Man, like I say every time this comes up and you try to make a big silly deal out of it: it makes perfect sense in the context of the series. The kids just hijack some DNA and effectively temporarily trade out their old body for a new one based on a separate individual. Their choice in morphs has nothing to do with who they are, just whatever's handy at the time. They cross-gender morphed *all the time* in the books and it wasn't a big deal because that's just how it worked out (granted, Rachel never actually morphed a lion in the books, but that's beside the point. Pretty sure her trademark Grizzly and Elephant morphs were male though.) Hell, Tobias once morphed into a human girl.Dominic wrote:Yeah, Rachel the tribadial lion was friggin' awesome, if only for the wrong reasons.
I liked the toys at the time if for no other reason than because I happened to be super-into the books (still have some fondness for them, I actually went back and finally finished reading the series a couple years ago), so toys of the series were a natural draw. Plus, they were fun, decently-engineered toys, even if they weren't much to look at in Angsty Teen mode (Marco/Gorilla was okay, and I heard Cassie/Wolf was rather good, though I never got it). The Andalite figures were definitely the better of the bunch, though. Hell, even discounting the transformation, Ax made for a really solid, super-posable Andalite toy, the scorpion morph was just kind of a bonus.
In short, they weren't bad if you were a fan of the series, but I can see why anyone else would be turned off by them. Made solid custom fodder though.