The Energon Pub

Hey Guys! I drew up a quick little review of one of my favorite figures. I didn't intend it to be comprehensive, I just thought I'd highlight some of the things I found neat. Take a look and let me know what you think!

AOE Scorn is a figure I really enjoy. The figure has a couple key things going for it. First and foremost, Scorn has really good aesthetics. Yes it’s one of the admittedly quite questionable AOE dinobots with that weird, unnecessarily complex jagged thing going on. Yes, it’s not accurate to the grey blur of a dinobot from the movie. Actually I’d argue that this is Scorn’s strongest point.I think the thing that most particularly demonstrates that is his headsculpt. Between the bright blue of his visor, the simplicity of the design, and the block coloration, it feels like something more out of Animated. Because of the liberties taken with the movie character model, we get this weird hybrid design. It has many of the features of AOE aesthetics such as the aforementioned jagged bits, knight features, and those fun little djinni booties all the Dinobots have, combined with the bright, vibrant colors and pseudo cell shading of the toyline. This ends with the figure feeling very cartoony, in its own way. While the sculpting of the figure actually does hew fairly closely to many of the details of Scorn’s movie character model, the figure has an ineffable je ne sais quoi in terms of proportions that makes it feel more like a stylized version of the character, especially in contrast with the later TLK figure, which looks like it hopped off the screen into a vat of red paint.

I think Scorn’s other primary virtue is the elegance of the design. He’s got a bunch of great little details that make the dino mode feel just that little bit more full. In particular, I’m very fond of the little piece of plastic that forms the bottom of the spinosaurus’s throat, and the way his legs collapse from humanoid ones into something more digitigrade, but quite solid.

Similarly, the figure is a joy to transform because of the engineering, particularly of the arms and waist (the leg ball joints on my copy have been weird and powdery since day one, but I always chalked that up to sitting unopened in the back of a Toys R Us for two years. I found the thing at retail in 2016, if you can believe it.) The arms remind me of Siege or Earthrise engineering, just years before that happened. It’s just some very nice, smooth pin joints, and I love them to death. The figure reuses robot mode parts to form the dinosaur mode in a way that is solid and looks good on both modes. For example, the middle toe of the dino mode feet is repurposed as the djinni bootie foot in robot mode. I also love how the waist transforms; the way his little loincloth piece perfectly slots into place as the rest of the waist assembly rotates is simply delightful. All of this engineering conspires to create a robot mode without very much kibble, and a dino mode that’s remarkably clean, especially considering AOE aesthetics.

Overall, scorn is definitely my favorite AOE figure. There’s a lot of really cool stuff going on with the engineering and the design. If you’ve got an opportunity to pick one up and see what it’s all about, I’d definitely recommend it.