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Top | Kids | Toys
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Give 'Em the Bird
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Ratings ( 24 )
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Idea by zobovor
Level (1)
Entered: 1/15/2001 11:52:27 PM
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Idea Description
The Beast Machines Deployers are fascinating little toys--simple in design and yet offering enormous play value, if only for the "fiddle factor." Rav is probably the neatest of the bunch, and is also the most convincing in both his transformations.
Rav is packaged in his beast form, a 5" long, 3 1/2" tall raven. As with most of the Beast Machines toys, his is anything but a realistic disguise; while it's oddly colored and painted, Rav is still shaped convincingly like an Earth bird. He's mostly a transucent red, decorated with some unusual gold polygons that look like they were borrowed from the opening sequence to The Jetsons, and gold legs with a black beak and feet. His articulation is very limited; his beak opens, his neck moves back and forth slightly, and his feet each pivot less than 45 degrees. Furthermore, fiddling with him excessivley tends to spring his transformation--literally.
At the flip of a switch, located under his tail, Rav automatically unfolds long enough to change into his crossbow form, then closes back up nicely. Pressing the switch releases the spring-loaded missile launcher from within his body, forcing both of his wings apart and enabling his legs to collapse into his body. Simultaneously, his head flips back into his body, his beak flips down, and the missile launcher rests on top of his body. All of this happens in a fraction of a second--in theory. Sometimes his bird head doesn't retract fully in time, and the transformation isn't entirely automatic since you have to pull out either side of the prod (the bow section).
In weapon mode, Rav is about 6" long and nearly 4 1/2" wide. He's pretty much a free-standing unit, since he's still perched on his bird feet; the tech specs for all the Deployers suggest that these are meant as accessories for the Nightscream toy, but Rav is the only one that Nightscream's lanky fingers can really grasp effectively. The weapon is so top-heavy that it tends to keel over on itself if you don't pivot the bird's feet down slightly, though.
As a crossbow, Rav fires two translucent-red missiles independantly when you press the twin triggers on the top of the weapon. Each one has a good range of about four or five feet. The instructions also indicate that the trajectory of the missiles can be altered by pressing on the bird's chest, which causes the head to push on the bottom of the launcher, although the same effect can be achieved just as easily by pressing on the end of the stock (the butt-end of the crossbow).
Curiously, perhaps the most interesting aspect to Rav is not the toy itself, but the accompanying biography and tech specs on his packaging. His profile notes that his "power was given to him by an ancient female Autobot resistance leader for courage in battle." This seems to be a reference to one of the fictional Transformers stories (since there were no female Autobot toys), and the only story that fits that description is a 1986 cartoon episode called "Forever is a Long Time Coming," in which a female Autobot named Beta helps lead the slave Autobots to victory against their Quintesson masters. And yes, Beta wielded a crossbow for a weapon. What a curious and fairly obscure reference indeed--one seemingly directed specifically at fans of the original cartoon show.
Rav has also been released in an alternate color scheme, predominantly a dark translucent blue with violet legs and silver painted markings. He was originally slated to be renamed Cro, but the new toy is also sold as Rav, with the original images of the toy in its inaugural colors still adorning the packaging. It is unknown why the old colors were so quickly replaced by the new version, nor why Hasbro opted not to rename the toy after all.
All in all, Rav is a fairly neat little toy in either incarnation, though his distrubution at the time of this writing seems to be fairly limited (aside from finding them at online stores, the only reported sightings have been at ShopKo and Target stores). If you only get one of the Deployers toys, though, Rav's your bird.
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