Here’s one that I bought on general principle, because Beast Machines needs more love. Beast Machines was the controversial sequel series to Beast Wars, much darker in tone, and more complicated in story, a big departure from both the previous show, and Transformers in general. To this day, nerds are still weird about it. I like to point out that we got about a half-decade of extremely kid-oriented middling-to-bad anime after Beast Machines ended, so maybe “this complicated, serious sci-fi philosophical action-drama is taking too many big swings, and made some odd choices” isn’t a very valid complaint. I do agree that the new writing team really didn’t have a handle on the personalities of the returning Beast Wars cast, though, and wrote a lot of them somewhat out of character.
Cheetor was one where his shifted, more stern personality worked for me, though, because he’d spent all of Beast Wars growing and changing, and this was just the next phase of that change.
As proof that nerds are still weird about Beast Machines, there’s the fact that this little Core-class toy of Cheetor is the only Beast Machines representation in Legacy, a nostalgia toyline that’s trying to do a little bit of everything, where even a character from Rescue Bots got a Deluxe. The only other era to get a single tiny core toy is Energon, an objectively bad low point for Transformers (at least on the television side), so you can’t help but think that’s the level of bad the designers seem to think it is. Well, at least the fact this new Cheetor’s a tiny Core-class figure means he’s small enough to impulse-buy, and hey, the original Beast Machines Mega Cheetor’s the one vintage toy I’ve looked at already (reviewed here), so we’ve got a baseline to compare him to!
Robot Mode
Does he disturb you?
One thing about the original Beast Machines toyline is that it wound up with notoriously poor animation-accuracy, thanks to the show’s animators seemingly only having early toy concept art to work off of. The original Mega Cheetor wasn’t too bad by the standards of the line, but it’s still satisfying to see this little version just be the guy from the show, without many obvious compromises.
He’s tiny, but he looks right.
“Are nerds still bizzarely mad at me?”
He’s an odd-looking bot, with huge, long, bent-back legs, and lanky proportions, and I’m glad that all the little details, like the various spikes on his arms and shoulders, and the patterns on his chest are properly accurate. The changes come down to the necessity of the size class, namely his legs being thicker, and having obvious cat-paws hanging off his forearms, and a cat head on his back, but they’re pretty minor. Generally, he looks correct, if a bit chibified. Well, all except for his face.
*uncomfortable silence*
Now, to be fair, the rest of the headsculpt is nice and accurate, it’s just the face that’s a bit odd. Maybe it’s the paintwork (more on that later), or the plastic, but it looks kind of…goofy? Like, he’s got a tiny mouth, a recessed chin, and these big, leering eyes. It just feels off for him.
Reminder, this is what he’s supposed to look like.
I will say it’s not as bad at this scale as the bad headsculpt was on the RED Series Cheetor figure, but still, it’s a big miss. It does have comedy potential, the same way Legacy Hauler’s face does, but it definitely isn’t on purpose.
“He’s just STANDING there, MENACINGLY!”
For colors, Cheetor’s a bright, mildly cheesy yellow, mostly. I’ve heard the shade described as McDonalds-esque, and, well, that’s not wrong.
“Little. Yellow. Different.”
“WHAT did you call me?”
It’s a pretty glossy shade of yellow, but I still feel like it washes out the details a bit too much. For the rest of him, he’s got a good assortment of orangey-red, green and gold highlights, plus a generous spackling of purple spots across his chest, shoulders, head, and legs. Oddly, the spots on his chest are darker than his arms. Comparing him to his CGI model, it’s actually a pretty near-complete deco, he’s just missing some accents on his wrists and thighs, and on some of his shoulder-spikes. Again, it might be the color that makes his face look odd, those eyes look so large because they’re painted in white, with black pupils, and have purple accents underneath that are supposed to be stripes, but read as eyebags. He hasn’t slept in years, and he’s seen some serious stuff.
“You won’t believe the Alt.Toys.Transformers flamewars I witnessed.”
One thing that he does impressively well, meanwhile, is stay standing up, at least in neutral poses.
And jogging ones, too!
The figure’s design, with its huge legs and small feet, has meant that many takes on it (including the original) were incredibly wobbly on their feet. But not this guy, something about the weight, and the size of the feet keep him standing in all kinds of odd poses. The rest of him’s equally sturdy-feeling, no tight joints, no loose parts. Shout-out to his fold-away cat-claws for actually being on tight joints, that’s the kind of thing that pops off easily, normally.
Those long legs are great for kicking.
For articulation, there’s plenty here, but some frustrating omissions. First of all, impressively, he’s got two sets of knee swivels in his weirdo legs, as well as ball-jointed hips. There’s some slight limits on those hips, thanks to transformation tabs on the insides of his thighs bumping his pelvis, but it’s very minor. Uptop, he’s got ball-jointed elbows and shoulders, as well as a swiveling neck. Technically, he’s missing a waist joint, but I keep not noticing, so I don’t miss it.
Y’know, him being Core-sized technically makes him canonically scale-accurate with G1 guys.
So, the two things that bug me about his articulation are, firstly, that he doesn’t have any kind of ankle joints. I wouldn’t expect that normally at this size, but his odd, bendy legs really feel like they would have worked better if you could at least rock his feet back and forth.
Sure, this pose looks cool, but it’s part of a very narrow range where both is feet are flat on the ground.
He may stay standing on his feet really well, but those feet need to be flat, and no ankle tilts means that’s hard to do. The other thing is his neck. He really needed a ball-joint, or the ability to otherwise move his head up and down. As sculpted, it feels like he’s tilting his head slightly downwards, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
Well, I can dramatically shoot him from below, at least.
Plus, on the Beast Machines tv show, Cheetor tended to pose himself in hunched ways, with his head tilted up to look forwards, and it feels like a miss that you can’t replicate that here.
One example of many. The toy can’t do this at all.
You can at least get some dynamic posing out of him, but it’s all a lot more limited than it feels like it should be.
Y’know, Centurion would make a pretty good base for a Beast Machines Tankor update to be retooled out of.
*shing!*
For accessories, Cheetor’s got a very important set of curved, twin swords. They’re important, because despite being his signature weapon on the show, none of his three first-year Beast Machines toys had them, with only a second-year stealth-colored figure coming with them, so putting one out with the right accessories always feels good.
So cool, they block fire!
Look at those eyes. You think he wouldn’t do this?
I think they’re a bit oversized compared to the show, but at this scale, that upsizing makes sense. Importantly, they’re sculpted correctly, and have the same reddish-orange accents at the top of them, and he can pose with them in a lot of cool, dynamic ways.
Like so.
There’s also a bonus feature to them. There’s a lot of tabs around the base of them, and that’s so they can clip together into a singular “boomerang,” another thing he’d sometimes do on the show, but has never been replicated by any figures before.
He’s got that look because he’s trying really hard to aim.
Despite being a creepy creature, he’s not Australian.
You can also flip how they’re plugged in, and do more of a “glider” configuration, another trick he’d pull.
Up, up, and away!
They’re really fun to mess around with, and add a lot. You can stash them in his shoulders if you want, adding a lot of mass to them, but that’s moreso intended for altmode.
You hear heavy breathing from behind his shoulder.
One nifty thing about how they stash is that each sword has a specific square tab on a specific side, so each has a specific shoulder they belong to.
Transformation
This is mostly a dirt-simple affair, where you’re flipping his cat head out and over his robot head, extending his waist, flipping out his tail, flipping his cat paws out, and putting him on all fours. Where it gets odd is a series of bizarre pegs on the insides of his limbs.
Before the big plug-in.
I’ll talk about them when we get to altmode, but they’re the only wrinkle in something that’s otherwise very basic.
Beast Mode
Trapped pre-pounce.
Okay, so, let’s just skip ahead and talk about those pegs. Basically, he’s got them on the inside of his upper arms, and thighs, and you’re supposed to plug both of them into holes on his upper torso, and hips respectively, basically gluing his upper limbs to his cat body. The thing is, like….why? What was the reason? All it does is neuter articulation, since he can’t move the top joint of each limb anymore, only his elbows and double-knees. Not only that, but thanks to his lack of any kind of ankle or foot articulation, it’s genuinely hard to get him into a position where all four feet are flat on the ground. I thought, initially, that he had to be posed with his butt up in the air, like he was about to charge, as seen above, before I managed to finagle his limbs so he could at least be in a neutral pose.
The only other “locked” pose he can do.
Now, there’s nothing stopping you from just unpegging his limbs, unlocking his joints, but in this mode, those tabs actually collide with his body, and mean his arms and legs have to be slightly spread out. It’s a baffling design choice.
He’s walking, but it’s an awkward walk, since he has to avoid bumping himself with himself.
The other bad design choice: Not hiding his robot head at all, which is just out, directly underneath his cat head. The instructions tell you to rotate it, so he’s at least not looking out underneath him, but thanks to his odd, elongated skull, there’s just this…thing sticking out beneath his cat head, like a goat’s gruff.
He’s trying to hide his weird chin.
You’re better off leaving him with his robot head facing downwards, it at least draws less attention to itself.
Something like scale.
With the two big complaints out of the way, what else do we have here? A cat that’s a re-arranged robot with a new head, not that that’s a bad thing.
I didn’t expect a new member of the Itty Bitty Kitty Committee so soon.
Like many Beast Machines characters, the show kind of gave him an impossible transformation, where a bunch of details on his limbs and body were different between modes.
Good luck making this out of that robot mode.
the toy not bothering with that is an inevitability, though I do wish they’d have made some effort to hide his robot fists, which are just hanging out right above his cat paws. He does lean really hard into the exaggerated, chibi look in this mode, though, with his big feet, big shoulders, and his new headsculpt, which is, dare I say, strangely cute?
He seems chill and nice, the complete opposite of his robot mode personality.
It’s unlike his show’s sculpt, but works better than his strange robot-mode noggin. I think a part of the vibe comes from the fact that his eyes are a set of black accents with uncolored pupils and irises, like a cartoon character.
My attempt at a Big Stretch.
So, for articulation, if you’ve locked his limbs in, you can still access his ball-jointed elbows, and swivelling double-knees, but there’s not much you can do with them, unless you unlock him to access his hips and shoulders, but then you have to awkwardly move his limbs in ways where those pegs don’t collide with his torso. I’m really missing those ankle tilts here, they’d have helped so much. For other jointage, his transformation joints mean you can raise his cat head (which, of course, exposes his robot head), raise and lower his tail, and swivel his waist up and down a bit.
There’s something creepy hiding just beneath the surface.
There’d be a lot here, if they hadn’t made the decision to nerf it with those dang tabs.
He can’t move as well in this mode, so Not-Tankor snatched him up.
Overall
I don’t know about this one, guys. I wanted to like him a lot more than I do, but he’s got too much bad in him.
I don’t trust that face, either.
His robot mode’s technically decent, and I like the swords, but he’s got that bizarre headsculpt, and some seriously limited articulation. And then his altmode is just a mess, thanks to a weird unforced error of a design and engineering decision that further kills his poseability.
He’s mad because I speak the truth.
I don’t hate him, but I’m disappointed in how he turned out. Beast Machines deserves better, and if you’re not specifically a fan of it, I can’t really recommend picking this guy up, at least not for full price. And if you are a fan, just leave him in robot mode, and try to ignore him creepily staring at you.
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