Titan Power TP-01 King of Beasts (Unofficial Voltron)
Outer hard plastic “shell” cover for the tray.
Manual comes packed with the connectors for holding the sword and shield on figure’s back.
Switches for the LED gimmicks are located on each lion.
The LEDs aren’t that bright though, it works better with background lights off.
The wings on the figure work in unison, rotating one wing will rotate the other as well.
This figure has a storied history. From what I understand, it was originally designed by Kwang Jun Park and sold as an unofficial, unassembled garage resin model kit with zero articulation. The design was then copied and reworked into a diecast action figure by an unknown Chinese manufacturer.
The sculpt and design on this thing are beautiful! You can tell how much thought and effort went into designing this thing. It’s a real shame the original designer didn’t get credited or anything from sales of this toy.
While also on the topic of the sculpt, the original design for the garage kit featured different lion heads for the left and right lions. It’s not so obvious on the arm lions (it’s subtle but there are minute differences), but it is more pronounced on the leg lions. This concept was not carried over into this figure and instead, both left and right sections of the respective lion heads feature the same mold but just different colors. A cost cutting feature from the toy manufacturer by using the same mold I guess (thanks to Lynn Hshieh for reminding me about this).
The sword and shield can be mounted on this back, but I don’t really recommend it, the connection is a bit weak and doesn’t really lock down well.
If you really want to do it, then I recommend a proper order to doing it. Connect the peg to the shield first, then the shield to the sword and finally, connect it to the figure’s back. Any other way of doing it makes it unnecessarily difficult.
The toy also features cannons inside the arm lions’ maws. You will need a tool to pick and move them into the proper angles though, they’re usually pointing downwards by default.
Solar Combat Spears
The spears can be combined.
Spinning Laser Blades shield.
Attaching the shield handle is tricky, I don’t recommend doing it often as it will damage the paint on the lion’s nose. There’s very little clearance to get the handle through. You will feel friction when you pop the handle in and friction again when you pop the handle off. Not cool.
Form Blazing Sword!
Thanks to the use of butterfly shoulder joints, Titan Power Voltron can hold the sword with both arms.
The Good
-Stands roughly 11.5″ tall (13″ counting wingtip height) and weighs 1013 Grams
By comparison the SOC is also roughly 11.5″ but roughly only 12″ counting the wingtips and weighs 1416 Grams.
-Diecast parts include
–Shoulders
–Knee joints
–Ankle joints
I couldn’t tell if there were any diecast on torso, as the thick paint coat was making it hard to figure with just going by touch, but the heft of the metal is definitely obvious in the knee and ankles.
-Butterfly shoulder joints
-For some reason, they decided to make the “ears” mobile. I do wish they could be lowered flush, instead of leaving off at an odd angle.
-Sliding front plate for the thighs when you move the knee. VERY COOL.
-Very decent articulation and LOTS of ratchet joints, only the elbows don’t have ratchets.
The Bad
– My unit came with this panel not glued down properly (easily remedied though).
-Unnecessarily difficulty in attaching the shield handle thanks to very minimal clearances, repeating it often will definitely scuff paint of the lion.
-Identical left and right “hands” and “feet” molds. Original garage kit featured unique molds per lion head. Cost cutting move by the toy company most likely (thanks to Lynn Hshieh for pointing this out).
-Some units came with the wrist joints misassembled, making the wrists unable to fold inwards for both hands. Luckily mine didn’t come with this issue.
Removing or replacing the batteries!!! Good grief! I thought long and hard if I wanted to remove the batteries and after watching tutorial videos on how to do it, eventually I said, never mind.
You see, to get to the batteries for each lion, you have to basically take the whole assembly for each head apart to get to the guts of the thing. This involves picking away at panels that weren’t meant to be picked at (i.e. like disassembling a Gundam model kit). This will leave scuffs or worse, broken pegs and connectors if the applied force isn’t right. It’s too darn tricky and you would have to do it five times (one per each head).
What bothers me is the possibility of leakage from the batteries ruining the gimmicks on the toy. But I figured, is it worse than seeing scuffs and chips on the paint finish or possible broken pegs? There’s no winning scenario there. So I figured on leaving the batteries installed until the end of time instead.
Overall, a very, very impressive looking figure! The sculpt is amazing, the paint is amazing! It just looks really, really good. I wasn’t able to dig out SOC Voltron to compare with this guy due to lack of time, but this thing could give it a run for its money. It’s also not quite pricey all things considered. It costs roughly about the same as an SOC Full Action figure but at 40% more size and double the weight and metal content.
The issue with the batteries has got to be the biggest problem with this figure, I do wish they made it simpler to access the batteries.
Gold
