the way and there isn’t really enough clearance to get the arms around and about without catching them on various parts of shark. The head lifts out from this same section and the torso then clips onto those legs.
The robot mode is a surprisingly lithe, toned thing. Cybershark is a lanky looking fellow. He’s rather unbalanced due to that huge left claw arm which is difficult to do much with. It spins about, but the elbow joint which powers this mechanism doesn’t have the same sturdiness of a regular ball joint which means it loosens far quicker over time. The right arm also has an element of frustration and awkwardness in that fixed right hand. Posed as he is in my picture, the right arm looks fine but it’s when you come to move that elbow that the ‘flaw’ becomes apparent. The fixed wrist leaves Cybershark holding that missile launcher at awkward angles in anything other than when the arm is left outstretched. It’s difficult to be churlish, given how any sort of moveable joint was at a premium during Transformers 1980s heyday, but little missed opportunities like this that pop up on Beast Wars figures stop some of the figures being as good as they could be.
Cybershark’s deco is decent enough without being out and out spectacular, and the uniform colour scheme does smooth out the asymmetry in the character’s bodywork, which depending on your view is a good or bad thing. Me, I’d have preferred the same colours used but perhaps used to match Cybershark’s patchwork body. Despite all the things working in Cybershark’s favour – superb detailing, an intricate (if frustrating) transformation and a good robot mode – are rather overshadowed by a later use of this mould that injected the mould with a burst of colour and recast it (somewhat more suitably) as a Predacon – RiD’s Sky Byte. Which sadly leaves Cybershark rather bland and unappealing by comparison.
13181319