Written by Jonathan Wojcik with the aid of With the Will, Digimon Wiki and Wikimon


THE FUNBEEMON LINE


BABY I: PUPUMON

I guess fourteen days is enough time for me to move on from Parasimon. 2003 was definitely an interesting year for Digimon, as the Pendulum X series brought forth a whole new generation with a whole new set of "core" evolutionary lines. We're going to begin with my favorite, this time, which in turn begins as this adorable little insect pupa "as light as a bubble!" Not that any pupal insect ever has functional wings already, obviously, but how great is it to have an explicitly insect-themed baby digimon at long last?!

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BABY II: PUROROMON

The next baby stage is an entire cartoon BEE! I'd say this is tied for the cutest Baby II of all time with whichever other Baby II digimon I said were the cutest of all time. It's not really that exclusive of a club.

Interestingly, Puroromon is six-winged! It's also, I believe, the only venomous baby digimon, as it's capable of stinging.

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CHILD: FUNBEEMON

Fun beemon!? I'm glad to see another child-stage insect digimon, after all this time, with a fully organic appearance; basically a Hymenopteran counterpart to the classic Wormmon and Tentomon! It's a shame that Tentomon is still one of the only cases with fully insect-like eyes, but it's nice just how accurate Funbeemon otherwise is to its inspiration. The right number of wings, the right number of body segments, and even the three ocelli on its forehead! A solid, competent insect digimon.

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ADULT: WASPMON

Unfortunately, the classic organic arthropod style does not continue any further, with all of Funbeemon's evolutions looking fully mechanized. On the plus side, Waspmon has a beautiful color scheme and an overall very cool, interesting shape with a highly realistic wasp face, even if it is a robotic one. The huge, spherical abdomen dangling off the accordian-like waist is a really neat look, and I like those big shoulder thrusters in place of wings.

Waspmon are the foremost guardians of a gigantic, flying digital beehive known as the "Royal Base," where all stages of this line are supposedly born.

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PERFECT: CANNONBEEMON

The next stage is interesting enough, with the huge energy cannon for an abdomen and even larger honeycomb-like array on its back, though I have to take a point off for dropping the more muted, pleasant brown and yellow of its predecessor and looking a little chunkier and boxier.

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ULTIMATE: TIGERVESPAMON

And then...blech! BLAH! MEH!!! Sure this is a "cool" metal wasp person but I feel like I've seen this countless times before. We get it, digimon, you think a humanoid is the pinnacle of evolution because you slept through biology class and only got the gist of the idea. THe face isn't half bad, the details are slick, but it just doesn't hold a candle to Funbeemon itself...or even Waspmon.

What's really interesting about this line, though, along with the digimon we'll be seeing over the next couple days, is that it's supposed to be a carrier of something called the "X-antibody"...which we'll be exploring much, much more very shortly.

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