When I got Cosmos on that Black Friday bundle, he only cost $15 and so it didn't matter who he was paired with, since even at that price he cost less than normal retail. But just for the record, the figure he was paired with was Armada Wheeljack. Or maybe that should be "Legend of the Microns Rampage."
Wheeljack is an exotic sports car with faast lines and a fast attitude. Once a prominent Autobot member, Wheeljack has had a
vibrant and rocky past; ow he's a stalwart Decepticon. Left behind on a battlefield to die, Wheeljack has not forgotten his good friend Hot Shot who left him there. Now he wears his scars as a badge of honor; a huge gash tears through the heart of his old Autobot logo, a blemish he keeps to demonstrate and remind those around him how he feels about the so-called noble Autobots. One day he will settle the ancient score; with Hot Shot's ruination his revenge will be complete. In robot mode Wheeljack skillfully wields two energy batons.
Hasbro was no better about putting bios on Transformers packaging in 2003 than they are in 2025, so that text comes from the Fleer Armada trading cards.
The original '00s toy was mainly designed by Hasbro's Eric Siebenaler, who was playing with a very G1 aesthetic at the time. That's why the head ends up looking so much like Generation 1 Sideswipe, with an angular forehead and what look like little angular horns on the top. The colors are very different, giving him a gold face and a white and black "helmet," but it's still a very strong parallel.
Armada Wheeljack's defining feature was
a big slash on his chest that cut straight though his Autobot symbol and revealed the interior technology that animated him. The figure uses the same engineering as Gigawatt, but with some new parts - including, appropriately enough, the hood. Not only is the slash a sculpted element, not only is the tech inside him a sculpted element, the giant Autobot symbol on his chest is also sculpted, a design that's raised above the surface of the chest just like it was on the toy two decades ago, and that's awesome.
My figure has a big flaw, and it's honestly kind of amusing: when it was assembled, its left foot somehow got missed, so he's just got a peg leg. Like, the foot goes onto the toy with one of those metal pins,
so it's not like it's something that could just fall off accidentally, but mine doesn't have one. He can still stand okay, considering, and it really just furthers the "he got abandonned and injured" storyline, so I'm okay with it. Maybe he can join the Star Raiders. There's no articulation in the missing foot, obviously, but he does still move at the ankle, knees, thighs, hips, waist, wrists, elbows, biceps, shoulders, and neck. His weapons include a pair of batons (homaging the way the original toy could hold his missiles in robot mode) and a launcher on his shoulder.
Luckily, the feet get tucked fully away when converting the figure, so Wheeljack's altmode isn't visibly missing any important parts.
To change modes, open the shins, fold the feet and/or foot away, rotate the waist around, raise the chest and fold the waist down, raise the arms to the side so you can hinge open the doors, bend the elbows, flip the hands down, lower the arms and fold them and the doors back in to the center, press the shins together, and fold the legs up and over. It's been the same since Siege Sideswipe, and it's been great the whole time.
To make this more "Wheeljack," the car doors have been retooled to have small slots where the batons can be plugged in to form running boards, because the 2003 figure had its missiles visible there. There
was also a Powerlinx feature, where attaching a Minicon would make the doors pop up so the missiles could fire; there's no such thing present today, but you can fold the doors up manually to at least simulate it. Additionally, the colors on the toy are based not on the Hasbro Armada Wheeljuack, but on Takara's Legend of the Microns Rampage: the majority of the body is black, but instead of wide yellow blocks on the sides of the hood, there are curved blue swoops. This absolutely looks better, and so was the right choice.
I didn't care about Armada Wheeljack when Armada was a thing, I didn't care about Armada Wheeljack when Legacy United updated him, and I sure didn't care about Armada Wheeljack when he was available in a Walmart Black Friday two-pack. But because he came with Cosmos and thus only cost me $7.50 - a price below even the famous long-running sale price of $7.77 that happened around the time of the first movie in 2007 - I'm perfectly fine with him. Even with his missing foot.
-- 12/23/25
Do you like the Wheeljack or Rampage colors better? Tell us on our message board, the Loafing Lounge.
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