The story of me buying Gnaw all started when I was BSing with my coworker the Transformers collector. At the time I was just got into collecting Transformers toys and was trying to get as many figures from the Prime Wars Trilogy I could find (as well as justify spending money on) when he said “Dude, do you have any Gnaws?”

I answered by saying “Nos?” and he said “Yeah, Gnaws.”

Given where we work I thought he kept saying “Nos” like from Fast and the Furious when they were referring to Nitrous Oxide.

I swear the way my coworker was saying “Gnaws” it sounded just like Vin Diesel and Paul Walker saying “Nos.”

After a few moments of confusion, I realized he wasn’t saying “Nos” he was saying “Gnaws” and after some explanation I realized he was referring to a Sharkticon which I knew existed because I did see the 1986 Transformers movie but I didn’t know they were given a distinct name, I always thought they were just called Sharkticons.

My coworker told me that they were pretty cheap because he had just bought like 2 dozen of them off of Big Bad Toy Store.

Since they were so cheap, and because I was still scrambling to pick up cool yet affordable Transformers figures I thought “what the hell” and ordered one off of Amazon.

Like I said earlier, I knew of the Sharkticons because I did watch the 1986 Transformers movie. In there the Sharkticons are first encountered when Hot Rod and Kup crash on the Quintessons’ planet and they ran into a group of Sharkticons who were serving as the Quintessons’ foot soldiers and executioners.

Hot Rod and Kup would then go on to go full-beast mode on the Sharkticons after the Quintessons try feeding them to the Sharkticons, all of this set to the song Hunger performed by Kick Axe, a Canadian heavy metal band. Fun fact: on the Transformers: The Movie soundtrack Kick Axe had to be listed as Spectre General for some weird legal reasons.

This goes on until the Dinobots come and save the day by scaring off the remaining Sharkticons.

I know the Sharkticons would go on to make appearances in season 3 of Transformers. Unfortunately, I haven’t had the chance to see those episodes yet,  but they’re on my list of things to watch.

Here’s Gnaw in his blister pack. Considering how cheap he was I wasn’t surprised that he’s just a Legends class figure.

I’m really curious who does the artwork for the packaging. It’s really good and reminds me a lot of the art from the IDW Transformer comic books.

Here’s the backside of the packaging. As you can see the description is pretty simply since all it says is “AUTOBOTS are the favorite food of this fearless SHARKTICON.” This makes me miss the toys that were around when I was a kid and the packaging would be printed with all this backstory or made up details of whatever toy was inside.

Here’s the trading card that came inside.

The transforming instructions for Gnaw. Out of all the other Transformers I have he is probably the simplest one to do.

In robot form Gnaw is a little skinnier than he looked in the cartoon, but other than that he looks pretty spot on.

Even his face is a close match.

Here’s Gnaw in his alternate (beast?) mode. This looks just like how he did in the cartoon. I’m not sure why they chose this color scheme for him. Pink with sky blue extremities. It doesn’t exactly shout out super tough robot monster that will eat everything. As you can see his mace/morning star becomes his tail in his alternate mode.

That’s pretty much it for Gnaw. Considering that he is just a tiny Legends class figure there’s really that much I can say or do with him. I probably should have just listened to my coworker and bought more of them so I could create these really big and elaborate fight scenes. He is a pretty cool figure so I wish he was bigger. I’m pretty sure the ’80s version was like 3 times the size. It would have been nice if they made him a deluxe class figure instead.

Don’t’ forget to check back soon, San Diego Comic Con is coming up and I have all kinds of plans for cool content I can bring back from there. I also have a couple art shows that I want to hit up as well as a few more toy and movie write-ups I’m going to try to get up before SDCC.