Crawler
Insector

Not as deadly as Scorpio or Tenticus, but just as effective. A bite from him will leave his victim in extreme pain.

Crawler is one of the later Convertors whose lineage is easier to work out. The figure comes from Takatoku's Beetras series, being a cheap licensed reproduction of the Beet-Gadol figure for Mark's Zectron line. The original Takatoku version, with high quality plastic and some diecast parts, was sold to Bandai when Takatoku folded, and then licensed to Hasbro - they then recoloured it as the Transformers Deluxe Insecticon Barrage. Due to Mark being still in business, presumably Hasbro/Bandai either had no way of stopping them licensing their own version to Select, or just didn't care.

Crawler's sculpting is actually a decent enough likeness of a robotic stag beetle, and is a lot more recognisable than, say, the styling of the Diaclone Waruders (reused in 1985 as the original Transformers Insecticons), though the blue colours obviously rob it of much realism. The toy suffers from the same problems as the other Avarians and Insectors - very brittle plastic. With all the protruding insect bits, this one is more fragile than most - as you can see, half of the front prong has snapped off this example long ago.

The transformation is rather neat, and the robot design isn't bad - though the chest sticks out far too much. It looks like the chest should pop further into the body, but it won't without wrecking the thing. It's also worth noting that unlike the 'Deluxe' version of the mould, the insect features don't fold away.

However, he looks pretty spiky and vicious, especially with the head design. Sadly, a lot of the neat touches from the Takatoku version - such as the compartments on the robot legs for the beetle appendages - are lost on this version, but it still looks good enough.

Minimal articulation and fragility aside, this isn't actually a bad figure, just stupidly fragile and very cheap feeling. If only the Takatoku mould could have been meshed with the Convertors colour scheme...