Beast Wars Iguanus (Transmetal 2)

Robot Mode: Iguanus is a relatively small Deluxe-class figure, but compensates his lack of stature with very long arms and really big hands. In typical Beast Wars fashion he is very nicely articulated, so no complaints here, and the detail work also looks pretty nice. A few more colored highlights on the shoulders and head could have brought out the details a bit more, such as his bolted-on eye patch, but overall he looks pretty spiffy. The frills from his beast mode become a sort of half-skirt around his back end, which looks... interesting. The tail of his beast mode becomes a rather long brad down his back, also a nice visual.

Iguanus has no ranged weapons in robot mode. The missile launcher from his beast mode (see below) is inaccessible here, so he is restricted to carrying his orange missile as a club. His left pectoral flips open to reveal his spark crystal. Now from what I have looked up most Iguanus figures actually do have a Beast Wars Predacons spark crystal there, but mine features a Maximal crystal. And not even a Maximal crystal from Beast Wars, but rather from the follow-up series Beast Machines. I assume he was misassembled (he came out when Beast Machines toys had to have been in development already) or maybe a customizer went a bit crazy here, I don’t know.

Overall Iguanus is a nice-looking robot with no real flaws except the lack of a ranged weapon (but you can easily imagine the sculpting in his left shoulder to be a missile launcher).

Beast Mode: Now you would expect a guy called Iguanus to transform into an iguana, but instead he becomes a bio-mechanical frill-necked lizard (lat. Chlamydosaurus kingii), who is not even in the same overall class as an iguana (Sauropsida instead of Reptilia). But I guess Frillneckus or Lizardus-Frillneckedus was a bit too much of a mouthful or something.

The lizard is the same strange mess of biological and cybernetic-looking parts as the robot and looks more like some kind of mythical dragon than any real animal. Inside the mouth of the lizard you can find his missile launcher, now finally capable of loading and firing Iguanus’ missile. Activating the missile launcher causes the frills on his neck to flip up. All four legs are fully articulate (being the robot mode limbs), so there is nothing to complain about here. Whether you like the look of the beast is purely subjective, naturally.

Remarks: Iguanus was one of only very few Beast Wars characters who got a second mold despite not appearing in the TV series (in either form). Matter of fact the only other Beast Warriors I can think of to whom that happened are Spittor and Cybershark (okay, we have two Prowls as well, but they’re not supposed to be the same guy). Anyway, Iguanus’ Transmetal 2 form was only briefly glimpsed in 3H Productions’ Primeval Dawn comics, where he was a minion of Tarantulas, but that story was never finished due to 3H losing the Transformers license shortly afterwards.

Anyway, Iguanus is one of the better Transmetal 2 figures, but overall this was already the point where the Beast Wars toyline began to wind down and I’m not that big a fan of the TM2 concept in general. So not a bad toy, far from it, but in comparison to the other Beast Wars toys I can’t call him more than a good average.

Rating: C+