I'm going to talk about this guy for a while, so I can get him off the computer desk and put him in a Detolf cabinet where he belongs!

So, a couple of decades ago when I was still married to my ex-wife, she collected pigs and so I found her an incomplete Snarler on eBay for like ten bucks. It was the first time I'd encountered the toy, and it was a strange experience to encounter the very different design philosophy of G1 again after so many years of modern-designed Beast Wars toys. The Pretender shell is very familiar to my eyes, then, as it remained a fixture in the household for ages, but it's also been about 20 years since I've seen him! I got my new copy from ViceGripX, who was looking to get rid of some things in his collection. I told him I was happy to adopt this unloved pig and give him a nice home, and never ever turn him into sausages.

I'm not sure how Snarler thinks he can get away with the name, since it's so close to the name of the Dinobot called Snarl. But, I guess it's better than robots like Barrage or Sky High patently ripping off existing names of other characters. (There's a whole gold mine of untapped potential in new Transformer character names! Prowler, Brawler, Growler...)

Snarler was gang-molded with Carnivac, so they share plastic colors. Where Carnivac was mostly magenta with some brown, Snarler takes brown as his dominant color, with magenta lower legs and teal robot fists. It's honestly not the most attractive color scheme ever. We don't get brown Transformers toys very often. It looks good when coupled with tan (Chromedome, Landfill) but here it just seems off. (In Marvel Comics, the brown was interpreted as bright yellow, and the magenta was realized with lavender ink on the comics page, so the Pretender Beasts bore very little resemblance to their Hasbro toys.)

Snarler stands at about 3.75" in robot mode, though due to the design of his knee joints, he leans forwards slightly, like Headmaster Siren, and I expect it was done deliberately to counter the weight of his large backpack. He's got a couple of hooved pig's feet hanging off his robot legs (a fashion statement that was all the rage back then—just ask any Terrorcon).. His robot arms can swivel at the shoulders, and due to a transformation hinge, he can also bring his hands together. His knees bend in tandem with each other (his lower legs are a single stump of plastic), but not a lot of emphasis was placed on articulation during the G1 days. He carries a magenta rifle described as a "rotary cannon," but you'd think with a name like that, it would look like a Gatling gun or something. It does not.

To transform him into a boar, you swing the animal head from behind his back to cover the robot head, tuck the robot legs in at the knees, and position the robot arms to serve as the front legs. The boar's tail is tucked between the robot legs, until you swing it out to complete his look.

In animal form, Snarler is about four inches in length, with a magenta head and rump, brown legs, and teal-colored tail and front hooves. Each of his animal legs can rotate freely. Where Carnivac is something like a Cybertronic wolf, Snarler exhibits some pig-like elements (rounded hooves, a short and stubby little tail) but in place of a snout and tusks, he's got drills.. His entire muzzle is a gigantic cone-shaped drill, with two additional drills on either side of what approximates his face. It's a devilishly clever visual pun: He's a BOAR who BORES. Oh, come on. It's funny. It's at least a little bit funny.

His Pretender shell, meanwhile, is a goliath of a pig—a horned warthog with a tremendous head and broad shoulders. What an absolute unit. This meat is PACKED. He's a dark teal in color, with a ligher teal for his tail, shoulder pads, and tusks. The tail and shoulder pads are removable, but the tusks, while made of the same type of plastic, are not. He has yellow painted hooves, a single horn protruding from his forehead like some kind of dinosaur, and he's sculpted as if he's got strap-on silver armor around his body.

The Pretender shell splits into two chunks to accommodate the inner robot. There is no reason to ever remove his tail, which is affixed to the right side of the Ppetender shell. (His instructions either include a cut-and-paste error, or describe an earlier version of the toy, because they suggest that you "fit boar into groove into rear half of beast," but there is no front and back half—he splits down the middle, so he has a left and a right half.) In Marvel Comics, he is illustrated with a tremendously large cannon on his back, but the only armament for the Pretender shell in toy form is that same rotary cannon.

Snarler is super easy to find on eBay incomplete—you can get his shell for about $30 and the inner robot for less than $20. It's the hard-to-find accessories that really drive up the price—like Carnivac, he's got four pieces requried to complete him (a gun, a tail, and a left and right shoulder pad) and each of these, alone, tends to sell for $30 or more. I've noticed the purple tab that locks the boar head into place tends to break off frequently on the inner robot. It's hard to find a copy with good stickers, too—the consumer-applied labels were translucent vinyl, and tend to peel off the surved surfaces of the toy. There's one complete copy on eBay right now for about $150, which isn't a bad price, all things considered.

The Pretender Beasts concept was abandoned after 1988, with no new styles added to the assortment for 1989. I don't think it was a bad idea, certainly, though it was a bit at odds with the idea from 1987 that most Autobots were vehicles and most Decepticons were creatures. The Autobot Pretender Beasts violated that unspoken rule, but then again, so did the Monsterbots. It will be interesting to see if these characters are ever revisited for neo-G1 in any capacity.

Zob (hey pig, yeah you, hey pig, piggy pig pig pig)