Bot Reviews: Transformers: Vintage Beast Wars Deluxe Cybershark

You know, when the Vintage Transformers collection started doing Beast Wars reissues, I remember kind of regretting that I’d decided to go in on Kingdom’s take on the entire Beast Wars tv show cast, instead of reissues of the originals. But, long-term, it turns out I backed the right horse. While the one Vintage Beast Wars figure I did get (Rattrap, reviewed here), turned out pretty good, I’ve heard the line’s been plagued with quality control problems, and the prices are kind of high for what you get. Plus, they’re all Wal-Mart exclusive, which means they’ve been hard to find, and nigh-impossible to order online. And then, for some reason, the most recent wave of reissues showed up on shelves at Toys R Uses in Canada instead, including this guy. I guess Wal-Mart gave up, and TRU got their overstock, or something?

Anyway, one thing the Vintage Beast Wars line’s been doing right has been reissuing old toys that weren’t on the show, instead of the show cast, which feels like the right move, to me. See, Cybershark here came out in 1997, in the second year of the Beast Wars toyline. There were 20 different mainline figures released that year (more, if you count BotCon exclusives, micro-playsets, and count the combiners as multiple guys). And out of that entire year of figures, only two of them (Airazor and Inferno) actually appeared on the animated series, because it was expensive to create new CGI models. So Beast Wars has a very high concentration of non-show characters, which, when you’re a kid, could be fun, since you got to invent who they were when you played with them (as I said when I reviewed Transmetal 2 Prowl, here). You kind of had to for this guy, too, since Cybershark’s bio note didn’t even say what his personality was, just that he Fights Good with a bunch of special weapons. Cybershark is perhaps a bit more famous than most non-show Beast Wars characters, though, because he got a toy commercial specifically advertising him, right here (he’s in the second half, once they’re done talking about Inferno.)

As to the question of why he has a CGI model, but wasn’t on the show, if you look, it’s a very crude model compared to the show characters. His face can’t even move! Either way, this is one I didn’t have as a kid, so I was happy to belatedly own one, and approach him without nostalgia goggles.

Shark Mode:

So, this figure isn’t solely mine, it’s co-owned by my fiancée, because she loves sharks, and specifically Hammerhead sharks. That’s what this guy is, and he looks pretty spectacular. He’s pretty big by modern Deluxe standards, too, being almost as long as some of my Voyager-class animals. 

In terms of the sculpt work, we’re not quite looking at the modern Kingdom-and-on beast aesthetic of hyper-realistic animals, the kind of designs you’d see on rubber replicas. This is a slightly more stylized shark, but it’s still recognizably shaped like the thing, even if his skin is smooth, and not rough. There’s subtle lines on his body, including gills, and his face has a kind of endearingly doofy expression to it, with an open, toothy mouth.

Of course, the sculpt is criss-crossed by transformation seams, screwholes, hinges, and other artifacts, but I don’t think he does it any worse than any modern figures would. His second-biggest miss is the fact that the lower half of his rear fin is a spiky, steely blade, instead of an actual fin, thanks to it being a weapon in robot mode.

You can fold it away, if you like, but then he’s missing half of his rear fin. Meanwhile, his biggest miss is beneath him, where, like a lot of Beast Wars toys, he just has an open stomach with his robot legs visible.

This seems to universally have been considered “free parking” for robot parts in that era, and to be fair, it’s not really visible from most angles, and even has detailing to look like the kind of belly-fin actual hammerhead sharks have.  

For colors, he’s surprisingly lush. His main colors are a watery blue-gray over top of him, that fades nicely into a very light tan for his belly (I think the blue is plastic, and the tan is a very nice fading paint app). One of the reasons his robot legs blend pretty well is because they’re the same very light tan. Meanwhile, he’s also got this nice pattern of mildly metallic green-blue spots all across the top of him, red eyes on his hammer-head (it was the style at the time, no Beast Wars animals had normal eyes), and a bit of silver for his teeth, and tail-blade. In fact, he looks like he’s got more color on him than all the actual Hammerhead Sharks I’ve looked up pictures of, it’s quite detailed. The only issue I’ve got is that various hinges and triggers on top of his body are colored in that same very light tan, in a way that makes them stick out against his blue body more than they would have if they’d been sprued to be blue.

His build quality, meanwhile, is good on a large scale, but bad on a small scale. Overall, he holds together nice and solidly, but for two issues: His actual hammerhead, thanks to its gimmick, is mounted on a piece that rotates upwards, and it doesn’t peg in or anything, so it likes to drift upwards a bit, instead of staying flush.

Meanwhile, there’s a big split down the middle of his upper belly that similarly doesn’t stay flush, thanks to the two halves of the shark body not actually tabbing together. The whole thing does hold together, but those two bits make him feel a bit more rickety than he ought to. 

For articulation, he’s mostly a brick, not that I was expecting much out of him. He does have one important bit of articulation, though: Both of his front fins are on balljoints, so you can spin them around, and maybe do a little bit of gesturing. 

Here’s how you know he’s a 90s toy: He actually has some spring-loaded gimmicks. The big one is delightfully silly: Press the trigger above his head, and the Hammer on his head shoots out, as missile.

Underneath it, there’s silver-painted metal, with the launcher acting like a cyclopean eye. In fact, the mono-eye and the detailing really give me Revenge of the Fallen Ravage vibes.

One issue with the gimmick, though, is that it’s a strangely weak launcher. You can really only get that head to shoot an inch or two, most of the time (that demonstration above was a bit of an anomaly). I feel like this is for safety reasons, rather than a bit of bad QC. It’s a little disappointing, but better than nothing, and still audaciously fun.

There’s also missiles hiding inside his body that you can put in the launcher, but those are moreso a robot mode thing (and you’d need to start transforming him to get at them). The same goes for his tail blade, which you can fold away, and then spring out by pressing a trigger above his tail, but is more for his robot mode. 

Transformation

While you can technically do this transformation without taking any parts off of Cybershark, you’re going to at least want to pop his tail off, since it just gets in the way in robot mode. Aside from that, this is like, a 15-second transformation, which sounds bad, but in practice, just comes off as cleverly elegant. Basically, all you’re doing is splitting his body in half, rotating both sides of it outwards, flipping his legs and robot body out, and then down again (along with the shark head they’re now attached to), plugging the whole thing into his back to finish it off.

It’s that “flip the body up, and then slam it back down” bit that feels especially nice to do. He’s equally satisfying to flip back into shark mode, you just need to make sure that the bottoms of his feet plug into his robot fists, to stabilize the whole thing.

Robot Mode

So, technically, you can leave the launching Shark Hammerhead attached to Cybershark’s chest-launcher, in your typical beast-head-on-chest setup, but it looks really doofy, especially the way the bulk of it covers his waist.

So, I tend to leave it off, and discard it. The chest and torso underneath are a lot more tapered anyway.

The rest of him’s equally dynamic-looking, especially the way the outer layer of shark-skin on his back doesn’t read as kibble, but almost as angular wings.

It helps that there’s a bunch of tech detail on the insides of them. Meanwhile, his arms and legs have these hollow gaps in them that combine with their light-tan color scheme to make them read as being composed of bone, appropriate considering how they come out of his filleted shark body.

And oh, that headsculpt. That’s some premium 90’s anti-hero extremity.

He’s got a shark’s fin up top, a giant toothy maw below, and angry red eyes, that make him look like one of the Street Sharks mid-transformation.

You don’t see headsculpts like this anymore. 

His colors are mostly the same, with a bit more of that bone-color for his limbs, with the big addition being brownish-red for the interior of his shark-skin cape, a color that’s not as gross as it could be. Meanwhile, a tone of deco-work went into that awesome robot-mode head, including the same silver-blue-spotted-in-aqua sharkskin deco, red eyes, black to make it clear his toothy maw’s open, and more. 

For his build quality, he’s got one fatal flaw that, unfortunately, drags the whole thing down a bit: He’s got loose ankles. It’s not impossible to keep him standing, you can see that from these photos, but it’s just difficult enough to be irritating, especially considering he’s somewhat topheavy. He did fail my usual test of “can the figure stand on one leg and kick?” because of it.

A brighter spot is this figure’s articulation, which, honestly, is pretty modern. That’s the big gauntlet that Beast Wars throws down to modern updates of its figures: The originals were plenty poseable. Those ankles are loose, but that’s because he’s got forward-to-backward ankle rockers. Above that, he’s got knee joints, thigh swivels, ball-jointed hips and shoulders, bicep swivels, elbow swivels, and a ball-jointed neck. It’s probably a little less than a modern Deluxe (no wrist swivels, for example), but it feels really complete. Shame about those ankles, though.

For accessories and features, he’s got a lot going on. So, firstly, he’s got that spring-loaded missile launcher in his chest, which you can now flip forwards. You can mount the Hammerhead there, and launch it. Alternately, you can have him hold the hammerhead in his hand. Unfortunately, the angle of how he holds it prevents him from using it like an actual hammer, but it works as a shield, or nonspecific cudgel, or something.

Meanwhile, he’s got two light-tan missiles that stash snugly in his backpack, behind his head, which can also be fired by the launcher.

Y’know, maybe the launcher isn’t that weak, they shoot pretty far, it’s just that the hammerhead is heavy. Speaking of those missiles, there’s little cartoonish shark heads sculpted into them, a detail that’s just a chef’s kiss.

The missiles themselves also fit in his hands as clubs.

He can even Darth Maul ‘em. 

Finally, that tail-blade accessory finally has a purpose, as he can hold the entire tail assembly in his hand on a peg. The tail-blade itself has a cool spring-loaded deployment….

but what I really appreciate is that the peg he holds the whole thing on can pivot, so he can either hold it facing forwards, gun-style, or sideways, sword-style.

There’s just enough happening here to make him feel really full-featured, like a lot of Beast Wars Deluxes.

Overall

Yeah, even by today’s standards, this guy holds up. He looks good in both modes (he’s dripping with x-treem 90s cooless), is fun to transform, is plenty articulated, and includes a suite of gimmicks, many of which you don’t see in mainline Deluxes in 2024, especially the spring-loaded stuff. His only real problems (depending on how you view the launcher’s strength, or lack thereof) is the bits in his beast mode that don’t tab in, and those disappointingly loose ankles, but that last one’s at least fixable, if you’ve got some floor polish (I say, having some, but having never gotten around to using it on a figure).

Still, this is a good one, and more importantly, he’s being sold locally for the same price as a modern Deluxe, which means he’s actually worth what he costs, a problem a lot of the Vintage Beast Wars stuff struggles with. Heck, with all the spring-loaded stuff in him, and how big he is in altmode, he might be better value than some modern releases. Certainly, I don’t see how a modern update could meaningfully improve on this. Maybe add some wrist swivels, some missing tabs, and make his ankles tighter, but you’d definitely lose the missile launcher and the spring-loaded blade in the process. Either way, this is one that’s worth adding to your shelf, even if you weren’t a 90s kid.

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