Dave's Transformers Kingdom Rant: Voyager Wave 4

Tigatron (white tiger)

Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Gen/VTigatron

Shipped with more of Rhinox. Note, if you have the option, look
carefully at those on the shelf before picking one, the paint on the tiger
eyes is applied somewhat indifferently, and not everyone is going to want a
"Special Edition Concussed Tigatron."

CAPSULE

$30 price point.

Tigatron: Basically what Cheetor should have been without
shrinkflation. The mold still has a few issues, but it's good enough I don't
regret pre-ordering the Golden Disk orange retool. Recommended.

RANT

Packaging: Same as previous Kingdom Voyagers.

MAXIMAL: TIGATRON
Assortment: WFC-K35
Altmode: White Tiger
Transformation Difficulty: 23 steps
Previous Name Use: BW (and some Japanese and convention uses)
Previous Mold Use: None, sort of

Packaging: The robot is held in with six ties on the front and two on
the beast ankles in back. Two ties hold the tail to the cardboard, and one
holds the gut-gun (none of the weapon ties need to be cut in order to free
the weapons, though).
While the art on the front of the box doesn't show Tigatron with his
rifle, but the render on the back does.
My copy came with the Optimus Prime card with the fate, "BECOMES NEMESIS
PRIME".

Robot Mode: It's basically an upscaled Cheetor with a new head and a few
extra details (such as more proportional feet). Rather than making Tigatron
a retool of Cheetor, they ran with the "tigers are bigger than cheetahs" fact
and made it bigger...but fundamentally the same. It might be an assembly
issue, but the abdomen side flaps on mine won't fully peg into place while
the tiger head is in its proper position. Probably related to the issue
mentioned below in transformation. While the feet still look a little small
compared to the giant calves, they added fold-out heels so the figure is
stable without needing add-on shoes.
6.25" (16cm) tall, mostly white with some dark teal-blue. A teal-blue
plastic (just gonna call it blue) is used for the collar area, shoulders,
elbow joints, and a bit of the spine (mostly only visible during
transformation). Everything else is white or slightly off-white plastic,
although there's two distinct types revealed under UV light. The low-glow
type is used on the shoulder roots, waist, hips, ankles, heel spurs, and some
bits of the paw joints in beast mode. Most of the paint is in the forms of
black stripes, but there's also a lot of very light tan on the beast cheeks,
outer faces of the boots, top facing of the tail, much of the beast legs on
the backpack, and the buttflap. In "subtle to the point of wondering why
they bothered" paint, there's a pearly white paint on the helmet front,
biceps, and thighpads. I guess the point was to look a little more 90s CGI?
Metallic teal-blue paint is used on the face, the pelvis front, and the shin
fronts. The robot eyes and helmet tablet are orange-red. The guts on the
rifle are gloss pink. Beast face paints covered below.
The neck is a ball joint but only barely wiggles a little, it's
functionally a swivel. Swivel waist, with hinged pelvis armor and buttflap,
although neither of those joints is necessary (and the pelvis hinge doesn't
even make sense). Universal shoulders, but if your flank panels don't lock
in place it's hard to move the shoulders without opening up the sides. Upper
bicep swivels, double hinge elbows, swivel wrists. Universal joint hips,
mid-thigh swivels (with the thigh pads staying in one piece connected to the
bottom half), single hinge knees, ankles are hinged in both useful axes.
The hands can hold 5mm pegs, and the heel spurs have 5mm sockets all the
way through. There's a 5mm socket on the underside of each forearm, and the
buttflap has a 5mm socket for holding the tail in beast mode but it could be
used for a stand connector here. I guess the reason for the hinged buttflap
is to allow access to the 3mm socket on the back of the pelvis core.
The tail becomes a whip, but the way it's designed to hang in beast mode
means that it curves back too hard as a weapon, making it difficult to find a
pose that doesn't look bad. Unlike Cheetor's tail, it's not designed to work
either way...sure, you can put the end of the tail in his hand, but there's
no axe head or anything to make it look like an intended weapon.
The gut gun is based on the original BW mold's squirt gun gimmick that
had intestines molded on it, as if Cheetor (and Tigatron) was ripping out his
own innards to use as a gun. (The early molds had a bit more body horror
than later ones.) It's 2.75" (7cm) long, with a sort of engine block look
ahead of the guts chunk, and then a narrow barrel with rings that suggest
"zap gun" elements. The barrel is actually removable, via a 5mm peg. If you
insert the tail into the body of the gun, it looks like a brain-sperm. (The
socket is a little loose for the tail, but I don't think it was intentionally
not 5mm, just bad tolerances.)

Transformation: Mostly the same as Cheetor, but with several extra
panels and folding bits. The transformation doesn't quite manage to hide the
robot feet, though, or the robot pelvis. The arms do manage to create a more
complete ribcage underside for the beast mode, although you have to fiddle
with the elbow joints a bit to get them aligned properly. Also, getting the
waist panels outside the shoulderpad panels requires a bit of force, I
suspect it's a matter of alignment not being exactly right on mine. They did
cleverly add a levering action to the backs of the lower legs, to help get
the shins to pop out, as they're pretty flush and the joints are stiff.
There's no real attempt to hide the gut gun, it just pegs onto the
underside of the chest.

Altmode: It's a white tiger with only a few bits of robot visible,
almost entirely in the rear half (some blue hinges are showing in front).
The tail is held down along the line of the beast rear thighs, and an okay
job is done of blending the robot thighs into the beast abdomen. As noted
above, the robot toes still poke out, the shin armor bits are visible on the
backs of the rear legs, and the robot pelvis is a pretty obvious chunk.
Still, it shows what the basic mold can do with more budget.
6.75" (17cm) long, 3.5" (9cm) tall at the head with the forelegs
straight. It's not a whole lot taller or longer than Cheetor, but is
noticeably bulkier. Almost all the blue is hidden, leaving white plastic
with black stripes and some yellowish shading in places. No paint inside
the mouth. The nose is a dark pink, the eyes are gold with painted pupils.
As noted up top, mine are kinda derped, the two eyes not looking in the same
direction. This is reportedly a common problem.
The lower jaw is hinged, there's no neck articulation. As is normal for
digitigrade animal toys, there's no actual knee hinge, with the "knee" being
more of an ankle and the true knee hidden in the upper thigh. The forelegs
have universal hips (and can sploot), hinge ankles with an arc cut so there's
no real gap, and then the paws are on struts that are hinged at the top and
ball joints at the bottom. The hind legs have hinge hips (robot knees), and
the robot thigh swivels can be used to rotate the hind legs outwards. The
ankles are hinges, and the paws are on the same sort of joint as the front
ones, but the shin armor detailing restricts the range a bit. The tail does
not move.
There's two 5mm sockets on the underside (forearm sockets), that's it
for connection points.

Overall: A pretty good upgrade of the Cheetor mold, although not without
problems (most of which could be written off as the usual "Lego design
requirements, Hasbro execution," issues).

Dave Van Domelen, might need to put some stuff away soon rather than
just pack the display shelves ever tighter....