Beast Wars Series Cheetor

Height: 15.3 cm (robot mode average); 19 cm (beast mode length)

Articulation: 19 points total - swivel neck; 3 points each arm: ball joint shoulder, upper arm swivel, hinge elbow; 6 points each leg: ball joint hip, thigh swivel, hinge knee, multi-jointed ankle/foot.

Colors: Molded yellow, blue; Painted metallic blue, red, green, black, cream.

Accessories: Tail/club, triple bladed battle discs x2.

Release Data: Released December 2008 in the United States at a suggested retail price of US$10.99.

Gallery: 23 images.

Author: ExVee



Cheetor has always been fast. Other robots move at speeds that seem agonizingly slow to him, as if they were trapped in tar. Unfortunately, a lot of the time he moves a lot faster than he thinks, and finds himself in situations that, in retrospect, could have been avoided. Still, speed has gotten him out of a lot more jams than it's gotten him into, and when speed isn't enough he can always break out his blades.

Cheetor's been around the block in terms of character growth. Starting out as the reckless kid type at the start of Beast Wars, Cheetor gradually, and surprisingly naturally matured over the course of the following seasons. And aside from a brief backslide in Beast Machines, Cheetor ended up replacing Optimus Primal as leader. Well, until you start getting into secondary media that follow on the end of Beast Machines which set about resurrecting Optimus almost immediately.

That's of no great concern to this Cheetor, though. The bio is somewhat indistinct about the whole thing, but between the body and the noted personality traits, he fits best in season 1 of Beast Wars. Or you can take the approach from the Anniversary Beast Wars leader toys and view this Cheetor as an idealized, "ultimate" form. Uh, whose ideal was this, again?



Beast Mode

The best way I can describe the beast mode is as if it were a comic book character. It's generally a good representation of a cheetah - certainly a better effort than any remotely realistic attempt Hasbro has made before - but it's way muscular, particularly on the legs. I'll grant that a cheetah should have fairly developed leg muscles, but to my memory they're not known for their bulging physiques.

At the start of the Beast Machines cartoon, the returning characters were briefly back in their original beast forms. But in the years since starting with Beast Wars, technology and the skill of the animation crew had improved notably. This was expressed in tweaks to a couple of the beast CGI models, Cheetor being one of them. It was nothing drastic, but some changes were made to make him a little more true to life. I look at this Cheetor in much the same way. The original Cheetor toy was so indistinct in beast mode that Hasbro (well, the Kenner division anyway) was able to recolor it into a tiger. They probably could have recolored it as a cow and nobody would have questioned it.

Today's Cheetor need have no fear of being remade as a tiger at some point in the future. He hits all the right cheetah marks, if maybe a little exaggerated in proportion. A large, deep chest, followed by a slender, narrow rear. The legs though starting muscular quickly taper down quite thin. And of course the tail sticks out straight behind. Paint operation restrictions limit the total number of spots, and the tail is without any markings at all, but the face accurately reflects its inspiration with the typical black rings around the eyes and lines tracing the sides of the muzzle.

Cheetor has a gimmick for the beast mode, which requires a bit of back story to understand the full meaning. See, back in 1996 various circumstances led to the original Cheetor shipping multiple times over the course of the year's toys. In each new batch, the eye color was changed, eventually ending with blue, red, and green-eyed Cheetors all being available at one time or another. Now, Cheetor's gimmick involves pulling a small lever in the middle of his back, which causes the upper half of the head to be pushed up, showing his teeth, and changing the color of the eyes from green to red. It's just about the ultimate level of homage, and a pretty neat effect. But be warned, after triggering it only a few times, the mechanism has begun to work less effectively. I now have to push the head down the rest of the way when I release the lever, where it initially reset entirely under its own power. Pinned together as it is, it's not readily possible to get in and try to correct, either.

Unfortunately, the complicated mechanism prevents the head from being at all articulated, so he's stuck in place no matter what other pose you might end up with. And Cheetor can pose decently. Decently, but not amazingly. The front legs have only three points of articulation each, and the shoulders are somewhat limited in their range. The rear legs do a little better. The hip joints are restricted in forward motion by parts from the robot mode, which sadly precludes any notion of a running pose. But they can extend backwards very well, which facilitates perhaps a leap, or a stretched out, laying on stomach pose. It may not be as dynamic as one might hope for a cheetah, but the original was much more of a brick, so we'll accept this.


Transformation

Beast Wars was famous, or perhaps infamous for many transformations that basically involved standing up. There were variations, perhaps simple flourishes, but when it came down to it, many toys transformed by having at least one pair of beast limbs become equivalent robot limbs. And it returns here, once more! The limbs forming the robot limbs is however just about all that's in common with the typical Beast Wars transformation. Even getting from front legs to arms is not nearly as trivial a process as you might assume, and it's just one portion of a larger complicated process of forming the upper body. In theory much of the moving parts are designed to peg or tab into place, but in execution it's not a sure thing. In my case just the friction is adequate to hold most of that together, so probably not something to worry about, at least in the short term.


Robot Mode

While unmistakably Cheetor, the face is much more feline in appearance than is generally associated with this body. Even the CGI model had its split lip as a surface texture rather than matter of construction, and was otherwise more humanish than cat-looking. The face is mostly neutral in expression, the only hint of personality is the figure's left eye being molded slightly narrower than the right. The head can theoretically turn a full circle on its swivel, but it gets tight feeling at certain points. The panel that covers the head in beast mode remains attached, and can be used as a lever when turning the head. The panel doesn't interfere, but despite being hinged it can't be moved any place where it's not obviously sticking up behind the head.

Even from seeing photos beforehand, I could draw parallels to Armada Hot Shot for the arms. Sadly I turned out to be right in that estimation. In some depressing similarity to Hot Shot, Cheetor's arms are found to be terribly restricted. All for the fact that the beast mode's front legs are hanging in their entirety from the arms, the arms can neither straighten fully, nor hang at the sides without turning them so the beast parts face outward from the body. Nothing can be said for this except that it is bad design. Furthering the trouble is that the shoulders themselves are not the best at staying connected to the torso. Hinged panels meant to lock by tabs in the torso, it ends up failing as the fit is just a fraction off and the panels are easily jarred loose. This isn't helped at all by the shoulder panels being attached themselves to another hinged structure which makes it difficult to align the parts when snapping them together.

The package photo even shows the toy with the shoulders dislocated and hanging farther down the torso. In a sad twist this solves one proportion problem even if it creates another. Cheetor's arms are pretty short. Granted, many Transformers have problems like this, typically as a result of needing to fit the arms in a confined space, but they still tend to reach farther down than their own waist. Cheetor, when arms are in the right position, does not even have that. The arms seem meant for a figure with a somewhat shorter torso, certainly not the one they're attached to.

To top it all off, Cheetor has typical fists instead of odd open hands, and even has holes in them. But the fist holes are a very oddball style that doesn't match any I've ever seen before, much like diamonds with blunted ends. This means that Cheetor is compatible with only the accessories he comes with.

The torso suffers for the gimmick of the beast mode, and for the complex engineering of the transformation. From the beast head all the way to where the cheetah's abdomen would start is a massive, solid piece. Not only does the head jut out some length from the chest, but the uninterrupted mass of the remaining beast mode bits extends a full 5cm from the line of the shoulders and is almost entirely hollow. Meanwhile the gimmick does not actually require all this space to operate, as the same effect can be had by pulling back on the cheetah mode's ears. Apparently someone found it more important that you need not touch the beast mode head to work the gimmick than they found it to not have the toy appear to be wearing a cheetah-skin backpack. The panels that wrap around the form the abdomen for the robot mode don't really close up all of the space, so you can still see the empty space within. On one positive note, the tampographed Maximal insignia on the stomach makes me quite pleased.

The legs at least have the least crippling by leftover beast mode parts. From the hips to the ankles everything is fairly typical. The knees don't have any stops, so you might end up accidentally bending them backward. Or you could do it purposely to homage Beast Machines Cheetor to some extent. The lower legs retain a chunk of the beast mode legs. They're put to some use here by concealing the storage space for one of Cheetor's accessories. Thankfully they don't stir up any trouble with the normal function of the legs.

The feet aren't quite so guilt-free, however. The beast legs are fairly articulated. And they happen to form the extent of the robot legs. This means that somehow or another the whole mostly authentic structure of the cheetah's feet has to form robot feet. Early images had suggested the robot stand on just the cheetah's toes, but that's incredibly difficult to execute. Later revisions, including the package photography shows the entirety of the cheetah foot being utilized, with the ankles straight. This is reasonably stable, but has aesthetic drawbacks. First up it gives him really obviously huge feet, but the straight ankles also inflate the figure's height and exaggerate the existing proportion problems. The best balance I can figure is to bend the ankles back as far as they go. It helps disguise the full length of the feet, and also shortens the whole figure a bit. If you're having balance problems from the backpack this can help get some more support under it, so it has practical benefits.


Accessories

-Triple-bladed Battle Discs

Very much like Animated Prowl, Cheetor comes with a pair of throwing star style weapons. So similar in fact they share the same sort of gear mechanism to deploy or retract all the blades at once. As noted above, these have a storage location on the legs. They can snap into place securely, but it may not feel like it at first. The peg and hole are pretty shallow, and it takes just the right pressure to get the disc to seat on its peg. They fit into either hand by a deployed blade, but they only fit snugly with the pointed end facing back toward Cheetor, else they're loose and feel as if they'll fall out. Unsurprisingly the shape of the blades and the shape of the opening in the fists are a nearly perfect match.


-Battle Club

Also known as a tail. More Cheetor toys have been designed to use their tails as melee weaponry than come with guns. Though there was that one which had both... But where most have some sort of blade or other object at the end to reinforce the weaponry function, this is just ... a tail. I'd say it's maybe more of a beating stick than a decent club. Treating it as a tail whip might also be a workable justification.

The original Cheetor toy turned its tail into a second gun.



Closing Remarks

Many people call Galvatron a bad toy. In truth Galvatron is the victim of material problems more than of poor design. I think Cheetor is an honest case of bad design. The gimmick was very ambitious, and is somewhat impressive in execution, but not at this cost. Too bad that's not the only issue working against the toy.

To be fair we have to acknowledge the point that the beast mode was pretty clearly prioritized, and in that regard it was a success. The beast mode is without a doubt the best thing about this Cheetor. Still, for a Transformer I kind of want a robot mode then that doesn't make me sad. The worst thing? I compared Cheetor to Hot Shot earlier, but at least Hot Shot wasn't designed with normal arm jointing in mind. Cheetor has all the articulation of a normal toy, but it's gone to waste due to beast bits hopelessly getting in the way.

It's a fine beast mode, but for a tribute to Beast Wars in the 25th Anniversary line it fails to meet expectations. We can but hope Dinobot turns out better. Could Have Been Better.

Still, to this day nothing has topped Night Slash as my favorite version of Cheetor.

-ExVee, 1/8/2009