Claw Jaw

Claw Jaw is a Maximal from the Beast Wars portion of the Generation 1 continuity family.

Mayhem Attack Squid.

Like Tigatron before him, when Claw Jaw first emerged from his stasis pod his beast instincts overwhelmed his Cybertronian personality. Though eventually restored to himself, his squid instincts still form a huge portion of his psychology, motivating much of the way he acts, fights, and hunts. He even keeps an undersea lair in the deepest and coldest part of Earth's seas. Claw Jaw gives a lot of attention to protecting it when Predacons stray too near. It is a job for which he is well suited: The suckers on his eight arms can drain the energon right out of a robot and into Claw Jaw. Combine that with a crushing grip, razor-sharp fangs, and robotic claw weapon, and few Predacons escape to inform on the refuge he so fiercely protects.

Claw Jaw is a rather simple bot without great endurance, firepower, or intelligence, but he makes up for that with courage and impressive undersea speed, even if his ingrained "squiddy-ness" sometimes weirds out his fellow Maximals.^[1]

Fiction

2006 IDW Beast Wars continuity

And they will never agree who'd win out of Mega Shark and Giant Octopus.

Claw Jaw was one of the protoform stasis pods jettisoned from the Maximal survey vessel Axalon when it was forced to crash-land on prehistoric Earth. The Predacon general Magmatron led a small group (that included the Maximal agent Razorbeast) back in time to place these protoforms into chronal phase and reprogram them into Predacons, and lead this army against the Maximals in the present. However, Razorbeast placed a viral code in Magmatron's Predacon shell program, allowing a number of the protoforms to retain their Maximal identity. The Gathering #1

Accompanied by Cybershark, Claw Jaw sped towards Razorbeast and the small group of new Maximals accompanying him. The Gathering #2 He and a phalanx of other Maximals finally reached them, just in time to fight off an army of Predacons. In the subsequent battle, Claw Jaw used his tentacles to ensnare Jetstorm. The Gathering #4

Sometime later, when Ravage's Predacons hit the Maximals again, Claw Jaw was among the ground forces defending their base, The Ascending #1 but Grimlock and The Pack turned the tide. The Ascending #2 When Unicron's Blendtron servants attacked, a small group of Maximals and Predacons escaped aboard the Pack's transwarp cruiser and returned to the present in the hopes of saving Cybertron. Claw Jaw was among the unfortunates left behind to hold off the Blendtrons, but survived. The Ascending #4

Beast Wars: Uprising

On a Cybertron where stagnant and tyrannical Autobots and Decepticons had built the Maximals and Predacons in order to continue their eternal grudge, Clawjaw owned a copy shop. His cousin, Jawbreaker, once used this shop to print out leaflets for his anti-government group. Jawbreaker's profile in Club magazine #57

When the Grand Uprising broke out, Claw Jaw joined the Resistance, and when the Beast Upgrade came around, took on the form of a strange, horrific tentacled thing. During the Resistance's desperate, last-ditch push into Iacon, he was one of the undersea forces trying to take the Builder fleet at Yuss. He personally attacked the commander Diveplane, draining her before she even knew he was there. Derailment

2005 IDW continuity

Claw Jaw was a member of Mayhem, a secret fraternity of Cybertronians hoping to expose the dirty wartime deeds of 'bots like Prowl. After allying with Tarantulas, they received new Chimeracon bodies, which masked their spark signature and allowing them to disguise themselves as normal Earth creatures.

While stationed in the gigantic whale Transformer known as Tidal Wave, Claw Jaw and Overbite were sent out to deal with Stakeout after he dived into the ocean chasing Stampy, who had stolen the Aequitas data slug. The battle was joined by the Wreckers. The members of Mayhem were eventually outmatched and Claw Jaw ended up being brutalized by Roadbuster and forced into revealing the portal to Prowl's prison within Tidal Wave. Sins of the Wreckers #2

What Claw Jaw led them to was the Noisemaze, which caused intense sensory anguish to the Wreckers. Claw Jaw was immune to the dimension's effects, but his gloating was cut short when Hubcap switched off the squid's neural blockers and intensified the Noisemaze's effects, causing his head to explode. Sins of the Wreckers #3

2021 Beast Wars comic

The Cybertronian who would become Claw Jaw was one of the many Maximal protoforms aboard the Axalon. To eliminate the Maximals and Predacons, Tarantulas and the Vok brought every crashed stasis pod they could find online and reprogrammed the protoforms within into loyal "Children of the Vok". Together, they attacked the crashed Darksyde in an attempt to take out the Maximal-Predacon alliance; when the Maximals and Predacons destroyed the Vok themselves, however, their remaining followers agreed to a truce and left to live peacefully in the wilderness. The End

Toys

Beast Wars

You're a kid now. You're a squid now.

• Claw Jaw (Basic Class, 1997)

• Accessories: "Claw weapon"
• Known designers: Takio Ejima (TakaraTomy)

Part of the second wave of second-year Beast Wars Basics, Claw Jaw transforms into a maroon and orange squid. Pushing a trigger on his back opens his beast mode jaws. This also works in robot mode, where his mandibles are mounted on his chest. The small removable "claw weapon" on the plunger can be held in his... uh... sucker on his robot mode arms/tentacles.

Claw Jaw was released in Japan as an import with a Takara-applied sticker and then (with very subtle paint, plastic and molding changes) in Beast Wars II as Scuba. The Scuba version of the mold was later redecoed into Ikard.

• More information on Claw Jaw at TFU.info

Heh. "Transmetal". Heh.

• Claw Jaw (Basic w/ video, 1998)

• Accessories: "Claw weapon"

A redecoed green and blue Claw Jaw was sold with a VHS tape in the European market. Despite the lack of a third, vehicular mode, this version of Claw Jaw was sold as a Transmetal.

Together with the equally Europe-only "Transmetal" redeco of Spittor he was released alongside, this version of Claw Jaw came in unique trilingual packaging that sported texts in English, German, and Italian (regular European Beast Wars packaging came in the combinations French/Dutch/German and English/Spanish/Italian).

The VHS tape included with the UK release contained the Beast Wars episode "Aftermath", whereas the tape included with the German release contained a dubbed version of the episode "Beast Wars (Part 1)".

Oddly enough, like most redecoes of this mold, this figure uses the Takara Scuba molding as well. His robot feet have been hollowed out more than on the original Claw Jaw and his forearms/tentacles have been thickened up and rounded at the tips. It's possible that this figure was the first to start the change in the tooling as both Scuba and this one were released the same year, although it's probably lost to time as to which was the first to use it.

This toy was later repurposed as an "infected" Ikard in Beast Wars: Uprising.

• More information on Transmetal Claw Jaw at TFU.info

Notes

Foreign names

• Japanese: Claw Jaw (クロージョー Kurō Jō)
• French: Octopince (Canada, "Octoclaw")
• Italian: Octopus
• Spanish: Atrapador (Latin America, "Trapper")

References