It was my birthday this month (yesterday, in fact), and I wanted to treat myself and get one of the vintage G1 toys that I've been longing for. I owned Grotusque many moons ago, and he was one of the toys I sold off as a young adult. My reasoning was that since he never showed up in the G1 cartoon, and certainly wasn't a major player in Marvel Comics, then he wasn't a beloved media character and I probably wouldn't miss him much. In fact, the opposite is true.

Of the 20 or so toys that I sold off, Grotusque has always been the one I've missed the most. There's something about his design and colors that I've always really, really enjoyed. Visually speaking, he's quite arresting. And despite not being able to point to a favorite David Wise or Simon Furman story in which he appears, this guy was part of my childhood experience nonetheless, and as such, I've missed not having him around. It's nice that he's finally returned to the fold.

So, I've always sort of envisioned the Monsterbots as roughly the 1987 equivalent to the Dinobots. Where the Dinobot toys were all Diaclone-era designs that were very fragile, the Monsterbots were designed by Hasbro in house, and they were built to take a bit more punishment. They're solid, durable toys. Also, I feel like 1987 was the first year that Hasbro's in-house designers really nailed the proper aesthetic. Toys like Flywheels or Slugslinger or Grotusque here already looked like they had stepped out of the Transformers cartoon, regardless of whether they had actually appeared in it or not.

Grotusque's name comes from the fact that he's a sabertoothed tiger, with large tusks, but he's also "grotesque," so that makes him Grotusque. There are a few different possibilities on how he can be arranged and configured in this form. He seems to be designed to be a two-legged bipedal beast, and can stand easily on his hind legs with no balance issues. Hasbro describes him as a tiger, though, which means it would make more sense if he could crawl around on all fours. You can certainly pose him this way, but you can tell his front claws aren't really designed for it. Regardless, his rear legs move at the hips and knees, the front claws have shoulder and elbow and wrist movement, and the head pivots up and down at the neck. His robot head is not especially well-hidden, as it's tucked under the tiger neck and facing backwards.

He has a second configuration, an "attack tiger" mode, which calls for the addition of his two bat-like wings and the vaporator gun that mounts on top of his neck, just behind his head. Grotusque was a Giant Realistic Flying Tiger back before Cartoon Network made that a thing. His main gimmick is the ability to shoot sparks out of his mouth, which is permanently affixed in a wide-jawed yawn. Pressing the purple trigger button on the top of his head rapidly will get his flint tumbler spinning, and cold sparks start spraying from his mouth. His lower jaw also bobs up and down when you press the spark trigger. Let's see Slag or Sludge do that!

The physical appeal of his animal form cannot be understated. He's mostly a bright magenta, with grey rear legs and wings and head, white shoulders and tails (he has two of them, like the lynx component to Sky Lynx) and blue highlights on his head. This is all accomplished with different colors of plastic, and no paint was required anywhere on the toy. His rub symbol is on the top of his neck, between the gun mount and his head. There's something about this color scheme that I just find enormously appealing. He's also really satisfyingly large for a G1 toy. He's about eight inches long from head to tail(s), standing at close to six inches at the head when he's up on his hind legs. His wings bring his overall height closer to seven inches.

Transforming him borrows some tricks from the Dinobots. The rear creature legs tuck away and end up mounted on the sides of the robot legs, and the rear of the tiger mode unfolds into the legs in the same manner as a toy like Snarl. The creature forelegs double as the robot arms, with the robot fists swinging out and supplanting the creature claws. The upper body shifts position for robot mode, and the tiger head swings up and ends up on the robot's back. It's not strictly necessary to ever remove the wings at all, as there's just barely enough clearance for the tiger head to tuck out of the way.

As a robot, Grotusque is close to six inches at the head, though with the wings attached to his shoulders, it brings his overall height to almost eight inches. He's still that lovely magenta color, with more blue visible on the robot chest and a magenta color adding some color contrast for his pelvis and robot fists. The robot head employs the same tricks that require no paint, as the helmet is white, the face is grey, and the eyes are blue, all made from different colors of plastic.

The only thing that bugs me about his design is his sticker placement. The only spot he's got Autobot symbols is on either of his wings, which means he's got no faction symbols if you pop the wings off. I feel like he should have a symbol on the center of his chest in robot mode, and it bothers me that he doesn't.

Articulation in robot mode is about standard for the G1 era. He can move his shoulders and elbows, and his wrists have a little bit of pivot action, but his head is locked in place, and his legs are essentially frozen (his knees do bend as required by the transformation, but his upper legs are fused together, so the legs still can't move independently). Toys with similar builds, like Sludge, had individual leg movement, but they also broke more often as a result. So, back then it was a trade-off. It's almost impossible to find a broken Grotusque on the secondary market. Missing his wings and gun, sure, but not broken.

I've been shopping on eBay for this guy, on and off, since about 2020 or so. Every once in a while I'll see one that's missing his pieces, or is yellowed from sun exposure, and I think about getting a few different junkers and trying to piece a good one together. But, just buying the left wing or right wing or the gun separately would have cost me around $25 a pop, so piecing together a complete Grotusque could quickly become an expensive proposition. Then I saw an eBay auction for a complete Grotusque with no sun damage, a working spark gimmick, and pristine stickers, and I knew this was the one I needed for my personal collection. He was $125, which is not a surprising price for a G1 toy of this size and condition. I could honestly have sunk that much into buying multiple incomplete junkers and trying to piece together a complete unit, but this got me a complete toy in excellent condition that I could enjoy on my birthday!

I still need Repugnus, and I don't yet have Targetmaster Blurr or Targetmaster Cyclonus, AND I still need to complete my Targetmaster Scourge, but after that I'll have caught up on the entire 1987 assortment. There was a time when I never thought I'd get to this point, so it's quite exciting for me. And now it's off to the display cabinet to shove some other guys off to the side and hope Grotusque fits on the shelf with his big horkin' wings!

Zob (it's probably many years too late to be making Uncle Grandpa references, but it's also much too late to be reviewing a 37-year-old toy, so...)