Well this certainly took long enough!
Cowarros, a powerful and noble warrior, uses his exceptional speed and strength to serve under the banner of the golden lion for the Army of Leodysseus. Stationed in the mystical city
of Alkyrium, he is part of a coalition of heroic warriors tasked with keeping the city free of dark magic. Already well known in his own right, Cowarros arose to even greater fame helping Ragna Stormforger and Thallyn Frostbow with their mission to warn the unwary of the existence of the Soul Spiller, the fearsome weapon capable of resurrecting the evil goddess Illythia.
This figure was announced in April of 2018, and pre-orders began that July, just after Mythic Legions: Coliseum shipped. A limited run was available at Power Con in August (which is how Rustin was able to get his), but it's been nearly a year now, and finally the Soul Spiller figures are shipping. So if you ever wonder how some companies can have a "preorder" for their toys sell out, and then the actual figures come out only a month or two later? That's why. Because those weren't real preorders, they were just pre-sales of already ordered and allocated stock.
Cowarros is the newest addition to the unofficial Mythic Legions/Masters of the Universe crossover - he's the Battle Cat to Adamonn's He-Man. Convenient that a cat-headed character was created for Advent of Decay, then! He absolutely looks like a male version of the Seventh Kingdom cat warriors - which makes us more annoyed than we already were that Mythic Legions is closer to a 7" scale than Seventh Kingdom's 6".
The figure is mostly humanoid, of course, because the point is to make him entirely from existing pieces, and "humanoid" is what Mythic Legions is about. Even the frogs and deer are shaped like humans. He has the bare chest, arms, and legs, to best show off his bod, and while his gloves, skirt, and boots are the more refined "good guy" style, the feet are the sharper "bad guy" kind - figure it's an effort to suggest Mo2K Battle Cat's paw armor? It definitely looks threatening. To keep him from looking too human, he's got a tail and Asterionn's extra neck piece - which causes a little bit
of a problem.
B'alam, the character who lent his head to this figure, was designed to fit on a standard suit of armor, with a standard neck - it was specifically not designed to fit on a minotaur's beefier shoulders. So the socket for the balljoint is deeper on the cat head than it was on the cow head, which means Cowarros ends up looking like he has no neck, his head just sprouting directly from the gigantic trapezius muscles. The promo photos of the toy didn't have this problem, which may have been accomplished by not actually pushing the head all the way down onto the joint, and instead letting it just barely grip on top (which, unfortunately, will leave a visible gap if viewed from the sides or below).
The colors are unmistakably Battle Cat. His entire body is a deep, vibrant forest green, and the asymmetrical stripes are an
orange-tinged yellow. His armor is brick red with metallic copper highlights. Other than those touches, the armor and the body both have very flat colors - no shadows or weathering to be found. You could be charitable, and say that was done intentionally to suggest the old toys, but who knows if that's something all the Soul Spiller figures suffer from? Not me, because I was only getting the homages. The strap that hides the transition between "normal base body" and "yoked swolebro neck" is plain brown leather, with some silver hardware and a big blue gem in the center.
Cowarros' accessories include a big sword from the Dwarf Weapon Pack, a pair of spaulders, and two shields. The sword is a nice piece,
with a bronze hilt and a metallic blue blade that makes it stand out nicely when it's being held in front of all his red armor. It's not at all difficult to tell the shields are meant to stand in for the two discs on the 2002-style saddle, but really, all they make us think is that Mythic Legions needed some smaller shields if that was going to work. Like, these are full-sized, and they look ridiculous on the toy. They should have been bucklers.
The MotU-homage figures all come with a secondary head (that makes varying degrees of sense for the character). Because of his dark green skin, Cowarros' alternate head is an orc. It's likely the
Four Horsemen chose this one because the angle of the cheek armor is reminiscent of Battle Cat's actual helmet, but even with the pointy ears and big fangs, there's no mistaking the fact that this is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a feline head. Oh, and it looks even stumpier on the big shoulders than the cat head did, so if you want to give him this look, you'll have to take the neck-extender off. At least if it had looked better, we'd be able to pretend that the idea was to start with a slender, unarmored cat and have him turn into a larger, more armored version, but that just doesn't hold water.
We've said before that if we'd been able to host a variant for the Seventh Kingdom cats, she'd have been green with red armor, so in some alternate universe, she now has a bigger brother. Cowarros has some definite flaws, endemic to the "made from only existing parts" style - in other words, it's not production mistakes, just the limitations of the form. Mythic Legions Battle Cat is cool enough as an idea that I'm not going to complain that he's not perfect.
That said, the Horsemen now have a year(ish) to try to find a fix for these issues with Purplorr, Cowarros' opposite number.
-- 06/22/19
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