This set was unveiled back in July, but it wasn't made available for sale until the PulseCon virtual convention earlier in October. It was a live sale, though, not just a pre-order like most of the stuff that pops up on Hasbro Pulse, so it shipped as soon as people ordered it.

Hasbro's relationship with Ravage, particularly as he relates to Beast Wars, has been an interesting one. When Ravage first appeared in the Beast Wars cartoon in 1998, he was a show-only character, added as fan service and not meant to advertise any existing toys. Eventually, though, they sold a redeco of Transmetal 2 Cheetor and named it Tripredacus Agent, a reference to the fact that Ravage worked for the Tripredacus Council. They also retroactively took Shadow Panther, who had been only available in Japan, selling him through the online Hasbro Toy Shop and pretending he was an alias of Tripredacus Agent.

Takara, meanwhile, produced a toy for their Beast Wars Metals assortment, taking the original Transmetal Cheetor and modifying it to resemble Ravage as he appeared in the show (which was appropriate, since the Mainframe animators used Cheetor's CGI model as the basis to create the model for Ravage). Historically, Ravage X-9 has gone for insane amounts of money on the secondary market because it was the only toy of Ravage as he actually appeared in Beast Wars.

So, with the recent Beast Wars revival we've enjoyed, this was a great time for Hasbro to take a crack at Ravage themselves. I feel like they did an exceptional job.

The packaging showcases the two toys in the set, Agent Ravage and the G1 Ravage reissue. There's a side panel that accurately describes Ravage's role in the Beast Wars, and the back panel shows artwork of Agent Ravage transforming into a tiny cassette and jumping into the tape deck of his transwarp cruiser. This toy doesn't turn into a tape, so that's why G1 Ravage is included... so you can re-enact that pivotal scene with two different toys. (The inner cardboard tray is drawn like the interior of Ravage's cruiser, and includes a cardboard tape deck slot so you can insert G1 Ravage in tape mode. It's a fun idea, and hearkens back to the Pit of Judgement packaging, which was equally as clever.)

So the Deluxe-class Agent Ravage toy is an extensive remold of Kingdom Cheetor. Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to describe it as an all-new toy that reuses a handful of Cheetor parts. He stands at about five and a half inches in height, and is almost entirely black with some silver painted deco on his shoulders and chest and upper legs and guns. He's got a single Predacon insignia emblazoned on his left shoulder. He carries two guns, as he did in "The Agenda" parts 1-3.

Even though the CG model for Ravage borrowed some assets from Transmetal Cheetor, we haven't actually gotten a Transmetal Cheetor toy for Kingdom yet, so there are no existing parts to recycle. So, Ravage shares some lower leg pieces with Kingdom Cheetor, and the beast-mode forelegs are the same, but everything else is all-new. He's got shoulders that swivel and pivot outwards, elbow swivels, double-hinged elbow joints, wrist swivels, a rotating waist, hips that swivel and pivot outwards, knees that bend and swivel, and ankles that pivot and tilt. He's got a head that can swivel from side to side and pivot up and down a bit, and he has an articulated lower jaw.

The toy's transformation isn't too different from Ravage X-9. The robot arms fold up and tuck into the robot chest, and the robot head pulls double-duty as the beast-mode head. There's a fun trick where the beast-mode forelegs are tucked into holes in the robot's back, and these holes are plugged up by the robot arms when they're folded up for beast mode. The robot from the waist down transforms like Kingdom Cheetor, with the robot legs forming the hind legs for the beast mode. You can plug the twin guns into his hips in this form.

Also included is a reissue of Ravage from 1984, only with some updated deco.. The toy is entirely painted, with no stickers used for the cassette window or Decepticon badge, as with previous versions. He comes with the same accessories as the G1 toy, vaccum-metalized.

On all previous G1 cassettes, the characters always had an obverse side that included painted or stickered cassette tape details, and a "disguised" side which usually became the side visible for robot mode. The decision was made this time to paint both sides of Ravage, so he's got tampographed cassette detailing even on his "disguised" side. Ravage has sculpted detailing on this side that isn't prevent on his observe side, so the cassette window and the "JAPAN" stamp are printed over uneven terrain. Still, it's a nifty idea.

Ravage transforms the same as always, with the head and tail unfolding from the top of the cassette and all four legs unfolding from the bottom of the tape. The 1984 edition of Ravage had a metal foil Decepticon sticker on his shoulder, while the 1985-86 release had a rub symbol in that spot. This version has a tiny Decepticon badge tampo-printed there. His twin guns mount to the holes in his cassette spools.

I would have liked it if they'd found a way to mount the G1 Ravage weapons to Kingdom Ravage somehow. He looks like he's got holes in his hips that are the right size, but they're too narrow to accept weapons. Even the ability to plug the G1 guns into his handheld weapons would have been nice. (You can stick the chrome guns into two of the hollow slots in the beast legs folded behind his back in robot mode, and it works, but it's clearly not the way the toy was designed.)

Hasbro Pulse charged $52.99 for this set, which does seem a little pricy. The two-packs of G1 cassettes at Walmart were $20, so one cassette should cost about $10 or so. So, really, this is like a $30 set. But, you tend to pay a bit more for convention exclusives in general.

Also, the Hasbro Pulse web site specifically mentions that G1 Ravage "comes with G1-inspired stickers to decorate the cassette mode." But, the set comes with no such sticker sheet. I imagine they were trying to say that he has tampographs that *they* used to decorate the cassette mode, but it's still misleading and inaccurate. Furthermore, the copy on their web site claims Agent Ravage comes with "two pistols and two blast effects," but no such blast effects are included in the packaging. Maybe they cut-and-pasted their text description from some other toy's description. I'm not sure. But, these are two features that they advertised that the set doesn't actually have at all. That's incredibly sloppy.

Anyway, I can't think of the last time that toys from two radically different eras were packaged together like this. It's great. This is arguably the definitive Beast Wars Ravage, as it's more screen-accurate than Takara's Ravage X-9, plus it doesn't have all that vac-metal chome to worry about. The G1 Ravage reissue is arguably a little less special than it could have been, given that he was recently available at Walmart, but you've got to give Hasbro points for wanting to do something special and screen-authentic.

Zob (still gonna give them flak about their inaccurate product description, though)