Tigerhawk

In the fires of an unknown place between time and space, the Vok aliens de-Sparked and fused the bodies of Tigatron and Airazor together to form Tigerhawk, a Vok-controlled super warrior intended to bring justice to the time-disrupting Transformers on prehistoric Earth. But when the two extracted Sparks unite and re-enter Tigerhawk's body, a different purpose and personality seems to emerge.

Tigerhawk is by far the most powerful Transformer in the Beast Wars. In robot mode, Tigerhawk can fly, has missile launchers under each arm, his wings double as shields, and he has wrist-mounted electricity cannons. His beast mode contains razor sharp claws and teeth, as well as a pair of chainguns on his forearms. However, these outstanding powers are nothing compared to his uncanny shamanic abilities to control the weather and terrain of Earth almost at whim.

Fiction

Beast Wars cartoon continuity

Beast Wars cartoon

Voice actor: Blu Mankuma (English), Kōichi Tōchika (Japanese), Xue Weigang(Chinese), Alvaro Tarcicio (Latin American Spanish) «less

You see, when two Vok love each other very much...

Concerned with Megatron's constant futzing with the timestream, the Vok extracted the Sparks of the inert, captive Maximals Tigatron and Airazor. Their bodies were merged together to form the staggeringly powerful Tigerhawk. Inhabited by two members of the Vok species, Tigerhawk travelled to Earth as a blindingly powerful energy comet.

He's got Tigatron's voice but Airazor's mannerisms.

Tigerhawk's energy-ball plunged to Earth, impacting and utterly destroying the Darksyde. Declaring himself the emissary of the Vok, he charged Megatron with "the willful disruption of time and space", and demanded Megatron's immediate surrender. Megatron was not so keen on this idea, and ordered a Predacon attack instead. Tigerhawk engaged and defeated the entire Predacon force, then shot down Megatron. Optimus Primal arrived at that point, concerned that if Megatron was killed, the Spark of the original Megatron would also be destroyed, thus worsening the damage to the time stream. Tigerhawk dismissed Primal's concerns as intolerable interference, and buried him in the ground with a wave of his hand. Tigerhawk was seconds away from executing the unconscious Predacon leader when Tarantulas disabled him with specialized versions of his arachnoid helper-drones.

Pretty sure flapping your wings slowly doesn't let you hover in place, Tigerhawk.

Tigerhawk awoke to find himself a captive in Tarantulas's lair. The spider attempted to destroy Tigerhawk's mind by forcefully removing the Vok presence inhabiting it. Due to a fluke coincidence, Tarantulas only succeeded in destroying himself, alongside the Vok who had controlled Tigerhawk. The Sparks of Airazor and Tigatron, which followed Tigerhawk to Earth, merged to become one and entered Tigerhawk's body.

Tigerhawk's memories appeared vague—at first he seemed not to remember being Tigatron or Airazor, yet after a moment he recognized Earth as "home". He remembered enough specifics of the Beast Wars to find surprising the appearance of Cheetor as a Transmetal 2 and Optimus Primal in his "Optimal" form. Other Victories

The Maximals were pretty impressed to have Tigerhawk around, with Optimus Primal quoting scripture from the Covenant of Primus about a "mighty warrior" from "the heavens". The Predacons, for their part, were scared shitless and Rampage told Megatron that there was nothing he could find that could work against Tigerhawk. Unfortunately, that wasn't true: Megatron discovered the Decepticon warship Nemesis! (Handily for the audience, Tigerhawk didn't know what the Nemesis was and needed an exposition scene) Tigerhawk and Optimus raced against time to back up Depth Charge and stop the Nemesis from being activated, but to no avail. Nemesis Part 1 After a brief fight, Tigerhawk offered to hold the line while Optimus went back and warned the others.

Violent deaths in a kids show! Cool!

Despite holding his own for quite some time against the legendary warship as well as simultaneously draining the ship of its power, Tigerhawk was killed by the ship's main cannon. Dinobot respected his actions as "a brave stand, and noble", while Optimus swore that no more of his friends were going to die because of Megatron's ambitions. Nemesis Part 2 

3H comics

Razorclaw was an alternate version of Tigerhawk, among the differences being that he was alive and that he was in league with Unicron. Those who had known Tigerhawk all mistook Razorclaw for him until he cleared up on his identity. Abduction Optimus Primalsarcastically berated himself for the mistake, claiming that even Tigerhawk's nano-fleas were far above the likes of Razorclaw. Escape

Beast Wars Metals manga

Four katanas, 'cuz godlike elemental powers just aren't enough.

When the dead Tigatron was resurrected due to the machinations of Megatron, his lover, Airazor was also revived, but as a mindless zombie. The zombie Airazor battled Tigatron, although Tigatron could not bring himself to hurt Airazor. Desiring another death over harming her, Tigatron gave her one of his katana and knelt down.

As Airazor struck his neck with the blade, her spark traveled through the katana and into Tigatron's body. Inside cyberspace, the two reunited Maximals embraced, vowing never to be apart again. As their sparks joined, Tigatron and Airazor were reborn as the powerful Tigerhawk!

Tigerhawk used his elemental powers, channeled through his four katana, to dispatch hordes of zombie Predacon troopers with tornadoes and earthquakes. He then gathered up all the Maximals who had been separated from the team and returned them to Optimus Primal. Beast Wars Metals #6 

Games

Transformers: Battle Tactics

Tigerhawk Fuzor participated in battles against a variety of opponents, both Autobots and Decepticons. Sometimes there were many of him! He was an Epic character who first appeared in the "Transmetals: Episode 3" mini events, and could be recruited by collecting 650 units of Cybermetal, 350 units of Transmetal, 150 exclusive cores, and 50 cores of this character. Transformers: Battle Tactics

Toys

Beast Wars

Fly, my kitty! Fly!

• Tigerhawk (Transmetal 2 Ultra, 1999)
  • Japanese ID number: C-50

Tigerhawk transforms into half-robotic, half-organic, flying robot tiger-falcon thing. Yes. In beast mode, he is armed with "Hidden wing-tipped missiles", feather projectiles very similar to the Fuzor Silverbolt's, with spring-loaded switches to flip the wings forward, and flip-out missile launchers which activate when a lever on Tigerhawk's back is pulled (which also moves the wings). Under his beast head is a small cockpit with a pilot's chair (see Notes below).

Similar to Transmetal 2 Megatron, Tigerhawk features an aborted and undocumented vehicular "third mode", which involves flipping him over to utilize the otherwise unexplained wheels on top of his wings and facing his cannon arm forward. The box and instructions opt to call the deployment of his vacuum-metalized bird helmet (or "Targeting Computer Battle Visor") over his beast tiger head a third mode instead.

In robot mode, Tigerhawk has a decent level of articulation, though his elbow joints are rotated in such a way as to be not particularly useful.

Judging from his packaging art, it seems that along with Optimus Minor, Sonar, and Scarem, Tigerhawk was amongst the few Transmetals 2 that was intended to have the strange feature of having access to multiple limbs in robot mode... In this case, a second pair of arms formed by his rear beast mode legs.

A back-of-the-box graph for Tigerhawk gives technical designations to some of his robot mode parts. In addition to the already-mentioned "hidden wing-tip missiles" and "targeting computer battle visor," they include "Blast-open thunder torpedoes," "Ion-charged talons," an "Accelerator beam-turret cannon" and "Multi-stage deployment wings."

Know that this mold was later used to make Universe Razorclaw.

Transformers Legacy United

Tigerhawk will be released as a leader class toy under the Transformers Legacy United line in 2024.

• More information on Tigerhawk at TFU.info

Notes

One Winged Angel

• The extremely short duration of Tigerhawk's appearance on the show (a mere three episodes) was the result of a strange confluence of factors. At the time, it was not at all certain that the Beast Wars franchise would be ending. However, at one point, after Tigerhawk had already been written into the show at Hasbro's explicit request, the company considered not releasing his toy at all. Thus he was ordered killed off immediately, and was. Hasbro eventually decided to release the toy, but by that point it was too late to change the scripts or animation.^[1] Tigerhawk's toy did not appear on shelves until well after his death on the show.
• In the Beast Wars Metals comic, Tigatron was interpreted as a samurai; the katana being their weapon of choice. Hence the whole samurai motif for Tigerhawk.
• His motto is "Violence will not be tolerated--surrender or be destroyed." Poor copy-editing or delicious irony? You be the judge!
• Originally, Tigerhawk, along with Optimal Optimus and Transmetal 2 Megatron were to have small driver-like figures sitting on control chairs located in cockpits on their bodies. These drivers were meant to represent their sparks. But Hasbro later realized that kids might confuse these spark representations as drivers controlling the robots, so they were abandoned, but the cockpits remained. The spark pilot was eventually used in the Japanese release of Cryotek.
• Although otherwise fairly toy-accurate, Tigerhawk's animation model lacks his toy's beast mode helmet piece.
• Even before they were combined into Tigerhawk, Airazor and Tigatron had a gender-ambiguous history. Tigatron was a male robot with a beast mode that seemed to be scanned from a female tiger, while Airazor was a female character in the English version of the show and male in the Japanese version then female again in Beast Wars Metals.
• Over a decade after the character was created, The AllSpark Almanac II went ahead and declared Tigerhawk to be a Fuzor.
• An unrealized Fun Publications BotCon exclusive was a redeco of Tigerhawk into a non-combiner version of Generation 1 Predaking.^[2]

Foreign names

• Japanese: Tigerfalcon (タイガーファルコン Taigāfarukon)
• Italian: Tigre Alata ("Winged Tiger" toyline)
• Mandarin: Hǔ Yīng (虎鹰, "Tiger Hawk")
• Polish: Jastrząb ("Hawk")
• Spanish: Tigrehalcon (America, "Tiger Hawk")