Beast Wars Tigatron-Carded Cheetor Bootleg
In my adventures on eBay I came across a lot of bootlegs all on Tigatron cards. One of
them was Cheetor, and I'm finally putting a review up of him, so look out!
The only reason I put off reviewing this bootleg was because I didn't have an original
Cheetor (or a non-bootleg toy which uses the Cheetor mold), but I recently got a Japanese
Shadow Panther, so now I can compare and stuff. In retrospect I guess I shouldn't have reviewed
my bootleg Terrorsaur, Tarantulas and Rattrap, but too late now to go back, right?
Anyways, Cheetor comes in beast mode. The quality of plastic is actually pretty good for
a bootleg, though not all the pieces fit together amazingly well. Also, as is the case with
the first Cheetor mold, his beast mode has a gun sticking out under his head and out of his butt,
under his tail. Not horrible, mind you, but it doesn't look all that great. Also there's some
noticeable parts of his robot legs on his hind cheetah legs which are painted on pretty sloppily
in blue on the bootleg.
Transformation is pretty simple, just stand him up and fold out his arms. The major problem
the bootleg has is with the beast head, which catches on his codpiece when you attempt to rotate
his beast head into position. This is isolated to the bootleg version, however. To get it
to go, you need to have the codpiece perpendicular to Cheetor's body, then everything should
mesh fine.
The end result is also very well done, looking just like the non-bootleg version, though
with less colors and sloppy paint. The joints are also pretty loose. His arms don't really
lock into place, and the beast head moves down further than the non-bootleg version making
a sort of shelf in front of his head.
Cheetor still houses the two guns that made the mold famous as well. The fold back tail gun
is there, and the gross guts gun, complete with intestines molded right in there. The guts
gun, however, doesn't squirt water like the original mold did. Sorry folks, no bile squirting
abilities on this bootleg.
All in all, for a bootleg, this is probably as good as it gets (though I've heard good things
about the $10 G1 gestalt combiner bootlegs, but I have yet to buy one), if you can manage to
find one for $5 or so (though that may be a bit steep for a bootleg, I paid roughly $3 for
mine, with shipping) it's probably a good enough find to pick one up, especially considering a
real Hasbro licensed Cheetor can set you back a good $20 or more with some luck.
I also thought I'd add a quick review of my bootleg of the same nature, the Tigatron
bootleg. Small note, it's interesting that this could actually be passed off as the real
thing as he's on a Tigatron card and he's Tigatron. Of course, the bootleg isn't convincing
enough to really be Tigatron, but you get my point.
Anyways, the only difference between Tigatron and Cheetor is color. Where Cheetor is yellow,
Tigatron is a creamy off white color (like the original toy), and what is blue on Cheetor is
teal on Tigatron with the exception of the barrel on his guts gun. Other than that they're
both the same.
Odd thing about my Tigatron bootleg is that the robot arms in beast mode don't mesh at all,
which is weird considering they're made from the same exact mold. It seems to be due to the
way the tiger kibble was glued on his robot arms which keeps them from meshing with each other.
Ah well, what do you want for three bucks, right? Tigatron gets the same score as Cheetor.
