This is an important, nigh-legendary Transformers release for a few reasons, but before I get into that, let’s talk about who Cosmos is.
It all began with a little green doorbell.
So, Cosmos was always kind of a funny idea for a Transformer, conceptually. Released in 1985, at a time when Transformers was still mostly angling for the “robots disguised as real things” approach (mechanical bugs and dinos aside) angle, here was a minibot who instead changed into a flying saucer, straight out of a 1950’s sci-fi b-movie. His Bob Budianski-written profile even noted that he liked to prank humans by making them think a real flying saucer was after them, all because he was often bored and lonely, as a spacefaring Autobot relegated to watching for threats from his far-off vantage point. This characterization didn’t really come through on the cartoon, though, where he was mostly a friendly robot who spoke in what was supposed to be a very bad Peter Lorre impression, according to his VA, Michael McConnohie.
He was the resident Space Guy ™.
Nor in the Marvel Comic, where he was a part of Blaster’s underground resistance, and spent a lot of his screentime racking up a bizarrely high body count, courtesy of his deadly hand lasers.
Seriously, he was merciless.
But his most faithful-to-the-profile portrayals came from IDW’s comics, in both their original and rebooted continuities, where he was a lonely, unappreciated scout.
Falling in with a bad crowd, because they give him attention.
He also had doomed romances with a Decepticon in both universes, so he’s got a type, I guess.
So shameless.
On the toy front, despite having such an unusual alternate mode, Cosmos has managed to get four different new-mold figures of himself made, not counting repaints and re-releases, which is pretty impressive. The one I owned before today’s subject was the Power of the Primes minifigure, and he’ll show up in a couple photos.
Here’s a Wiki pic, for reference.
But it’s this latest one that’s confounded collectors, because of how impossibly rare it was until now. See, this version of Cosmos first came out in the Wal-Mart Exclusive Velocitron Speedia 500 line, and it’s hard to get your hands on Wal-Mart exclusives at the best of times. But Cosmos got it particularly bad.
Most of us only ever saw this as a JPEG.
Despite being a brand-new tooling of a well-liked G1 character, he was shipped one-per-case, meaning very few of him ever got made, and they were all promptly snapped up, with a lot of them going straight to eBay. I only ever saw one in person one time, at TFCon, with a triple-digit price tag on him. In some circles, “Velocitron Cosmos” is just shorthand for an impossible to find figure. Well, until now. As I mentioned last week when I talked about Studio Series Rise of the Beasts Optimus, there’s currently an initiative by Hasbro to re-release hard-to-find, exclusive figures, mostly by repacking them into the last wave of Legacy United, which is how Cosmos hit the market again, and how I finally snagged a copy of this former collecting grail.
Capocollo’s here for proof that it’s mine.
Let’s see if he was worth the fuss!
Robot Mode
A chunky boy.
So, another thing that Cosmos shares with Studio Series Rise of the Beasts Optimus, besides being a former rare exclusive that just got re-released, is that he was also originally planned to be a retool, in Cosmos’s case, of Origin Bumblebee, reviewed here.
A behind the scenes of the original plan.
But, like Optimus, Cosmos’s designers, Mark Maher, Shogo Hasui and Ittoku Kuwazu looked at the retool budget, and decided to squeeze a whole new figure out of it instead.
That’s about all they share in common, though.
And it sort of shows on Cosmos’s sculpt in an interesting way. Aesthetically, he looks different from other Legacy figures. He’s very blocky, and very cartoony, in a way a lot of his classmates aren’t. He almost looks like a third-party figure.
One of these things is not like the others.
I don’t mean this in a bad way at all, it suits his design. Cosmos was always kind of an odd, chunky, squat, wide robot, with a lot of strange little design flourishes, and they’re all preserved here very well, on a sculpt that’s also extremely accurate to his Sunbow animation model.
Which makes it really funny to pretend he’s his vicious Marvel self.
Honestly, he’s kind of adorable, which feels right for a bot like this. He’s short for a Deluxe, but his chunk and heft make up for it. One little detail I like about the sculpt is less-cute: He’s got tiny lasers sculpted into his knuckles, presumably so he can go on a Marvel-style Decepticon Blasting Spree.
Fists of fury!
Meanwhile, uptop, he’s got a headsculpt that preserves his Early Sunbow Wierdness, with a head shaped like an upside-down flower pot, a face with a strangely ornate mouthplate, and innocent-looking eyes.
He’s a little ropey from the back.
I’d say the only compromise on him is that he’s got a bit of a backpack of folded-up saucer panels, but it’s not too bad, and they had to go somewhere. There’s also the fact that his forearms are completely visibly hollow, something that a figure made on a full budget probably would have had the partscount to fix.
The opposite of arm kibble.
One thing that isn’t a compromise is the little hip-skirts hanging on the sides of his waist, those are actually on his animation model, if you can believe it (check the top of the article).
Green pals.
For colors, they did not skimp out on this little guy. He’s mostly a couple shades of dark green and bright yellow, with bits of red, blue and silver for extra color. He’s got a particularly ornate bit of deco on his chest, with different blues, silvers, and an Autobrand in the middle, imitating one of the two different decos his chest had, depending on which G1 episode you were watching. It’s a very complete-feeling set of colors.
“How…How would I reach you?” “Say my name. I will hear you.”
For build quality, he’s also really solid. Being made with a retool budget doesn’t affect the amount of plastic used, so Cosmos is still weighty and substantial in your hands, feeling heftier even than some normal Deluxes. That, and all his joints are nice and tight. I think the only hinky bit of construction on him is around his head. You can flip the panel it’s on to hide his head for his transformation, but the panel’s just a little bit loose for my liking, and rocks his head around whenever you try to use his neck joint.
~Giant steps are what we take…..walking on the moon. ~
Speaking of articulation, he’s, again, pretty full-featured. He’s got all the joints you’d expect from a modern figure, including ankles, knees, thigh swivels, universal hips, a waist swivel, universal shoulders, elbows with a built-in swivel, and a rotating neck. I will say, he’s maybe not as bendy as some of the other modern minibots, having no wrists, and, generally, a lower torso full of joints that feel like they ought to have a bit more range to them.
~I hope my neck don’t break….walking on the moon.~
On one hand, his bulky, squat appearance doesn’t feel like he ought to have a big range of motion. On the other hand, other Deluxe Minibots like Legacy Gears, and Origin Bumblebee, have shown us that that a smaller figure means the budget for more movement. I do appreciate those swivelling elbows, though, since you can use them to position his fists into a shooty pose.
Oh boy! Here I go, killing again!
His accessory is an interesting one, because it’s connected to how the figure originally came out in the Velocitron toyline, which was themed around racing.
They forgot to load the texture.
Since it would have been unfair for a flying saucer to be in the race, the designers explained during the livestream that introduced the figure that he’d be the one waving the flag at the start of the race.
Ready?
Goooooo!
So, that’s what he comes with, a black and white checkered racing flag, with a green handle. It’s a strange accessory, but it fits the cute vibes of the guy. And it has features! The fabric part of the flag is attached to the handle by a 5 millimeter port, and you can pop it off, flip the handle around, and reveal it as a little laser pistol for Cosmos to shoot with.
“What am I supposed to do with this?”
“Oh! I get it!”
The other side of the flag is solid white, and the designers also suggested he might wave it to seem like he was surrendering, only to flip it around and shoot his enemies…which is fully a war crime, so, uh, maybe not?
This part’s okay.
This part’s super-duper illegal.
On top of that, he’s also got seven ports across his body that are 5 millimeter compatible, in case you think he wasn’t armed enough already.
Got that battle lust in him.
Transformation
Cosmos has got one of those “simple in theory, fiddly in practice” transformations. Basically, you’re unclipping his arms and backpack, swivelling them upside-down to go to his lower torso, and turning both them, and his legs into the flying saucer’s body, with you flipping away his head along the way.
Halfway there.
The fiddly part is getting all of the different pieces that make up the bottom of the saucer to clip and peg together, and there’s a fair amount of micro-adjustment needed before it all works.
How it looks from the bottom.
Some of it feels like it just kind of fits on vibes rather than anything solid. Still, it manages to be a pretty fast transformation, so I can’t fault it too much for a bit of fiddliness.
Saucer Mode
You know the old-fashioned saucer noise that’s playing.
At the end of the process, Cosmos changes into an old fashioned, retro sci-fi flying saucer, straight out of a 50’s b-movie. Let’s get the big elephant in the room out of the way with his design, though: He’s shaped kind of wrong compared to his appearance in the animation, and his original toy.
For reference.
Basically, the cylinder on top of him is way too big and tall, making him look a little bit more like a tophat with a big brim than he ought to.
When Soundwave wants to put on the ritz, he puts on the Cosmos.
I think it really sticks out, too, because most other Cosmos updates change him into a totally flat saucer.
Like the Power of the Primes version.
Still, it doesn’t bug me as much as I thought it would, probably because it still basically fits his cute, chunky aesthetic. He’s a very swooshable saucer, the kind of spaceship you want to pick up and zoom around, while Jetsons-type noises play in your head.
~It’s lonely out in spaaaaace….~
There’s also a lot of good sculpting on the saucer body, including thrusters in the back, and little lasers in the front, which you can fit blast effects onto.
Excellent pews.
And, of course, he has the red button on top of him, like some kind of fancy doorbell. The only other hinky part of the sculpt is some gaps around where the top of the saucer meets the body.
Not exactly a normal minibot.
For colors, most of the yellow is now hidden, save for a little bit around the tall hat. He’s now mostly two shades of dark green, with a bit of silver at the front, the red button uptop, and the really ornate chest deco on the main body.
“Cosmos, that’s not a disguise!”
In terms of his build quality, I groused about how fiddly it is getting the saucer body together, but once it’s all in place, it stays together, making for a fairly solid spaceship. Well, mostly. He’s got a panel at the back of him that really doesn’t like staying in place, and flips down at the slightest touch.
It’s right there, at the bottom end.
In terms of features, there’s those blast-effect-compatible lasers in the front of him. But more importantly, he’s still got three 5-millimeter ports on him that you can use. You can stash his flag-gun on any of them, though he can really only use it as a gun, and not a flag. Still, you can also add in more accessories, to turn him into a hostile alien invader.
Hm, still not very menacing, to be honest.
Overall
I’m really glad Hasbro put this guy back in circulation, and gave normal fans like me the chance to actually own a copy of him, without paying insane scalper markup. That’s because, overall, he’s a pretty fun figure. He’s got a unique set of vibes to him, as a kind of chunky, non-threatening little space guy.
~There’s a staaaaar maaaan waiting in the sky….~
Those vibes do a lot of heavy lifting, though, because while his engineering isn’t bad, I feel like it falls a bit short of other modern minibot updates, like Gears, Origin Bumblebee, or even Gens Selects Hubcap and friends. There’s nothing especially wrong with him, I just wish he had a bit more poseability, or a more stable transformation, or a more proportionate saucer mode. Still, we’re talking starting from like 7 out of 10 on engineering, but with a bunch more points added to that by the excellent sculpt, and just the general novelty of who and what he is.
How can you say no to this face?
I think another underrated element of him is that he’s a substantially different figure from his previous release, the Power of the Primes one, so you wouldn’t just be getting the same thing with some more mass and a few extra joints. So, I’ll say this: Don’t pay scalper bait for him, but if you can get him for normal retail price (which you should be able to, now that he’s got a normal retail release), he’s worth picking up on his own merits, and not just because he was once super-rare.
Coming in for a landing on your shelf!
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