G1 Cosmos

Review by Desastron:

Prelude: In the original series Cosmos was one of several secondary characters that kept appearing in the latter seasons over and over again. I don’t remember exactly when he first appeared. I do remember a rather spectacular crash involving Sky Lynx. Now and again this little guy here flew across the screen, but he was never what you’d call a main character. I have to admit, though, that Cosmos was one of those characters that appealed to me from the moment I first saw him.

Robot Mode: Cosmos is a Generation 1 Minibot and as such he is not exactly big. In fact he’s tiny. He’s shorter than today’s Legend class figures.

That’s not necessarily a flaw, of course. Cosmos wasn’t among the big guys in the series, either. What does grate a bit, though, is his lack of posability. In fact he can barely move at all. His arms can be twisted backwards in theory, but that’s for the transformation sequence and not for enabling Cosmos to pull off poses.

Even worse than the immovable arms are the legs, or rather his feet. They are only hinted at, barely, and are actually a single, inseparable plastic block.

As far as detailing goes, he pretty much delivers what you’d expect of a figure this age and this size. There are some nice highlights here and there, as well as sculpted fingers. He doesn’t have an actual face, though. Then again, that pretty much pertains to his cartoon counterpart, too, who didn’t have the most expressive of faces, either.

Overall Cosmos looks very compact, mostly because he consists almost exclusively of rounded elements. It gets funny, though, when you look at him sideways, because Cosmos has a very prominent romp, which makes him look like a tiny, green penguin.

You can’t really call this figure either “good” or “bad”, because you can’t judge the Minibots by the same standard as other Transformers. Myself, I think he’s kinda cute.

Alternate Mode: A short transformation sequence turns Cosmos into a... hubcap? Well no, not realy, Cosmos actually turns into a flying saucer. Which is the unexpected highlight of this little figure. Because this UFO is modelled after all those pictures of flying saucers that may or may not be real.

Whatever the case, I really like the idea of having a Transformer that turns into a flying saucer. And Cosmos does look pretty much exactly like his (probably not really existing) role model. He isn’t exactly any more detailed than he was in robot mode, but he does have tiny little engines, which are made from Cosmos’ fingers. Isn’t that something?

Remarks: It’s hard to rate Cosmos objectively. For a collector he’s certainly a nice little addition to the G1 cast. For those more focused on the modern figures he’s probably not very interesting.

If you judge him by today’s standards, there is no way to give him a good rating. In this case, though, I’m not using any sort of modern standard. Cosmos is an extraordinary figure due to the idea behind him. Maybe the actual figure doesn’t have that many qualities, but his alternate mode alone makes him an innovative piece of Transformers history.

Rating: I’ll give him a C-