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Blackjack's Review: Generations Rattrap

Name: Rattrap
Allegiance: Maximal
Accessories: Gun (2 pieces), Binoculars

”We’re all going to die.”

Rattrap is one of the original five Maximals to be introduced in Beast Wars, and is one of the few characters to maintain a role as a main character all throughout all three season of Beast Wars and through Beast Machines. I’ve always found Rattrap interesting – he was this pessimistic complaining little shit who practically gets up everyone’s nerves, and constantly bickers with Predacon rebel Dinobot like a married couple. But unlike most stock characters who complain and bitch about everything, Rattrap is shown to be more than able to handle his own in tough situations, be it infiltrating the Predacon base, hacking into Cybertron’s infrastructure or simply just holding his own in battle. Rattrap’s role was to be a contrast to the more stoic or angsty characters, by cracking a few sarcastic quips here and there.

Rattrap’s role is pretty impressive, and his character arc, while not really happening in the spotlight like many of the others, was pretty nicely developed over the two TV series he starred in. It’s just that, well, Rattrap’s original toy wasn’t that spectacular or show-accurate. It’s still pretty brilliant, but it could stand not being a tiny basic class toy. And when Rattrap was announced to appear in the Generations toyline, I was stoked. Having learnt their lesson from the disastrous undertakings that were Cheetor and Dinobot, I was extremely satisfied with Hasbro’s Rhinox. And while Waspinator is a bit of a fumble, Rattrap looks for all intents and purposes pretty awesome.

It took a long, long time to hunt him down, but hunt him down I did. He’s probably the best deluxe class toy from the Thrilling 30 Generations subline that I own.

He comes with a Dark Cybertron comic, in which he hardly shows up in which is strange because Rattrap has a sizable appearance throughout Dark Cybertron. But IDW portrays Rattrap as basically Starscream’s toady anyway, which is a portrayal I loathe with all my heart and soul so I don't particularly care.

Beast Mode:
This Rattrap toy is based on Rattrap’s first body way from the beginning of Beast Wars, transforming into a gray-coloured organic rat. I’m not a big fan of rodents myself, and absolutely hate them with a passion, but Rattrap’s cool. He can stay. His fur is mainly gray, with his ears, feet and tail being the colour of flesh. A good chunk of the back of his beast mode is painted in a nice shade of brown. Rattrap in the show does have a shade of brown on his fur and while I don’t remember it as being as concentrated as the toy’s, it’s pretty nice and goes into making the toy look like an actual mouse. Rattrap’s eyes are beady black, and his nose is black as well. His teeth are white. He’s a pretty great-looking rat, having all the contours and generally looks pretty realistic. The fur sculpting is pretty beautiful as well.

Right away you’ll probably notice that well, his robot mode hands are blatantly visible under his stomach. Being bright orange and everything makes them stand out like a sore thumb. It’s pretty annoying.

That aside, though, that’s probably the only downside about Rattrap. His robot kibble, as visible as it is, stays together pretty solidly. He is a pretty articulable little rodent as well. Both his legs are on rotation joints, his rear feet are hinged and his front feet can rotate around. He can do poses like running or scuttling pretty easily. His lower jaw can hinge downwards allowing him to take a chunk out of an unlucky Predacon, or to nibble on cheese. Rattrap’s tail is soft plastic with a flexible wire running through it. It can’t really do that much articulation but enough to feel like an approximation of what a real rat can do.

It can even stand on two legs, something Rattrap likes to do in the show. The two legs are stable enough to support the weight of the rat, and there’s an additional small piece of fur that slides from inside Rattrap’s skull to cover the robot head. It’s a nice little thought to allow Rattrap to stand on two legs and still look forwards. He can pretend to hack a computer, or to shrug, or to do whatever. He’s a pretty expressive rat.

Overall, out of the various modern reimaginations of Beast Wars toys, Rattrap is the clear winner. He’s easily the most expressive and articulated of any of the new Beast Wars toys in beast mode, whereas most of them, like Rhinox or Waspinator, are just content to look good but not be able to do much else beyond that.

Robot Mode:
Rattrap’s robot mode looks brilliant. He looks like he just stepped out of the cartoon, having the exact same silhouette and colours as his cartoon counterpart. The transformation scheme has been changed from the original toy, where the rat head folds down, and the rest of the rat parts just crack open and become a backpack. The cartoon cheats, of course, by having the backpack compact down a little and having his limbs have more mass than what could possibly fit inside the rat’s belly. Generations Rattrap still has a bunch of rat panels pile up on his back, but they are less of a massive chunk and instead form a more tidy and cohesive backpack. His rear legs, instead of hanging off the lower parts of his backpack, become integrated into his robot mode’s lower legs, helping to form the mass on his calf as well as part of his feet. His front rat legs can point outwards to give more show-accurate kibble, or to be rotated to stay out of sight on Rattrap’s backpack. It’s a nice little touch.

A fair bit more orange and silver show up in robot mode, and small Maximal insignias dot the center of his iconic wristguards. His face has the exact same exposed-brain aesthetic as the original toy. While the toy probably meant for Rattrap to have his mouth open, both his teeth and the inner side of his mouth are left unpainted, which is a shame.

Articulation-wise Rattrap is missing the ever-elusive waist joint and wrist joints, but otherwise can pull off a rather impressive amount of poses nonetheless. His head is ball-jointed, his shoulders are double-jointed, his wrists are on universal joints, his thighs are double-jointed, and his knees are hinged. Plus, of course, the flexible tail, which ends up on his butt. It’s not the perfect repertoire of joints that you’d expect from a deluxe class toy, but it’s enough for him to strike as many poses as he wants to.

Rattrap comes with a single long rifle based on the gun he totes around during the show. Apparently as a homage to the original Rattrap toy, the gun can split into two halves, meaning Rattrap can dual-wield a smaller pair of guns (which look different!) if you want to. Regrettably instead of being painted in dark gray with brown highlights as it was in the show, Rattrap’s gun is a very unattractive shade of translucent light gray which makes it look positively horrid. In addition, his hand holes are pretty tight, and mine has already been showing stress marks. It’s a really sad thing that mars an otherwise excellent figure.

The rifle can be stored on a space on his back, and he has enough articulation to reach behind and grab it, which I think is awesome.

In addition to Rattrap’s rifle, he also comes with an additional pair of cylinders within his left arm’s wrist compartment. Rattrap’s wrist compartment does open to reveal all sorts of things from communicators to grenades to binoculars to whatever, and the toy does make this gimmick work. A pair of cylinders which could be anything from binoculars to explosives (which actually match Rattrap’s love of saboteur missions) is hidden inside. I’m not a big fan of how they kind of pop out from the underside of his arms, but I suppose without that they can’t be detached easily. TFWiki informs me that the device is apparently the ‘Hot Box Device’ from the season one episode ‘the Web’, which Rattrap uses to fake his heat signature and fool Tarantulas. It’s something that never comes up again, and I prefer him to have explosives, so.

Anyway, Rattrap’s a pretty awesome robot.

Marks out of ten for the following:
Transformation Design: 7/10 It’s not the easiest transformation, especially changing him from robot to rat. His lower legs take forever to get into place, and that’s not counting the fact that kibble hangs down pretty visibly from his alternate mode. I do like how neatly the plates end up being in his robot mode, however.

Durability: 7/10 He’s got stress marks on his hands and I’m quite afraid of how his rat legs transform. Put too much force and I fear I may break something that won’t be repairable.

Aesthetics: 9/10 I do really like how Rattrap looks both in robot and rat mode. The rest of how he looks more than makes up for the robot mode kibble hanging down in robot mode and the weak-looking gun.

Articulation: 8/10 He’s got a great range of articulation. He doesn’t have as much joints as I would like, admittedly, but the ones he has does make him an extremely posable robot. Add an extremely posable beast mode into the equation, and Rattrap is a wonderful toy to pose around.

Fun: 9/10 Rattrap is a fun toy, yeah. He’s easily the funnest new toy I have acquired lately, discounting Age of Extinction Hound and his ten thousand guns.

Price/Value: 8/10 Deluxe class toys are starting to creep up in price, but Rattrap, I think, is one of the best purchases I’ve made.

Overall: 9/10 It certainly depends whether you like Rattrap or not. If you’re one of those people who cares naught for transformers that turn into realistic animals, Rattrap’s probably not something that you want. But other than them, Rattrap is a brilliant representation of his Beast Wars show model and toy. He’s got some flaws that knock him away from a full score, and I may be ridiculously subjective since I love Beast Wars a hell lot, but Generations Rattrap is one of the toys that just blew me away.
 
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