The back half of the second season of Beast Wars was pretty much a murderer’s row of excellence in Transformers storytelling. Truth be told, few of those episodes were surprisingly heavy for 10-year-old me, and “Transmutate” was one of them. The episode introduces the title character, born from a crashed, damaged Stasis Pod as a strange, asymmetrical robot with the mind of a child, but with incredible powers. Between her design, which young me found unsettling, and the unusually dark themes and plot of the episode, I was left equal parts scared and saddened. These days, I appreciate the episode for how it swung for the fences, regardless of how well it hit.
It’s weirdly difficult to get a full-body screenshot of her from the episode, for some reason.
Transmutate was a member of the same club as Nightbird, Autobot X, and others, in that she was created specifically for the show, and wasn’t depicted as being able to transform, so there was no figure of her in the original line. One was belatedly created for 2006’s 10th Anniversary Beast Wars line as a non-transforming build-a-figure spread across two waves, and the Collector’s Club did their own alternate-universe version as a repaint of Transformers Prime Arcee awhile later, so there’s never been an easy-to-come-by representation of her, until this Generations Selects version.
The two rare versions.
This new one’s still an exclusive, but it’s pretty easy to grab at Gamestop, or off Hasbro Pulse. This version is about halfway between the Club and build-a-figure ones conceptually, in that they gave her a redesign with an alternate mode, but hewed closer to her classic appearance. The tooling itself is actually a clever retool of Paleotrex, one of Kingdom’s Fossilizer figures, meaning she changes into a skeleton, and can be broken apart into weapons for other figures.
The realistic, but bland, predecessor.
It’s an interesting way to get her into plastic form, and I’ve never handled a Fossilizer before, so I was eager to check this version out.
Robot Mode
Well, they got one thing right: This is a weird-looking robot. Instead of being made of mismatched machinery, she’s made of bones, in the rough shape of a person. The design might not be doing much to specifically evoke her show version’s asymmetrical, janky look (save for a single oversized left shoulder), but the general strangeness of the proportions (long arms and huge hands, tiny legs), plus the whole made-of-bones thing makes it feel right for the character.
She’s got very expressive hands, so expect a lot of that here.
You can make out obvious anatomical mismatches like her thighs being made of ribcage, and her left arm being mostly made from a tail, that add to the effect. Basically, it suits her well.
The one bit of the figure that is, specifically, modelled after her show design’s her new headsculpt. Kingdom’s headsculpts in general have been pretty good about nailing their show designs, and Transmutate’s face is a perfect replica of that too-smooth, too-human, sunken-eyed look that was so unsettling in CGI. And to their credit, outside of the face, they didn’t just plop her TV show head onto this unrelated body, but stylized it a bit with a more streamlined look to match her new form. I just wish it didn’t split open so easily.
*Cowboy yelling meme goes here*
On the show, Transmutate had a sonic scream attack, so the toy replicates it by giving her a jaw that you can open up, splitting her head into a dino-like maw with teeth. It’s a great, creepy effect, but on my copy, the joint is loose enough that it likes to tilt back and open at the lightest touch. She has a neck joint that lets me tilt her face down a bit, mitigating it, but it’s still a tiny little annoyance. At least it stays shut when at rest.
In a perfect world, Transmutate gets to simply vibe.
They did something really interesting with the colors here. Transmutate was originally light blue and pale gold, and for this version, they made both colors more vibrant, making the blue slightly more neon, and the gold into a darker, metallic, goldish-bronze. Something about the way these two-tone colors combine with the dinosaur bones gives her a really unusual, pretty set of colors, making her look more like coral, or some kind of mineral or gemstone to me, appropriate considering she’s made from fossils. It’s just a combo of colors you never see on Transformers, and it looks great.
Bots with blue accents stick together.
She’s almost entirely these two colors, with there being a sneaky bunch of paint apps designed to make specific pieces two-tone, or fade from one color to the other, and the color-matching is impressive. The only other colors are on her face, which is, again, impressively painted. Special attention was given to her eyes, and they include the black gradient around red, like she had on the show (plus black in her mouth, and a bit of yellowy-brown on the top of her head).
In that same perfect world, she took up breakdancing.
I groused a bit about her jaw before, but outside of that, she’s a surprisingly stable robot, considering she’s meant to break apart in her other modes. You’d think she’d be unstable on her tiny feet and small legs, but she’s surprisingly solid on her feet. For articulation, while she lacks ankle tilts, she has everything else you’d expect from a modern transformer. In particular, her giant hands have multiple finger joints on top of wrist swivels, making her able to emote with her hands really, really well.
Her accessory’s the only real weak point here. It’s the very end of a tail, a kind of long cone.
She doesn’t understand it, either.
She can’t hold it, but you can plug it into a hole in her thumbs, in a loose approximation of a melee weapon, though it’s an awkward angle (and it can’t stash anywhere). (Eleventh hour update: Yes it can! Thanks, Viv!)
Just look for a rectangular peghole on the back of the shoulder, and a rectangular peg on the cone.
Funny story: When I unboxed this, my partner took one look at her, and said, “that’s a Bionicle.” And she’s right, something about the colors, silhouette, and construction evokes Lego’s beloved line of buildable robot warriors. And just like Bionicle, everything I could say about Transmutate’s design comes with the caveat that you can just deconstruct her, and try to make something better. Let’s have a look at some examples:
Custom Robot Modes
A very mild modification.
Transmutate’s instructions don’t mention any alternate builds, but to begin with, her stock photography suggests unplugging her big, bladed shoulder, giving her a shorter right arm, and plugging that shoulder into her hand as a sort of blaster weapon. It’s certainly better-looking than her little tail-club thingie, and the asymmetry of the shorter arm certainly works for her.
She’s not shooting anyone, that’s a water squirter.
There’s also two alternate builds I’ve seen fans put together that I’ve found interesting. Instagrammer @tonezone.mp4 gave her this layout, completely changing up her limbs and lower torso:
AKA “Oooh, she walkin’” mode.
I like that it adds some mass to her (she was a larger character on the show), gives her funky multi-jointed legs, asymmetrical arms, and does a fair job of imitating her hunchbacked show appearance. On the other hand, she no longer has a single working hand, her left arm’s got no elbow, and the hunchbacked angle of her head means her jaw’s even more prone to rolling open. Still, A for effort, and some great creativity.
“What happened to my elbow?”
The next one was sent to me on Discord, and comes courtesy of The Sunbeam Collective. It, again, makes her very tall, gives her a peg-leg and asymmetrical arms, without sacrificing articulation, save for her peg-legged knee.
It’s not hunched like the other one, but the whole thing turned out a bit stronger to me. I then messed with it a bit further, added a chest panel, and reversed her pegleg for more asymmetry.
Rattrap objects to getting pets.
And that’s a big part of the appeal of figures like this: You can take them apart, and build something different with them. Use your imagination! I’ve seen several people create combiners out of multiple Fossilizers, even.
Transformation
The downside to a figure designed this way is that you do almost no actual transforming with her, instead breaking her apart and rebuilding her into her new form. Some of it’s intuitive, especially since we all know what a dinosaur skeleton looks like, but plenty of bits around the core body left me squinting at pictures and pieces, trying to figure out exactly how it all goes. This’ll never be a transformation I idly do in my hands while looking at something else, it’s too involved.
Skeleton Mode
After all of the strange asymmetry and jumble of her other form, Transmutate changes into a straight-up T-rex skeleton. It’s another choice that fits for the character, and I can see an alternate version of the Beast Wars episode where a damaged DNA scanner on her stasis pod interpreted a fossil too literally. The sculpt’s pretty normal-looking at first glance, and does a fair job of looking like an actual fossil. It’s only when you pay attention to the neck and ribcage that you notice folded-up robot bits.
*insert the other half of the yelling cowboy meme here*
The big weakness in the sculpt is her robot head, meant to fold into the back of the extremely cool-looking Rex skull. In practice, it doesn’t really fit in very well, and to keep it from being visible, you need to leave the skull pointing slightly up, or pointing straight forwards with kind of a frill sticking out. I wonder if the original Paleotrex tooling had a solution to this.
Pose her head pointing a bit upwards, and she winds up with a frill on top.
The colors are, again, lush in their gold and blue, and give the whole thing a kind of dollar-store-model-kit vibe, but in a good way.
“Gasp! Skeletons!”
Articulation’s a bit limited, though thanks to how the figure dissasembles. Granted, her legs are VERY poseable, with hips, knees, ankles and toes, and her tiny arms can wiggle on ball joints, but her tail’s mostly rigid, with only a single up-and-down joint at her pelvis, and while her skull has a nice, moveable jaw, she’s got a stiff neck, and again, moving her head too much dislodges her robot mode noggin.
This is about as weird as it gets.
Still, I can’t complain too much. The sheer coolness factor of “gold and blue T-rex skeleton” tends to overwhelm any issues I have.
Weapon Modes
Again, there’s no real transformation here, you’re just breaking her into her components, and equipping them to other robots in different ways. The instructions suggest using Kingdom Warpath, whom I don’t have, and are built around using a core figure with a single War for Cybertron port in the middle of their back. So, this time, our model will be the Trilogy’s ever-reliable everyman tooling, Siege Sideswipe, wearing his G2 Deco (also, you’d be surprised how few of Kingdom’s Beast Warriors actually have a proper port on their back).
The first configuration gives him a giant set of over-the-shoulder grabbing arms, a Beast Megatron-like Rex Head Claw on his right arm, a little shield on his left arm, an impressive axe created from the tail, and, gruesomely, a mace made of Transmutate’s head.
These ludicrous weapons suit a 90’s guy pretty well, actually.
It’s impressive, stable, and vicious-looking, in a creative way I like. The other build is somehow both sillier and cooler, though.
He’s off to swordfight Cloud Strife.
First of all, it gives him extendo-feet made from the rex legs, which are a bit tricky to balance. Secondly, he gets a more modest pair of shoulder cannons, and the same shield. Finally, he gets an absolutely gigantic, Buster-typr sword made from…all the other bits, with her head as a hilt. It’s the perfect kind of 90’s-ludicrous.
The guns are just for show.
And, of course, again, there’s always the call to create your own builds. Here’s a couple ideas I had:
Cheetor thinks adding a third leg will make him faster.
Hot Rod’s latest repair job’s especially dire.
Overall
By default, this is the best, most available Transmutate figure. But that’s faint praise. Something more definite is that this is a unique, interesting idea for how to handle the character, and it was executed well. Plus it’s just a unique, colorful design. The fact that it’s basically a construction toy means those of us who are LEGO-brained will get more out of it. That being said, I’m not one of those kinds of creative people, and yet I still enjoy what’s here. So, don’t pass this one up.
Ooga-booga-booga!
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