Beast Machines: Rattrap

I found this guy two months ago in a K-Mart near my school one morning. I'd never seen one before (and I've only seen two since), so I decided to pick it up. Egads! 16 bucks (with tax)! Guess I'm gonna starve. Transformers chosen over food, that can't be good.

Anyways, as is the case with pretty much all Beast Machines toys, there are many differences between what you see in the show and what you get. Hasbro has got to stop letting Mainframe adapt the toys, though I have to admit the show Rattrap looks cooler than the toy.

The first thing you may notice about ol' Ratface is the fact that he's really big. No proportions seem to have been taken into consideration when they made the BM toys. Rattrap's rat mode is so huge that Optimus (blast punch or regular) can ride him as is he were a horse. Maybe he's been living in the sewers of New York.

At any rate, Rattrap is a cool looking rat, and he actually looks like a rat (as opposed to the Beast Wars original version), all techno stuff aside. He sports a weird head twitching feature where you spin his tail and his head moves from side to side and his ears move. Pretty cool to see, but the novelty wears off quickly.

His transformation is complicated, but generally worth it. Essentially you need to open his entire chest (his robot chest that is) and pull his robot legs out of there. There's also a problem with the instructions as they don't show quite what to do with his beast head and front legs (the picture on the box even shows his robot head completely in the wrong position). What you need to do is fold up his rat legs, and rotate the gray piece with his spark up into his chest. Then push the legs down so they are lined up with his back legs (or his robot arms, your choice). Now pull the whole thing forward a bit so you can fold the rat head down (you may need to use some force) and it should rest nicely right below his tail (or tail socket if you've ripped it out already). Push the whole thing as far in as it'll go and finally push his front legs down as far as they will go (this enables his chest plate to stay closed).

In robot mode Rattrap looks pretty cool, though he suffers from a fairly large hump on his back, the main drawback of the toy. That thing aside, he's pretty cool. For the show enthusiast he also houses two 'wheels' (and I use the word wheels loosely) which double as saw blade type dealies. Sadly the wheels don't roll, so Rattrap's wheeled mode is in permanent skid, but you can't have everything I guess.

So, aside from the few drawbacks, this is really a very cool toy. If you can manage to find one in the stores, by all means pick it up. Otherwise they are fairly common on eBay, and usually for less than in stores.