It's time for another installment of my least-viewed feature, and this time around I have something that I literally waited years to get. Now that I have it, I simply had to cover it right away, if only because there's nothing else that would or could go ahead of it. Here is yet another direct to Walmart offering, the Ultra Exosaur, and if you don't believe me about the name, here's the damn box.
As alluded above, I first sighted this one around 2018, if not earlier. Even by my standards, it was weird and goofy (not to mention bulky), so my immediate reaction was to document it without buying it. I continued to see it on and off as it got shuffled around the local Walmart's shelf, right up to a few weeks ago. Naturally, when I finally decided to buy it, it was gone, but I had no trouble finding listings online, without the level of scalper gouging typical of direct-to-Walmart offerings. With shipping factored in, the best deal turned out to be for a 2-pack with a giant robot who will undoubtedly get his own post sooner or later. As shown on the box, both are part of the nominal Adventure Force line, previously featured through their retro raptor and the best and worst of the spinosaurs. Here's another shot of the box to give a feel for the style. Incidentally, most of these pics are going to be with my phone rather than the computer, mainly because these things are so damn big.
And, here's some more shots; that "real" eye is freakier than the electronic scope thingie.
Resistance is futile; prepare to be masticated.
What should be fascinating here is that whoever designed this didn't and possibly couldn't decide what it's supposed to be. To me, however, this is mostly just annoying. It's not really a dinobot, unless it's supposed to be a bot with synthetic skin like the Terminator, and that would beg the question what the point of the disguise would be. (Maybe Skynet sent it to the Cretaceous to kill the first primate???) The name implies an actual dino with mechanical prosthetics, which you can kind of see with the headpiece and the metal arm. It seems even more akin to a dino version of the Borg (really, why wouldn't they assimilate non-humanoid lifeforms?), except they were usually implied to have normal anatomical functions, whereas this guy clearly doesn't have a space to take in food, and who knows what's going on at the other end. What this really makes me think of is the biomechanoids in Virus (which I somehow haven't covered in the Revenant Review), as if a machine had won a Pyrrhic victory against the T. rex and then put itself back together from the pieces.
To get a further sense of the size of this thing, here's a few reference shots I did take with my computer. As seen in the opening pic, he easily outsizes the Definitely Dinosaurs rex. On the other hand, he's not quite as big as generic Godzilla. I threw in Robbie the Robot for further comparison.
"They tried the robot impersonator thing with me in the '70s. Trust me, it doesn't work."
An extra bit of random here is that it comes with light and sound features, and supposedly walks. The box further advertises that it is "motion activated", without any further clarification. I ultimately ended up testing this over several days. At first, I assumed the batteries were dead, because it did absolutely nothing during the initial unboxing. During that time, I found a switch with two or three settings between the legs (make your own joke), which still did nothing. However, when I pulled the right arm, the lights flashed and the dino made a roaring sound plus various blaster sound effects. I concluded this was the "motion activated" part, until I tried it again and nothing happened. What I soon figured out is that the electronic features activate pretty much at random, and not often. Sometimes, snapping the jaw or pulling on a limb will do the trick. At other times, it came on during casual handling, or at one point after I let it fall over. Then there was a time it started walking when I came back into a room, apparently simply because I turned on the lights. (Of course, it could have started before I was in the room at all...) Naturally, the first few times this happened, I couldn't get the camera ready in time, while quite a few of the close-ups I ended up with were pics I took while trying to make it work. Here's what few pictures I got.
Roar, damn you.
This is a toy that truly feels possessed, or else just self-aware enough to refuse to work. The really disconcerting part is that I'm not satisfied I can actually turn it off; the switch mostly seems to serve to keep it from walking off on its own. Even as I write this, it's creeping me out even more as I think about it. Not that I'm likely to get rid of it. This is the kind of thing you buy and keep just to have proof it exists. On an upbeat note, here's another pic of the bot plus the Iron Giant.
"Who says you can't be pacifist and have a bunch of cool laser guns?"
Needless to say, more to come!
as if a machine had won a Pyrrhic victory against the T. rex and then put itself back together from the pieces
ReplyDeleteThat's something right out of a Gene Wolfe novel.