Does anyone here know what was the piont of rhe "Mask/Alien face" gimmick some of the earlier BW toys had? I know the creators of the tv show wanted to use this gimmick somehow but due to budjet limits they did not do it.
They were meant to be battlemasks, when the characters went into battle they would have switched to those heads. IIRC the budget would not allow for creating an extra robot mode model for everyone with the alternate head, although you sort of see Blackarachnia's other head when she's wearing that visor in Other Voices. Yeah, bit of a stretch, but you can't deny that the visor does make it look like she's got her other head out.
So... if they were supposed to be battle masks Rattrap doesny have one? I know its a diffrent size toy and all but from a fiction point of view it doenst make sense to me + the masks look more like an organic Alien head then a battle mask
Don't think the basics had one, Rattrap and Airazor plus the other Maximal basics lacked it. So did the other Predacon basics like Insection, etc. I had also heard that the reason they dropped the gimmick was that it was at the time it was too difficult to render.
They do look like organic alien heads--but hey, the Transformers were aliens who'd recently adopted organic bodies, right? Seriously, though, I've always heard them referred to officially as Mutant Heads. Like they'd activate those to tap into their wild side and go all ass-kicking berserker-freak-out. And yeah, Basics didn't get 'em for the same reason Energon Scouts didn't Powerlink. Extra features = more money, which defeats the purpose of having lower price points. Instead, we got the auto-transforming feature most of the earlier Basics came with.
OK, so some BW TF has "Mutant Head's", but what was the point? After all, money was involved. someone aproved this "gimmick" so it most have a reason behind it besides is "wow they have masks" factor. As I understant it. in the begining of the BW line the TF were suposed to be on present day earth - may their masks were suposed to be disguises? in some stupid kind of way? (or maybe they all got parts in the squale to the movie Hoist was back in the G1 cartoon?)
Okay, I'm not sure what you're not tracking. The "Mutant Heads" were just a play feature. They were supposed to add to the appeal of the toys, thus (hopefully) improving sales--hence the willingness to approve a gimmick that costs money. It's no different than a Minicon or a Cyberkey. Maybe it's not the most thought out feature ever, but that's what it is. They were supposed to be included in the show, presumably to promote the feature, but the cost was prohibitive. So Mainframe dropped the idea. Without support for them in the accompanying fiction, the feature dissapeared from the molds in later waves. So yeah, the point was basically, "Wow, they have masks!" Just like Fuzors were "Wow, they're two animals," and Transmetals were "Wow, they're all chromey," and Transformers in general have always been "Wow, they transform."
It worked out later on when they brought in repaints as characters. Tarantulas uses the mutant head of the toy, Blackarachnia uses the robot head. In the Botcon comic, T-Wrecks is shown using Megatron's mutant head, and later on in the Cybertron line, the Buzzsaw toy used Waspinator's robot head.
They weren't "Battle Masks" as much as they were supposed to be kinda "mid transformation" more-beast-than-robot heads. Some of the figs ended up with their mutant heads being their CG heads, like Waspinator and Tarantulas. Most of the other mutant heads were mercifully ignored.
