Roshan's Spotlight: Battle Beast Cats
 

Well OK, there is only one kitty cat in the Battle Beast menagerie, but this spotlight will be focusing on all of the members of the cat family in Battle Beasts.

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I'm sure many of you in your 30's had one of these as a kid. Small little critters with two points of articulation and one of the first table top miniature battle systems ever produced. Each figure randomly had either a wood, water or fire symbol and the game played like rock paper scissors. I won't get into all of the minutia about Battle Beasts themselves, these are figure spotlights, not so much line spotlights. But I would point you to this archive to get more information if you really dig the line and want to delve into it: Beastformers - Battle Beasts - Laser Beasts Price Guide and Checklist!

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Now let's go down the line of all the cats made. First up is Pirate Lion. The king of the Battle Beasts, well one would assume given he is Battle Beast #1 (all Battle Beasts and their weapons were numbered somewhere on the figure or weapon). But beyond just the number, Pirate Lion had a unique rub symbol that set him apart from all others: The Starburst. The Starburst symbol Pirate Lion is pretty rare, and as a kid you'd basically own everyone on the table because the Starburst trumps all other symbols (kinda a broken mechanic).


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Next up was #3 Ferocious Tiger. This figure came in either brown or light brown armor. There were a lot of slight color variants in the line that were due to multiple factories as well as multiple markets being sold and produced for (Battle Beasts were an even bigger hit in Japan where Takara sold them as Beastformers and tied them to the Transformers line)


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#31 Jaded Jaguar is the only figure in the entire Battle Beast line who had a variant that wasn't just a color shade difference, it was a completely different color altogether.

#57 Black Panther. I forgot to take a pic of him. Bad Roshan. Bad.


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This brings us to the Laser Beasts. There were 76 regular Battle Beasts with rub symbols, but the final series of Beasts had the rub sign replaced with an orb with the symbol behind it and were called laser beasts. The first 12 laser beasts were hard to find but still sold in the US. Outside of packaging mockups, no further laser beasts were made in the US, and instead sold only in Japan making them veeeeery expensive to US collectors in the present day in the aftermarket.

#81 Tiger Burn is one of the lasers available in the US. Note also the weapons are now all guns instead of edged or blunt weapons.

#89 Brown Lion could be considered the heat miser brother to Pirate Lion's cold miser :D

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Finally, we come to Grencats, who is technically the only kitty cat of the group, and probably the cutest of all the laser beasts in my opinion. Grencats came in an exclusive 6-pack called the shield battlers set where every figure in the set came with a weapon and a shield that could attach to a battle sled. Pictured next to Grencats is an unpainted test shot torso of Grencats.

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Finally I leave you with some custom cats I've picked up over the years. Thanks for readin, see ya guys Monday with more.

I never had any Battle Beasts when I was a kid. I was more of a Muscle Things guy.

Do Battle Beasts arms move?

Yep, that was their only articulation.

That's 2 more points than Muscle Things had.

So it looks like some had weapons and some had vehicles, or beasts of some sort.

Any play sets?

Three playsets, the phoenix, shark and wood beetle sets. The vehicles were the cat, bighorn sheep and deer, and in the laser beasts there were sleds, shield sleds and drills. The drills being astronomically expensive.

Every figure came with a weapon. Except Stone Cobra and the clear carp.

Are the pics in this thread from your personal collection, and will you be posting pics of the other items mentioned?

Thanks for another great thread. I remember battle beasts as i just turned 30 and used to play with these when I was a kid. Brought back some good memories and a lot of good info presented here.
On a side not, were u at NYCC? I looked around and didn't see you or your books there for sale.
Also, you planning on any future toy related books?

Yea, my personal collection. Everything in the spotlights will be mine unless noted. I'm not going to dig out the playsets from the displays so I'll just show you the full display and you can see the scale. The phoenix is in storage because there's just not room on the shelf.

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Okay, so I'm guessing you had all of them, or have all of them?

So, on the rock, paper, scissors angle, if you beat your buddy did you get to keep his Battle Beast?

I actually was there, but unfortunately i wasn't able to afford a booth. The artist alley was full by the time I went to register (I was planning on big apple con, but they canceled it, so I was stuck) and a regular booth cost like $900.

I'll be looking to get almost every major toy line in print at some point. So I won't be focusing on the stuff that's already been done well like Joe and Transformers, there are already great writers out there who've done those. Although I like the work that tomart and lee's put forth in their magazines, I still feel most of the lines need to be fleshed out a little better from an archival perspective.

That's how my brothers and I played it. So there were a lot of fights :D

I am missing 5 laser beasts and a few battle beast variants. The lasers aren't only expensive, many don't come up for sale very often. Even if all five came up for sale today, I'd probably end up spending $1200-1300 to get them.

Have you ever considered an Action Figure Encyclopedia?

I've often fantasized about a museam, but an encyclopedia would be more accessible to a larger number of people.

An encyclopedia would be something a person would do if they had multiple lines already covered. I've only got one book, no need to get ahead of myself. I think any encyclopedia at this point should be web based anyway.