Rhinox (BW)
| This article is about the Beast Wars Maximal. For the Armada Autobot, see Rhinox (Armada). |
- Rhinox is a Maximal in the Beast Era portion of the Generation 1 continuity family.
Rhinox is a Renaissance Bot. Intelligent, massive, strong, and stalwart, there are few Maximals one could depend on more. Rhinox is of a rare breed -- he's incredibly tech savvy, but mystically-inclined... without coming off as a burnt-out technohippie. He's quick and decisive in a crisis, with spectacular results, but is slow and steady. He loves to sniff the flowers. A behind-the-scenes charismatic and an on-his-feet strategist, he could lead the Maximals if he wanted to, but he doesn't.
If he sounds too good to be true, it's because he just might be. At times he can be borderline obsessive and single-minded. The Maximals are glad he's on their side, because if he ever had a change of heart, woe be to them. No, woe be to the galaxy.
Still, you can't help but love a bot who can fight Megatron to a standstill without breaking a sweat yet would rather take a nap in a patch of daisies. Rhinox considers Rattrap to be his best friend, though he also has a close friendship with Optimus Primal. He appears to have some "older sibling/parental" emotions toward Airazor due to his role in bringing her online.
Spanish name: Rinox
Fiction
Animated continuity
Timelines: Dawn of Future's Past
Beast Wars
Voice actor: Richard Newman (English), Daiki Nakamura (Japanese)
Rhinox was a crewmember of the exploration ship Axalon when captain Optimus Primal got word that the Predacon criminal Megatron had stolen the Golden Disk and a ship with transwarp capabilities. The Axalon was the closest vessel that also possessed a transwarp drive, so Rhinox's ship was sent to engage them. After following the Predacons through a transwarp portal and appearing above a mysterious planet, both ships were damaged in the ensuing space battle, and before both ships crashed into the planet's surface below, the stasis pods carrying the rest of Rhinox's crew were ejected into orbit.
The planet was rich with energon -- so much so that prolonged exposure would short out their bodies, so the Maximals and Predacons were forced to take organic forms from the local creatures. Rhinox took the form of a rhinocerous.
When Optimus Primal was dematerialized and absorbed by a mysterious alien probe, Rhinox was forced to juryrig a gizmo to extract Optimus' molecular structure from the probe and reconstruct it. Whether or not this device would actually have worked is unknown, as shortly before he had a chance to use it, Rhinox blasted Waspinator with his chainguns (beginning the running gag of Waspinator being scrapped in every episode), and the wounded Predacon somehow accidentally triggered the Standing Stones construct, which then rematerialized Optimus on its own.
Rhinox later developed Sentinel, a hi-tech security system for the Axalon, which unfortunately went berserk when its control panel was damaged in a struggle between Dinobot and Rattrap. Rattrap however, was able to infiltrate the now-heavily guarded ship and deactivate Sentinel, which was then repaired and made fully-functional by Rhinox.
Sometime later, when the Maximals found themselves cornered by a Predacon ambush, Rhinox was able to take out their attackers with a carefully aimed spray of chaingun fire. Megatron was so impressed that he decided to make Rhinox a member of his merry band of thieves, by force. Rhinox was captured by Tarantulas and then reprogrammed into a Predacon by a device designed by Megatron called a "Transmuter". However, the newly malevolent Rhinox proved to be too much for Megatron to handle, as Optimus Primal had correctly predicted. He quickly dispatched most of the Predacons, working his way up to Megs himself in an attempted coup. Rhinox very nearly succeeded, but fortunately, Megatron was able to revert him back into a Maximal using the Transmuter, and Rhinox escaped to rejoin his Maximal comrades and smell some flowers.
Later, a stasis pod crashlanded in a barren wasteland. Rhinox intercepted it and, with Cheetor's help, managed to save the protoform Maximal's spark. The protoform then became Airazor, who repaid the favor by saving the weakened Rhinox from Terrorsaur.
When Scorponok tested an experimental bomb on a group of Maximals, rendering them blind, it was Rhinox who led the group on the dangerous trek back to the Axalon, teaching them how to use their other senses. Of course, they succeeded, and afterwards, Rhinox again went off to smell some flowers.
Later, Tarantulas infected Rhinox with an energon discharge virus, which made him expel his energon reserves via his nasal passages in bursts powerful enough to tear through the hull of the Axalon, threatening both to destroy the Maximals' base and completely drain Rhinox of energy. Rattrap and Dinobot were dispatched to acquire a countervirus, while Rhinox ate some wild bean vines to keep his strength up. When the bickering duo nearly failed in their mission, the other Maximals, including Rhinox, showed up, and the rhinocerous blew away the Predacons with a massive... energon discharge caused by his ingestion of wild beans. Megatron would remember this moment as the most humiliating defeat in his entire career. Rhinox was later cured by the countervirus via a Cybertronic beer hat.
During the Planet Buster crisis, Rhinox was heavily damaged by Tarantulas and Blackarachnia when they infiltrated the Axalon, forcing him to spend the remainder of the crisis in a CR chamber, thereby preventing him from being upgrade into a Transmetal by the quantum surge. Once Rhinox was fully repaired, he initiated a dangerous plan to bring the recently-deceased Optimus Primal back to life by using the hole in space-time caused by the destruction of the Planet Buster to astrally project his spark into the Matrix, where he followed the transion left by Primal's spark and led it back to the land of the living, where it was reborn as Transmetal Optimus Primal.
When Blackarachnia's attempts to become a Transmetal caused her shell program to deteriorate, threatening to erase her core consciousness, Rhinox carried out a very delicate procedure to surgically remove the shell program directly. Unfortunately, certain failsafes installed by Tarantulas, combined with a Predacon attack, caused the operation to fail. Fortunately, Blackarachnia was mysteriously resurrected anyway by the Transmetal driver.
After Megatron raised the Nemesis, Rhinox was ordered by Optimus Primal to execute Operation: Eternity, which apparently only Primal and he knew about. The purpose of the operation was to "move the Ark" by activating its engines and taking off; little is know beyond that, because the Maximals failed when the Ark's engines proved beyond repair. However, Dinobot II downloaded emergency data to the Ark about an Autobot shuttle hidden within the Ark. Rhinox piloted the shuttle and flew it directly into the bridge of the Nemesis, taking down Megatron and causing the warship to spiral out of control and crash somewhere beyond the horizon. Thus, the Beast Wars were won. Rhinox and the other Maximals left prehistoric Earth aboard the aforementioned Autobot shuttle and began the voyage home to Cybertron.
Critical Mass
IDW Beast Wars: The Gathering comics
Rhinox stood outside the Ark as Razorbeast's chronally dispaced Maximals passed by. Although Optimus Primal could vaguely sense their presence, Rhinox theorised that the sensation was just a side-effect of Primal's recent upgrades.
Beast Machines
Voice actor: Richard Newman (English), ? (Japanese)
Unfortunately for the maximals, as they attempted to return home to Cybertron Megatron broke free from their shuttle and fell out of transwarp space, thus they arrived home to hostile fire from an already conquered planet. Upon landing, Rhinox and the others fled an army of tank drones, only to be felled by canisters of megatron's virus weapon. Those maximals that had Transmetal or Transmetal 2 forms were reverted to the first beast-mode in their datatrax but managed to escape. Rhinox and Silverbolt, who had no other forms to revert to, appear to have simply frozen up like the rest of Cybertron's population and been captured. Rhinox's spark was forcibly removed and stored in a canister in Megatron's citadel.
When Megatron found that he needed underlings to properly control his Vehicon armies in battle, he used Rhinox's spark to power his tank general Tankor. Figuring that if the Maximal's discovered their new enemy had once been their close friend it would make them less willing to fight him. Rhinox's spark/consciousness remained conscious inside Tankor but could not act.
True to Megatron's expectations, the Maximal's did attempt to reach Tankor's spark and discovering Rhinox there, they endevored to wake his spark. They succeeded, but the Rhinox they got was not the Rhinox they expected. Tainted and embittered by his time inside Tankor, Rhinox rejected the Maximals and embraced Megatron's plan for a peaceful (because everyone else was dead) technologically pure Cybertron, only with himself at its head instead of Megatron.
(This new Tankor-Rhinox acts much like the temporary Predacon-ized version of Rhinox seen in Beast Wars. It has thus been speculated that it may be similarly the result of awakening Rhinox's spark without shutting down the Tankor shell program. This is supported "in-show" by the imagery of Rhinox and Tankor fused at the waist into one spark, apparently struggling and in pain. The BM story editors however opined that they believed Rhinox was totally free when he chose this path, though that seems less in character.)
Tankor-Rhinox immediately began plotting against both Megatron and the Maximals. He caught and reprogrammed Megatron's Diagnostic Drone, forcing it to work for him. He found the Oracle and, using the Diagnostic Drone, retrieved the Key to Vector Sigma from within. He then faked his own death and attempted to manipulate Megatron into firing the key on a planetary scale which would have killed all the organics, the Maximals and Megatron, leaving Rhinox to rule a pure mechanical world. Tankor's manipulations failed when he tried to attack Megatron, and a provision against doing so, hard-wired into his programming, shut him down. Due to Tankor's manipulations however, Primal opened the Plasma Energy Chamber and Megatron fired the Key and in the ensuing clash of energies Tankor-Rhinox's body was destroyed and his spark joined the Matrix.
Primal meets Rhinox's spark one last time within the Matrix, where Rhinox seems to express regret over his recent actions.
Universe
When Primus gives Optimus Primal the ability to choose any Transformer, living or dead, from the Allspark to assist him in the war against Unicron, Primal chooses Depthcharge and Rhinox. Depthcharge is bitter about being brought back from the dead, but Rhinox is thankful for the chance to atone for his actions as Tankor.
Fan Club Cybertron comic
As Optimus Prime recalls the end of the Universe conflict, Rhinox is seen defeating the alternate Tankor and escaping with Primal back to Cybertron as Unicron crumbles.
Beast Wars (PSX & PC)
- Voice Actor: ??? (English), ??? (Japanese)
In an alternate timeline, Rhinox joins his fellow Maximals in battling not only an entrenched Predacon threat, but the interdimensional monsters known as the Skriix.
Rhinox built a massive fortified base (described as an "urban zone") away from the downed Axalon. He eventually expanded it to within reach of Tarantulas' lair.
(Note: The exact situations within the game changed depending on what side you played as. In the Predacon path, Rhinox's base was judged a threat by the Predacons, who attempted to neutralize it. In the Maximal path, Tarantulas overtook the base and reprogrammed its defenses, prompting the Maximals to retake it.)
Beast Wars: Transmetals (PSX)
- Voice Actor: Alec Willows (English), ??? (Japanese)
In another alternate timeline, Transmetal Rhinox stayed behind at the Axalon as his fellow Maximals went to battle the Predacons.
Transformers Legends anthology
Toys
Beast Wars
- Rhinox
- Japanese ID number: C-7
- Rhinox (Rally's/Checkers)
- Rhinox (Transmetal)
- Japanese ID number: C-44
- Rhinox (Fox Kids)
- Rhinox (Fox Kids Transmetal)
- Rhinox (Tenth Anniversary)
Beast Machines
- Tankor
Tankor's tech-spec bio describes the Tankor-Rhinox fusion and not the pre-awakening Vehicon general. (The toy's function is also erroneously given as "Predacon General").
Timelines
- Rhinox
- A redeco of Cybertron Landmine, Rhinox is one of five toys in BotCon 2006's Dawn of Future's Past box set.
