Dave's Wal-Mart Exclusive Rant: Transmetal Rattrap "Wal-Rat" These hit my area in quantity this week. Normally, I don't toy shop on Wednesdays (it's comics day), but my comics pull was abnormally light, so I popped out to look for kitbashing materials, and found Wal-Rat (thanks to PFunkPearl for letting me know in advance I wouldn't be wasting my time). They're pretty easy to spot, being very dark in the package. And at the store I checked, more than half an endcap was nothing but Wal-Rat. CAPSULE The base toy was "Recommended," but I'd give this one a Mildly Recommended based on some remold problems. The main value seems to be as a collectible, or for those who missed out on the original TM Rattrap. $9.76 at Wal-Mart. RANT I'm not going to do a regular Rant here, because this is a recolor without even changed techspecs. Packaging: Wal-Rat is packaged in a regular Transmetal bubble card, with the same exact card front as the original TM Rattrap had, except for the new Hasbro logo in the bottom corner. The sticker on the bubble, however, has "Wal*Mart Special Edition Transmetals" on it. The back of the card is likewise pretty much a Transmetal I card, but it features the first wave TMII toys at the top, and has a Wal-Mart tag at the bottom. Same techspecs, same color scheme on Rattrap as originally. Couldn't even spring to have a guy go in and fiddle with the coloring. Color Mapping: Here's how the colors break down as compared to the original TM Rattrap. The red chrome becomes blue chrome (and has the quality control problem of drifting into purple in places). Orange painted bits are now bright dayglo green. The brown plastic is now a very dark sparkly grey. The pearly tan (in the tail and elsewhere) is now a slightly darker color, about the same as Optimal Optimus's forearms and blastaway shields. The blue accents on the original's legs are now orange. The sides of the head and torse are yellow, and the eyes are yellow on the beast and orange on the robot. The combination of bright green and bright yellow on the head is pretty awful. Hrm, and my original Rattrap's starting to shed chrome, the first of my Transmetals to have that problem. Cybertronian-pattern baldness? If not for the green and yellow in robot mode, I'd almost call this a stealth version of Rattrap. Gah, and the chrome's already peeling from this one, so beware of the batch. Remold Problems: It seems that whenever Hasbro redoes a toy in new colors, the change in plastics messes up the tolerances of joints and tabs and stuff. This doesn't seem to be a major problem with Rattrap, although the light brown plastic seems to yield slightly looser joints, especially in the tail and the forepaws. Okay, strike that...the rat head comes apart way too easily, especially when I try to put the toy in vehicle mode. And the robot feet don't seem to want to stay on their pegs on the rat's underside very well. Mind you, this isn't like a knockoff where cheap plastic is used. It's just that the machinery was adjusted for one set of plastic types, and wasn't re-adjusted for the new colors. Differences in hardness affect things. If you had the choice of this or the original TM Rattrap, I'd say to go for the original. Optional Gimmick: Something pointed out to me by an email correspondant, if you remove the rear hubcaps, they have pegs inside them that fit nicely in Rattrap's fist, so he can use them as shields. However, I've found that this can accelerate chrome loss because you have to flex the hubcaps quite a bit to get them out. [Later Note: Apparently the report I got was either in error, or only some Rattraps were built this way. Haven't tried it myself, the chrome made ominous crinkling sounds when I started to pry.] Overall: A nice toy, the colors aren't too bad, but it does suffer from the usual recolor mold tolerance problems. Dave Van Domelen, turning Airhammer into a Peryton and Terragator into a Hodag....