I did have this guy pre-ordered through Big Bad Toy Store (currently with an estimated December delivery), but I figured if I bought him today from Walmart, I could take him home and have something new to play with instead of having to wait. Instant gratification for the win!

I've heard that Blaster is supposed to be shipping to stores in Kingdom packaging, but I didn't see him on the shelf. I did see two Tigatrons and two Rhinoxes, though, so make of that what you will.

So, back in 1996, Tigatron was part of the second wave of Beast Wars toys. He was a redeco of Cheetor, only as a white tiger instead of a cheetah. In the TV series, Tigatron still looked a lot like Cheetor, but he was a larger character. I don't think anybody would have questioned Hasbro if they'd done a redeco of Kingdom Cheetor as Kingdom Tigatron. It makes sense. But, instead, Hasbro went of their way to produce an all-new mold for Tigatron in order to preserve the integrity of the scale between the characters. (Of course, this results in Hasbro doing weird redeco versions like "Mutant Tigatron" because they still want to recoup the cost of producing the molds.)

Where Kingdom Cheetor is about five and a quarter inches in height, Tigatron is a full six inches. He's actually slightly taller than Kingdom Optimus Primal, which is accurate to the Mainframe scale chart that's floating around the Internet. So, huge points for accuracy. While he obviously bears a physical resemblance to Deluxe Cheetor, no parts were recycled for Tigatron. It's an all-new design.

Where Cheetor just came with a tail flail (inspired by his Transmetal toy), Tigatron has the classic "gut gun" that was missing from the Cheetor release as well as the tiger tail, which I guess he can hold as a whip or something. Neither of the characters come with the actual weapon that the cheetah/tiger tail turned into (but I think it was redesigned by Kenner after development, which is the reason Cheetor was delayed and wasn't part of the initial 1996 launch). The gut gun has a removable barrel, for some reason, but in the interest of good taste I will not describe what it looks like to me.

https://youtu.be/8JVJzwgqZ9U?t=28

Ahem. Moving on.

The transformation isn't totally unlike Cheetor, but it's definitely its own animal (hee hee). The arms clip together to form the tiger underbelly, the robot head tucks into an opening inside the tiger's head, and the robot legs become the rear tiger legs. The robot feet tuck into the tiger upper legs, and there's a hidden vanity panel that closes up the gap created when the leg armor unfolds into the tiger's rear feet. Pretty clever.

As a tiger, he stands at about 3.5" at his highest point (Cheetor is more like 2.5") and his length from head to rump is a little over five inches (Cheetor is closer to 4.5"). He's distinctly more bulky and muscular than the sinewy Cheetor, too, so it wasn't just a matter of upscaling the design and calling it a day. But, he's also not the absolute unit that Masterpiece Tigatron ended up being. That guy is a heckin' chonker (Takara, where did you go so very wrong?).

In beast mode, he's pretty much got the same articulation as Cheetor—front shoulders, elbows, paws on a ball joint, rear haunches, knees, and ankles. The jaw opens, but the inside of the mouth is not painted. He does get an extra hinge joint on the front paws that Cheetor does not have. Also, the armpit hinge is white and blends in with the rest of him, so it's not as vital that you try to hide it, as it was with Cheetor's yellow body and the alarmingly visible blue hinges inside the front cheetah shoulders..

So, here's the trade-off. Tigatron gets the gut gun, but it doesn't actually form his guts in beast mode. You can plug it into the bottom of his belly, as per the instructions, but it looks absurd and out of place. (One of the ingenious things about the original Beast Wars toy line as a whole was how every single accessory could be stored away somewhere on the toy, but I guess we don't get that here.)

Wow, this means we've finally gotten every single one of the first-season Maximals represented in Kingdom! Woot! That's awesome. And with Golden Disk Terrorsaur on the way, all we're missing now is Tarantulas and Inferno to complete the first-season Predacons (and they're supposedly coming in 2022). That's pretty epic.

As I mentioned earlier, Tigatron is already on the slate for a redeco as Mutant Tigatron, an orange deco inspired by Kenner's original plan for the character before switching to the Arctic white look. That one's supposed to come out around March 2022, but you know how these things go.

Zob (on a work-related note, they've finally seen fit to start giving me some help in the toy department... I think management woke up and realized it's less than two weeks until Christmas and I've still got eight trailers full of toys)