Subject:
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Review: 7477 T-Rex vs. T-1 Typhoon
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.build.military
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Date:
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Sun, 31 Jul 2005 10:28:38 GMT
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Greetings, all. Ever since I saw the 7477 T-Rex vs. T-1 Typhoon I’ve been
wanting to take a closer look, and I finally got my chance when it arrived in
Anchorage this week. I didn’t quite know where to put this review because Dino
Attack is such a strange genre, but here goes…
Packaging:
Continuing a recent trend toward overpackaging, 7477 comes in the same size box
my UCS X-wing did despite having half the pieces. I would guesstimate that
about 60% of the box was full when I opened it, with a quarter of that being the
essentially prebuilt dinos. The massive front flap is primarily given over to
a tour of the Typhoon’s fantastical features (no, kids, not weapons), from the
Twin Quintronic Beam Emitters to the XL-4 Voltaic Rocket Launcher. A reach-in
pocket beneath the flap, however, displays the T-rex’s head with light-up eyes
and tongue, presumably meant to demonstrate the effects of electrocuting the
poor animal with the XL-4. (Kids, don’t try this at home. Or if you do, just
don’t tell your parents. Please.)
Dinos:
The set’s pterodactyl and T-rex combined amount to a whopping 11 pieces, the
‘dactyl simply four limbs plugged into its torso while the T-rex’s head is
separate. Appendage holes on the torsos accept Technic pegs on the limbs, while
a ring of click-hinge teeth around the holes matches teeth on the limbs to let
them hold poses; aside from those holes, only a 2x2 black brick rising out of
each torso’s spine marks them as LEGO parts. Both dinos have opening jaws, but
only the T-rex has the light-up features mentioned earlier. Structurally the
dinos are every bit the nightmare image of LEGO’s future I thought they would
be, but there’s a certain cuteness to them despite the obvious attempts to make
them dark and ferocious. They’re not LEGO, but they’re not all bad.
Minifigs:
Four crew members are included for the Typhoon, identified as
Shadow, Digger, Specs
and Viper. They are undeniably soldiers. Two of the torso prints incorporate
a toolkit and survival gear, but the other two prominently feature bandoliers
for grenade-launcher rounds. The unifying expression on all four heads seems to
be hatred, ranging from a grim-faced Bruce Campbell look-alike to a pilot whose
gray balaclava reveals only a pair fiercely scowling eyes. It only takes a head
swap between Shadow and Viper to create
a familiar Arnold
Schwarzenegger character.
T-1 Typhoon:
The first thing about the T-1 that has to be mentioned is
its size. At 82 studs
long and 24 wide, it easily dwarfs my outdated 60-stud
Hind gunship; the rotor
disc is based on paired 16x2 plates and comes out to 65 studs in diameter.
That’s four baseplates of display space for the rotors alone, and six if you
want to give the ship adequate room on a shelf. Only this year’s XXL Mobile
Crane and possibly the Explorien Starship challenge the T-1 for single largest
minifig-scale vehicle yet produced by LEGO. It’s a frightening machine
alongside any aviation-related Town set, unable to land at even a Century Skyway
lest the rotors clip the control tower. For all its ungainly bulk, however, I
find myself not quite able to fault the Typhoon for committing the same error of
scale as almost every military MOC. While the T-1 could have been rendered as a
variant of the police chopper in 6545 Search
N’ Rescue (easily the pinnacle of Town helicopter design) without much
functional loss, its size permits a level of detail not often found on smaller
craft. A passing family member saw the completed model on a table and said, “I
like it. It looks real, like it wasn’t built out of bricks.”
From the underside the
T-1’s structure is grossly inefficient, an ugly hulk of crisscrossing Technic
beams for the assembly manual’s first dozen steps, but it conceals fully
retractable landing gear. A tricycle undercarriage descends about three bricks
from the hull to provide clearance for various hanging weaponry, supporting the
ship’s weight on four wheels slightly wider than two bricks each. The wheel
wells require some room within the hull, but significant castle-hinge and
SNOT-based streamlining builds the hull up several bricks from the keel. (The
designers fail to address the underside of the tail, left open by the
castle-hinge taper, beyond the inexplicable Band-Aid of
suspending a brick in
the gap on a composite Technic axle.) This means that the lowest minifig in
the ship, the pilot in the forward cockpit, actually sits six bricks off the
ground with the landing gear extended.
The top of the ship is built along similarly massive lines, with several 6-wide
Castle arches and 2x4 bricks coming into play as structural supports. For all
this construction, 7477 give the Hand of God a workout: only
a rescue winch
provides entry to the aircraft, and only
manual removal of
canopies provides entry to either cockpit or a World War II-style gun turret
aft. Access to the cabin is much simpler, in large part because the 8-wide hull
at the cockpits thins to a two-stud-thick archway beneath the main rotor,
leaving much of the “cabin” an open deck. A small area aft of the archway just
big enough for two minifigs is enclosed, but is bisected by
a transluscent display
panel similar to that in the 7180 B-wing at Rebel Control Center’s war room.
The tail-gunner
position is immediately aft,
a swivel platform
beneath the static canopy allowing the guns and gunner to
rotate through a
90-degree aft firing arc that threatens only the aircraft’s rotors. Atop it
all is the main rotor, each blade offset one stud to the right in an
interlocking design; oddly, the whole thing is delicately perched on a standard
Town main-rotor swashplate. (It does bear mentioning here that the T-1 has no
visible means of propulsion. Voids beneath the SNOT side blisters resemble
intakes, but there’s no hint of engines or exhausts to be found in the model.)
Weaponry:
7477 contains no fewer than five weapons systems, four of which are on the
gunship itself. The first of these you build is the minifigs’ only weapon,
the Zolexx Stasis Ray,
an impressive combination of destroyer-droid legs and minifig accessories that
strongly resembles a Soviet bipod machine gun. (There’s a Soviet-style drum
magazine on top of the weapon, but the real ammo is apparently a removable
canister of liquid nitrogen refilled from a larger tank aboard the gunship.)
It’s a beautiful piece of hardware, but seeing
its eight-stud length
in a minifig’s hands reminds of a Samuel L. Jackson line from Pulp Fiction:
“Did you *see* that handcannon he shot at us? It was bigger n’ he was.” The
Stasis Ray’s sheer size is carefully concealed in packaging photography by
showing it pointed at the camera; it looks good as a door gun, but ludicrous
with only a minifig hanging off one end.
On the gunship, the Quintronic Beam Emitters are large rocket-pod equivalents jutting out from
either side of the hull with a formidable combination of 1x1 cylinders and
Technic gears pointing forward. Each one is built around a free-spinning
Technic axle, and the packaging suggests that they spin when fired. The aft
turret’s guns are identified as Sonic Screamers, sounding far more innocuous
than their long-barreled construction with TV-camera targeting pods implies.
They individually elevate to 90 degrees without trouble, but depressing them to
or below the horizontal bumps them against the tail and severely impedes the
turret’s already limited traverse. The dreaded XL-4 Voltaic Rocket Launcher is
merely a spring-loaded Bionicle missile launcher with neon-green missile tip,
hanging precariously from a ball joint beneath the hull. It’s the primary
reason the landing gear is so tall, a hideous afterthought of a weapon that
could have easily been designed to stow inside the hull when not in use.
The final weapon system is the only one that isn’t officially labeled as such,
but is literally right under the ship’s nose:
the Plarxx Radar Ray.
While both the packaging and a “TRACKING SENSOR” decal insist otherwise, the
presence of a barrel on a ball turret at the nose of a helicopter gunship
inexorably suggests some type of high-speed chaingun. It’s a brilliant one at
that, the bulbous appearance of the mount offset by its nearly complete coverage
of the ship’s entire forward hemisphere. Indeed, the turret is so convincing
that seeing its real purpose officially denied is a disappointment on par with
having not yet seen the 928 Galaxy Explorer become a LEGO Legend.
Conclusion:
It’s inconsistencies like the Plarxx Radar Ray that demonstrate the underlying
problem with 7477 as a set and Dino Attack as a theme: the clash between the
LEGO Group’s fiscal interest in selling military sets and its moral inability to
acknowledge that it is doing so. The fine balancing act inherent in 7477 seems
timid at best and hypocritical at worst, but allows the company to have its MRE
and eat it too. If the products of that compromise include sets like 7477, the
only building experience I’ve had besides Dan Siskind’s Blacksmith’s Shop and
the recent Star Wars sets that recaptured the complexity LEGO had in my youth,
it’s one that I can live with.
So, you ask, what is Dino Attack in the final analysis: merely a flirtation with
large vehicles and the dinosaur fad, or LEGO’s arrival for better or worse in
uncharted, more serious territory? The answer eluded me until I was holding the
completed Typhoon, extending and retracting its landing gear, and my eye passed
over the crew cabin. In LEGO, construction speaks louder than packaging, and
that’s when I took a longer look at a minor detail:
the rows of dinosaur
teeth on either side of a support pillar in the cabin, mounted high like
trophies. The words on the box may be soothing to the parents, but if I could
see the meaning of those teeth, any kid will too. These men shoot to kill.
Parts: Dark-red hull plates, tan angled bricks of all kinds, an arsenal of
common weapon parts…the bley is there, but it’s still valuable to the military
enthusiast. (7/10)
Build: Three hours of dedicated construction from girders to gunship, plus two
dozen decals (none on multiple pieces). It’s a full evening, and that’s before
any of the mods this hull begs for. (8/10)
Play value: A dozen moving parts, including something on every weapon. Decent
for the gunship alone; for kids add two points, because they’ll probably dig the
dinos. (7/10)
Swoosh factor: Somehow the streamlining keeps the ship eminently swooshable
despite its size. The ‘dactyl swooshes surprisingly well, although if he tries
to bite a rotor blade “he’d get sliced up faster than an onion in an
infomercial.” (7/10, bonus points if you know the quote...)
Overall: 7477 makes a strong display piece, as well as a strong case for LEGO’s
ability to produce military sets should the company choose that path. The
company’s limited release of Dino Attack and implicit hesitation to acknowledge
the line as military, however, make it feel like an unwanted child. (7/10)
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