Beast Wars Transmetal Cheetor

Actually, if you want to know, this is the first official Cheetor toy I've owned. Previous to this I only had the bootleg, though I have played with Supreme Cheetor before (we had to string him up from the ceiling at KB to advertise his new $19.99 price tag. He's still there and we still have four or five left), and I own Shadow Panther, which uses the original Cheetor mold.

Actually, I bought this once before, but I didn't pay enough attention to the seller and ended up buying a pretty crappy TM Cheetor. I got this one loose as well, and he's in much better condition than the original one I had.

So Cheetor, if you don't already know, is a cheetah. His beast mode is very sleek and cool looking. It's a vast improvement over the original Cheetor mold which was less articulated and had a lot of visible robot pieces. This one actually has nearly all of his robot parts visible as well, but they double as cheetah parts much better.

The major problem with beast mode is the head, which has nothing to peg into. Depending on how loose the hinge joint is (the one that ends up being above his chest in robot mode), you may have troubles with Cheetor looking straight ahead. Usually you can wedge it in there fairly well, so this isn't too much of a problem.

As with all Transmetals, Cheetor has third vehicle mode. As with the show, two rockets pop out of his sides, allowing Cheetor to fly (well, not really, only in the show). While simplistic, the rockets do a decent job of being a believable third mode. It's much better than Depth Charge's crappy flight mode, but nowhere near as cool or fun as Rampage's and Rattrap's third modes.

Transformation is pretty creative, taking some stabs at a different design in the 'stand up the animal' transformation scheme. His rear cheetah legs still become his robot legs, but his front cheetah legs become a backpack and his cheetah head splits in half to form his hands and arms. Neat. His transformation is actually comparable to Stampy from Beast Wars Neo, in that they're almost the same exact thing. Cheetor has less cumbersome arms though.

Robot mode is cool looking, and insanely poseable, despite the lack of ball or swivel joints below the hips. Most of the time Transformers with only hinge knees end up losing out on the poseability thing, but Cheetor's very flexible hip ball joints make up for it quite well.

The only real problem lies within his chest and arms. You see, his chest doesn't peg or clip into anything, so if you go to raise his arms at the shoulder, you sometimes end up lifting his entire chest plate up which is probably more than Cheetor would like you to see.

It's also worth note that his robot hands (which are more like claws since they only have two fingers), inner thighs and robot chest all have a very cool looking cheetah spots pattern. That part was actually painted over in blue paint (same color as his feet and upper legs) along with his beast mode back for some unknown reason. Apparently they didn't want his to be a cheetah.

Cheetor's tail also becomes a spiffy ax weapon that he can rest on his shoulder or use to chop wood or Waspinator's head off. Sadly you can't bring his hands together to form his beast head gun like in the show, though if you partially transform him back into beast mode (by folding his arms inward) you can accomplish it, though it looks very uncomfortable. Kinda like when Mel Gibson unhinged his shoulders in Lethal Weapon, only with both arms. Ouchie.

All in all TM Cheetor is quite the excellent toy. He's not without flaws, of course, but they are very small in number and the overall coolness of the toy blows everything else out of the water. If you can find a decent conditioned loose one for like $8 or so (that's what I paid), then go for it. A carded one may set you back more (it depends, sometimes they only get $10, other times they go up to $20), but as long as you don't go insanely high, you'll probably be fairly happy with the results.