Rated X wrote:Looking at this vintage figure just makes me realize how much justice the new takara version has done for this character. I never realized she was just a repaint of tarulantas in the beast wars toy line. We are very fortunate to now be getting fembots with actual female bodies instead of repainted male bodies posing as females.
However, it's because that she (and Tigatron) was a redeco that the cartoon was able to use her (and Tigatron) due to the limitations of CGI at the time. Had she and Tigatron been their own molds, Mainframe likely would have avoided using them and instead gone with two other redeco characters.
After all, Tigatron was originally going to be
Wolfang, but since Tigatron's toy was a redeco of Cheetor, they chose Tigatron instead since it was far more feasible and economical to make a modified version of Cheetor's CGI model for Tigatron than to make a whole new model for Wolfang. The same would probably have applied for Blackarachnia as well since they took Tarantulas's CGI model and made it more, erm, "feminine" for her, instead of making a whole new model.
As for Blackarachnia's newer Legends toy, it is quite nice in its attempts to be show-accurate, yes, but due to it being a mold originally designed for a different version of the character, it contains much more inaccuracies to the BW cartoon model when compared to the original toy (which is understandable since the cartoon model was based on the original toy), and its unfortunately misassembled torso (which every Legends BA figure has) doesn't do it any favors either.