Beast Wars Telemocha Series Tigatron

All things considered, mold reuse was not especially common in Beast Wars... at least, not in the sense of repainting one character into another. Even in those cases, it wasn't repainting one species into another. Reusing Cheetor's mold to represent a white tiger - which tend to be native to Bengal, while Tigatron patrolled the arctic zones in the Beast Wars TV series - seems strange, although it's suggested that he was intended to be remolded slightly.

Armada Tidal Wave

Gestalts were nothing new to TransFormers back in the early 2000s. Even leaving aside the teams of five (or six, in the case of the Constructicons), there had been a G1 Powermaster, Overlord, who consisted of two vehicles - with individual functionality, but without individual robot modes - which combined into one larger robot. Armada took this a step further, paving the way for the Autobots' 'Superlink/Powerlinx' feature in Energon, with the Dark Fleet, also known as Tidal Wave.

Armada Optimus Prime

"Hi, I'm HEXdidn't... and I wanna tell you about the TransFormers..."

Specifically the Armada incarnation of Optimus Prime, on this occasion. Say what you will about the cartoon that accompanied it (what little I've seen of it can only be described as 'shit', despite using many of the voice actors from Beast Wars, though whether it was entirely down to the US localisation, or whether the Japanese original was just as bad, I cannot say), the toy line had some highlights. Many of the toys were big, clumsy and blocky, but they at least had reasonable articulation. In fact, the Deluxe-equivalent version of Optimus Prime - fondly named 'Bendy Prime' - is still roundly considered to be one of the best of that line, and among the best articulated TransFormers ever... So surely the Leader Class analogue should be better, right?

Masterpiece MP05 Megatron

After doing the MP01 mold to death and only producing one new mold in two years, Takara Tomy had to do something particularly special with MP05 to get some credibility back into the so-called 'Masterpiece' brand. The announcement that the fifth release would be Megatron met with mixed response. The revelation that he would appear in his old Generation 1 alternate mode - a Walther P-38 handgun - hopes were both raised and dashed in equal measure

Kiss Players Hot Rodimus

Whether it was the malign influences of Unicron, or merely evidence that some folks at Takara were overworked to the point of nervous exhaustion, something very strange happened to the TransFormers brand in Japan in 2006... and that strange thing was "Kiss Players".

A mercifully brief line of toys, it incorporated repaints from Binaltech, G1, and a bunch of transforming egg things that hadn't previously been 'TransFormers'. There was also one larger-format PVC statuette of one of the girls that came along with a 'Worlds Smallest' version of the Mazda RX8. Each of the Binaltech repaints came with a human partner - at a slightly larger scale than had been used with Binaltech Asterisk - and the story had it that the robots gained special powers when their human partner kissed them. The story also seemed to include gratuitous panty shots, and the sort of phallic tentacle/tongue things that are normally only seen in the seedier genres of anime.

Hot Rod comes with Xiao-Xiao/Syao-Syao, some kind of Chinese martial artist in a very short dress and a padlocked collar, munching on what could be either a dumpling or a rice cake. Despite being to a different scale to the BTA figures, she fits into Hot Rod's vehicle mode reasonably well though, obviously, cannot be made to hold the steering wheel.

Beast Wars Neo Longrack

As ambivalent as I was toward Beast Wars, the Japanese line did have some delightfully bonkers additions to the range, and Longrack is just such a character. Among all the lions, tigers, apes, dinosaurs and other such powerful, dangerous creatures, who would have thought that a Giraffe represented a viable alternate mode for one of the time-displaced Cybertronians? Evidently someone at Takara did...