 Beast Battle Masters Rhinox
This guy's got bearings of chrome steel
Transformers Rise of the Beasts Beast Battle Masters
Item No.: Asst. F3895 No. F4600
Manufacturer: Hasbro
Includes: n/a
Action Feature: Transforms from rhinoceros to blaster
Retail: $6.99
Availability: March 2023
Other: It's clever, I'll give it that
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It's somewhere between neat and silly, but Rhinox is one of those things you should look at because it's a toy. It's not the guy from the movie, or the cartoon, or the other cartoon. It's a cute little cyborg animal that explodes and has a giant gun in it. It's silly - it looks a lot like the cookies in Death to Smoochy. You know the ones. But it's still the kind of thing that you pick up and it's goofy enough to send you back to your other toys to give everybody a crack at trying out this new accessory.
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The 2 1/2-inch long stocky little guy has a surprisingly large amount of paint. I would expect painted eyes and maybe the nose horns, but he has lots of cybernetic stuff on his sides. They weren't content to do a plain animal toy, he's totally marked up with wires, switches, vents, and other seemingly nonsensical electronic parts. It looks fun. Heck, it is fun. There's not much in the way of moving parts other than ball-jointed knees, which are necessary to scootch them out of the way for transformation purposes. I assume more than a few of these toys - packaged or not - will be missing them as time goes on, so be sure to inspect them prior to purchase if you can. They're usually tucked under him.
As a kid, a lot of toys were collectible figures (or PVC figures) with little or no articulation. I still have a bunch of them. They were fun to play with, but it relied completely on the charm of the dinosaur, or Smurf, or Gremlin or Nintendo character. In this case its a peculiar little animal from the zoo, but as a robot. It captures the imagination, but it doesn't necessarily do much in this mode other than look cool.
Transforming the figure is a breeze. The big barrel does pop off during transformation - which is unfortunate - but other than that it's pretty easy. You split the rhino down the middle, fold his haunches forward, and rotate the tiny feet in place. That's it, that's the whole thing.
The blaster mode has a fold-down 5mm peg, so you can assign him to most of the toys from the last 20 years and a bunch more from before then. It looks like a blaster accessory and you can see tiny vestiges of the sawblades from the original Rhinox toy on the back of the blaster. It's clever, but it's still a gun made out of an exploded rhinoceros. I assume it's going to be a weak seller and probably something you'll have a hard time finding in good condition down the road due to the flimsy packaging, but I can also see it being a prized part of any adult fan's toy box. Anything that encourages you to play with your other toys is good, and that makes this more than a little worthwhile.
Given you used to be able to get a 4-inch robot for $5-$7, and still can in the Authentics line, this guy feels a little pricey at $6.99. If they dropped the bulk of the deco and could get the price down a bit, even just a dollar, I think this would be easier to say "go run out and buy this." I think it's a great toy for fans with lots of toys on-hand already, but it's not going to convert anybody to collecting this line and I don't know if kids would find it exciting - especially not in and of itself. But I can't picture ever selling this, it's the kind of thing I'll probably keep futzing with until it breaks in the decades to come.
--Adam Pawlus
Additional Images
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