Courtesy of Hellscream, today's subject is the
Beast Wars figure,
Silverbolt. Silverbolt is a prime example of one of the more, how should I put this,
unique groups of figures that came about during the days of the
Beast Wars...the freakishly-fun
Fuzors. A Fuzor, in case you don't know, is a Transformer whose beast mode is an amalgamation of two different (sometimes very different) types of animals. According to the
Beast Wars fiction, a quantum surge caused a few Transformer stasis pods to malfunction, causing the DNA scanner to incorrectly scan two (instead of one) animals and combine them into one beast mode. Only two Fuzors were seen on the television program: Silverbolt, a chivalrous do-gooder who was infatuated with the bad-girl Blackarachnia, and
Quickstrike, a rootin'-tootin' Predacon cowboy straight out of the Old West, but there were several non-show (some for good reason) characters that were Fuzors as well. The pairing of animal forms provided us with a range of figures, some bordering on "
What the heck were they thinking?" all the way up to "
Man, how did this guy not end up on the show?". The Fuzors definitely weren't for everyone and the toys only lasted for a few waves, being released in both the basic and deluxe size classes. It should be noted, however, that the Fuzors were entirely a Hasbro-Kenner/Takara creation, with Al Gore having absolutely
no involvement in their
design.
