Quite the departure from the original. (Update 2)
I decided to toil with texture layering and noise I generated from World Machine. The idea to use noise from World Machine is credited to @jqarlsson 's post (Make Noise Textures with World Machine - #16 by jqarlsson) really awesome post for anyone interested. I messed with this anticipation effect for awhile. I wanted to keep the cylinder mesh from the original. So, I just ended up stretching it into a beam because I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do with it. I also increased the anticipation time by 0.5.
Now onto the explosion!