Beast Wars Revisited: Part 2 of 5

I had the good fortune of obtaining some nice vintage Japanese Beast Wars last week so I thought I might be a good idea to do a mini-series on them. There is nothing really spectacular about any of these figures other than the fact they are different from their domestic release counterparts and thus interesting to me.


Part 2: Beast Wars Telemocha TM-08 Archadis

Over the past few weeks I discovered that my Beast Wars Neo Destrons were surprisingly low on troops. Apparently over the course of time I have obtained most of the Cybertrons for the line, but have neglected the Destrons. I suppose this is probably because many of the Destron molds were re-used for domestic releases in one form or another while the Cybertron molds have been oddly omitted. This is probably because Hasbro couldn't justify releasing a transforming Giraffe, Penguin, Cobra, Horse or Rabbit. And certainly not a Tanuki.

So I was all prepared to purchase a vintage BWNeo Archadis to increase my ranks and I noticed his paint deco was virtually identical to Dinobot Airraptor who was released in the U.S. around 2000 as part of the Beast Machines line. So I decided I didn't want an exact copy so I opted for the Beast Wars Telemocha Archadis.

Telemocha was Takara's 10th Anniversary commemorative toyline for Beast Wars. Certain figures were re-released with show accurate paint jobs and packaged with a DVD containing one episode of the show. Not all characters were re-released and I'm not even really sure why Archadis was chosen since he was never even part of the original show. However he has a great paint job and so now he stands in for the real Beast Wars Neo Archadis in my Neo display.

He has some nice muted colors.

Archeopteryx mode

Angry Archeopteryx mode!

You can really see the difference between Archadis and Airraptor here.

Who will win in a battle to the death!

You'll notice Archadis has the 'Dinobot' spark crystal instead of the Predacon symbol he should have.