Monday, April 16, 2012

B is for Battle Beasts

I still LOVE his sword!
Anthropomorphic animals.  Power armor.  Cybernetics.  Shiny weapons.  Allied to fire, water, or wood.  What more could you ask for?!

Battle Beasts, like Master of the Universe, introduced me to Science Fantasy.  What is cooler than swords and power armor?  Or Guns and wooden shields?  Well to me not much.  These little 2" figures were kind of mystery compared to many of the toys of their day.  They didn't have a cartoon and we didn't even know each Beasts name (though you could send away for a poster with their names, which for whatever reason I never did).  Only their arms moved and they had these little heat activated holograms on their chest (Transformers did something similar at the same time, which makes sense because they were both owned by Hasbro), so you could play Rock, Paper, Scissors or, in this case Fire, Water, Wood.  And there were tons of these guys.  You could field a whole epic battle between these 3 forces to determine their secret goals.  Why secret?  Well, if I didn't even know their names, how could I know their goals?!

That Rabbit alwasy reminded me of Jaxxon from the Star Wars Comics.
Oh, and that Deer in the second row has a drill for a left hand!!
Even now, they strike me as awesome and if I could find my old figures, I'd use them for miniatures in an RPG.  I don't know if it would Palladium's After the Bomb, WotC's newest version of Gamma World or just DnD.  But they are totally cool.

Go ahead, mess with us.

I do remember that Blackthorn had a 2 issue, black and white comic.  But that was the only product tie-in I recalled, until today.

It seems that Diamond Select Toys has acquired the property and has released several limited edition minimates and plan to launch Wave 1 in toy stores this summer, with a tie-in comic from IDW Publishing.  I can't wait to show my kids.

2 comments:

Mark Means said...

I remember these, but don't think I ever paid that much attention to them.I don't think I ever realized they did a tie in comic, though. Neat concept, but maybe they were the victim of bad marketing :)

Cross Planes said...

Yeah, they were. G.I. Joe, M.A.S.K., Transformers, C.O.P.S., ThunderCats, SilverHawks, even TigerSharks all had some TV presence or a comic book from Marvel/Star Comics or DC. Battle Beasts had no TV & Blackthorn wasn't even 3rd tier as a publisher and only available through the Direct Market.

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