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Top | Kids | Toys
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Aww, He Doesn't Even Roll Up.
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Ratings ( 16 )
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Idea by zobovor
Level (1)
Entered: 1/17/2001 12:47:02 AM
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Idea Description
Dillo is a mixed bag, of sorts--he's the most attractive of the Beast Machines Deployers toys, but has the least effective transformation and gimmick, and the most difficult to activate successfully.
The Deployers are small-ish Transformers with mechanical styling, loosely based on real animals, apparently meant to serve as accessory toys for the Nightscream figure. About 5" long at the tail, Dillo is a rotund little creature with a nose shaped like a laser cannon and treads on his heels. Mostly black with a translucent purple head, claws, and legs and some blue highlights, Dillo would have a most appealing color scheme if it weren't for the somewhat distracting yellow painted deco on his back and arms.
Dillo is nicely articulated, with arms that move in two places each and legs that pivot at the hips on a ratcheting joint. He's equipped with tiny little laser cannons on his tail that pivot as well, but they don't seem to be designed to be used in this form. He's also the only Deployer who looks better without his missile loaded in his beast mode, since it sticks out rather uselessly from his back, and interferes with the trigger that operates his transforming mechanism.
Dillo's transformation is entirely spring-activated. By pulling up on his tail, the lock holding his body mechanisms in place is released, causing his entire back to swing open and forward, deploying his main launcher, which houses a missile in the shape of a twin mace bolo. Simultaneously, his side panels spring open so that his claws can be manually positioned on either side. It's a fairly interesting weapons emplacement, even though the toy has trouble standing up under its own weight in this form.
Dillo's main form of offense is a pair of spiked bolo balls, which are molded in place as part of a rather large and ungainly projectile missile. Surprisingly, considering its size and weight, it travels pretty far when launched, as much as six feet. That's pretty much the sum total of the toy's play value, alas; the side panels appear to have built-in pretend weaponry, and there's the aforementioned tail lasers, but all in all Dillo really isn't a very spectacular toy.
If the three Deployers' tech specs biographies all made veiled references to specific Transformers of the 1980's, Dillo's is perhaps the most difficult to decipher. All that remains clear is that according to his card, he was "a former apprentice to an ancient Autobot tracker." There really aren't any Autobot trackers that had sidekicks, though, and there was only a single isolated instance of an Autobot using bolo balls as a weapon (namely Prowl, in the cartoon series). I suspect, though, that this was meant to be a reference to the Autobot named Hound. He was a scout, not a tracker, though that's a fairly minor distinction. Also, Dillo's function is that of Forward Observer, which may be a nod to Hound's tech specs quote, "Observe everything, remember even more."
Shortly after his initial release, Dillo was issued in new colors, mainly red and blue with some silver painted deco. Apparently it was intended for the new version to be released as a separate character called Trench, but it's uncertain why Hasbro ditched the idea. The second version is sold in packaging identical to the first Dillo, complete with photos of the original toy adorning the backer card.
Dillo is sort of cute in beast mode, but his transformation is unreliable and ungainly. The fact that he's not featured on TV, has no proper robot mode, and doesn't really do much means that you don't get much for the price (he costs the same as a normal basic-sized Beast Machines figure) means that kids will likely lose interest in him very quickly.
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bobthedin0saur,
badragon,
pantazis5,
disartain,
rmavis,
mar6732,
Gizzykat,
missykea,
lara122,
TMayf63350,
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djgeiger,
zobovor,
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