CYBERMEN WEEK: Cybermats

One of the dangers of being a toy collector is that if you think something is going to be hard to find, you snatch up toys early for a slightly higher price than it eventually becomes available for. Which is why I spent so much on this set of 16 Cybermats and sort of regret it now.

These are basically accessories that would usually come with a Cybermen, tiny pieces of unarticulated plastic. They've pretty much taken the sam distribution method they did with the adipose. Although the Adipose were initially an accessory pack in, they proved so popular that Character Options stopped making that figure available and packaged 20 Adipose in their own card and charged the same as a regular character. That's what they did here for the cybermat, the big differences being that 1) the adipose figures were bigger, 2) the adipose set came with more figures, 3) the adipose were characters whereas the cybermats have no personalities and thus are harder to justify as being action figures that deserve their own seperate packaging.

But what about the Cybermats themselves? Well unlike the Adipose, which had only two different sculpts, the cybermats have 4. They correspond to the position of their tails, with one straight, one curved to the left, one curved to the right, and one in the middle of a serpentine  sliter. The one with the sliter also features an open bitey mouth as seen in the episode "Closing Time." (In my opinion it's an underrated episode. It also features the first real use non-alternate universe Cybermen, so I might be biased.) These things are tiny, so small that the guns that come with the other figures are bigger. Putting 16 in a pack and making it the only way to get cybermats is kinda wrong. Very wrong. Hell, remember when the Tomb of the Cybermen figure came with two kinds of cybermats? What happened to those kinds of practices?

Unfortunately I'm a Cyberman completist, so I had to get these guys.