I picked up some stuff last month that I keep forgetting to talk about.
So Mattel has been going cross-over mad lately. There’s Transformers Hot Wheels and Hot Wheels Transformers (that is Hot Wheels cars of Transformers alt modes and Transformers figures of, erm, “famous” Hot Wheels cars), Turtles of Grayskull, which asked the pressing question “what if a lot of He-Man characters had random mutations and some Turtles characters lightly cosplayed as He-Man characters” and MotU x Transformers, where some He-Man characters are cosplaying as Transformers (which look fucking awful but props for doing Scareglow as Starscream, I guess).
But there’s also MotU x Thundercats. Which initially I dismissed out of hand as being the same as Turtles of Grayskull – entirely inessential and rubbish. The only figure that caught my attention initially was Battle Cat Man, which is Battle Cat as a Thundercat, a brilliant idea. Not Mattel’s own, it must be said, as someone’s been making customs of that concept for years now.
I thought I’d missed out on BCM though, as I could only see it available from import dealers at an eye-watering £30~, but then it popped up on Amazon and a couple of other places (I ended up ordering it from Rarewaves). And in looking into that, I gave a closer look to the rest of the line and realised it’s actually better than I thought. Because while there is a He-Man with a cat chestplate and slightly leonine hair, most of the figures are Thundercats characters. But they’re not really cosplaying as specific MotU characters, they just have Eternian styled accessories, which you can just entirely disregard, leaving you with MotU Origins style Thundercats figures. Which it turns out I am into.
Cheetara is the perfect example of this. Here she is with all the Eternian bits.
And they look pretty rubbish, frankly. But throw those in the bin and you get:
A classic Cheetara. And it’s really good. Mattel have totally got the articulation pattern down well for this line (it helps that they reuse so many parts, I guess). The ankle jointss are a little weak and I think I stressed the feet swapping out the lower leg parts (will definitely heat treat to loosen them next time), but otherwise it’s great. And having it in scale with the MotU Origins figures is nice, even if I only have He-Man and Skeletor (and who else do you really need? Well, She-Ra and Hordak, obvs).
Skel-Ra is slightly more involved. He’s a bigger figure and the concept is Skeletor getting the powers of the Ancient Evils that Mumm-Ra uses or whatever.
Which is fine, I guess. You have to pull the figure apart at the waist to swap out his loin cloth, which is a bit daunting, but again, a nice thing about Origins figures is that they’re designed for exactly that, for some reason. Pop off the nice Skele-head, reverse the bat wings and add in some other accessories and you get:
A pretty fucking rad Mumm-Ra. That’s a great head sculpt. He’s bigger than the other figures, which is a good feature (no idea if Origins has been doing figures this size much – I assume not). Just a really solid figure.
I got both of those off Amazon Italy (worked out cheapest – Skel-Ra was in a damaged box) and they arrived before the main event: Battle Cat Man.
He’s a simpler figure in that there’s no real “transformation” element. You can remove his armour, but frankly, there’s not much point, as he just looks naked (maybe if they’d added a Cringer head it would have more appeal). Still, the concept alone, and the solid execution is all you need. I maybe would have liked another weapon, as the claws – which are based on Battle Cat’ armour of course – are a tad underwhelming and connect only in a fairly vague way. But that’s nitpicking.
There’s three waves of the series so far, with the aforementioned naff He-Man, Tygra, two versions each of Lion-O and Panthro (cartoon and toy deco versions) and a redeco of Battle Cat Man as Panthor making up the rest of the line. I’m definitely looking to get the rest of the T-Cats. Hopefully they’ll go on and do Wilykit, Wilykat, Pumyra and others (that guy who is a blue redeco of Tygra seems an obvious choice at least) but there was no news of the line at Toy Fair, so I fear it may be done, which is a shame. Would have been interesting to see what they’d done with Snarf. Maybe dress him up as Orko?
These figures have renewed my interest in MotU Origins somewhat. I bailed after that first He-Man and Skeletor as I was a bit pissed off with the way all the promo images showed He-Man with a proper sword, but then he only came with half a sword that combined with Skeletor’s (which looks naff) which was then switched to a proper sword in a running change. But I might dip back in and get some of the cartoon classics, especially the 200X ones they’re doing at the moment.
I’m also a little interested in some of the first He-Man Origins cross-over figures they did: Masters of the WWE Universe, which is classic WWE wrestlers with He-Man gimmicks (so the New Day as Man-E-Faces, which is genius). They’re all OOP and expensive though. Turns out they’ve done another WWE line in the Origins style though (called, unhelpfully, WWE Superstars, which is impossible to search for online successfully), which are just straight gimmick-less figures. They also seem to have ended and are also stupidly expensive online (about £30+ per figure) but I happened upon Tatanka, of all people, for £10 in a small chain toy shop in Worcester recently. He’ll do for designing resin stands for those figures at least.
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