I’m taking you back to the Beast Wars era today with a look at what has turned out to be one of my favourite combiner teams over the years. More specifically, my favourite version is from Beast Wars II, but that’s down to the colour scheme.
If you weren’t sure, or are too young to remember (I’m jealous) I am talking about Tripredacus, or Tripledacus, depending on your preference. I have both, but am going to focus on the BWII version, because he is the best boy.
Brief recap for all that are interested, Tripredacus was released first, in fact, he was the first BW toy I managed to buy in the UK, from Argos of all places in what must have been 1997. He was also the only toy I managed to get for a few months that year as they were certainly slow in getting out to the stores. In the Mainframe cartoon, the separate components appeared very briefly in season 2 in I think the first Agenda episode (which is great, watch it)
Tripledacus was introduced as a Maximal, formed by the Jointron Brothers and was released in 1998 as part of the Japan exclusive Beast Wars II line.
These were, and I think out of official Transformers, one of the most involved and complicated combiners going, far more intricate than the Scramble City types kids of my age were used to and they feel much better than the Car Robots and Superlink combiners that were released in the following years.
So, Triplewhatsits was a combiner made from just 3 smaller robots, this made them a lot easier for kids to collect them all. Here in the UK at least and probably in other territories, these were only sold as a gift set so you didn’t need to mess about trying to find different limbs. In Japan, you could buy either a gift set or each combiner figure individually.
I picked up my first Tripledacus when it was released, which obviously got sold on in the Purge of 2001, but I’ve been keeping an eye out for a replacement for the last few months and finally happened on one that was going with a nice low starting price (I really hate auctions with high starting prices, gets right on my tits for some irrational reason) and managed to snag it at just the right time of day for not many people to have shown interest.
It’s a great looking piece that I am very pleased to have back.
Check him out!
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