Written by Jonathan Wojcik with the aid of With the Will, Digimon Wiki and Wikimon
TOBUCATMON
We may be done with X-antibody forms, but several more digimon are X-antibody "carriers," including this oddball Adult stage that combines an anime can with an airplane. It's considered a "puppet" type digimon, and we don't know much about it except that its green right claws apparently flash before it turns right and its red left claws flash before it turns left, which its enemies are said to take advantage of. That's such a weird, funny detail that feels completely out of nowhere; do airplanes ever have "blinkers" like that? I don't even know.
What really sticks out about Tobucatmon is that it overall feels almost nothing like most other digimon but very, very much like the kind of fan-concept a teenager or pre-teen would have come up with right around the time this thing debuted in 2003. If you don't know what I mean then there's probably no way to explain it that you'll understand, but if you do know what I mean, then this airplane cat with spiky hair and anime eyes is probably already giving you flashbacks to Deviantart galleries and Angelfire homepages.
It is downright uncanny how strongly this critter reads as something an anime-loving furry kid would have designed back in the day...and that isn't a criticism. It feels likely to me that this WAS a fan-submission of some sort, even if I can't find any confirmation that it was, and it feels so unique to the sensibilities of young internet fandoms that it ends up one of the most "meta" digimon designs in the series; a creature born of the internet both in and out of its internal canon. You can argue that a LOT of digimon must have been born from the aesthetics of furry fan-art and otaku culture, but none of them have the authenticity of Tobucatmon.RATING:
What really sticks out about Tobucatmon is that it overall feels almost nothing like most other digimon but very, very much like the kind of fan-concept a teenager or pre-teen would have come up with right around the time this thing debuted in 2003. If you don't know what I mean then there's probably no way to explain it that you'll understand, but if you do know what I mean, then this airplane cat with spiky hair and anime eyes is probably already giving you flashbacks to Deviantart galleries and Angelfire homepages.
It is downright uncanny how strongly this critter reads as something an anime-loving furry kid would have designed back in the day...and that isn't a criticism. It feels likely to me that this WAS a fan-submission of some sort, even if I can't find any confirmation that it was, and it feels so unique to the sensibilities of young internet fandoms that it ends up one of the most "meta" digimon designs in the series; a creature born of the internet both in and out of its internal canon. You can argue that a LOT of digimon must have been born from the aesthetics of furry fan-art and otaku culture, but none of them have the authenticity of Tobucatmon.
