No newsagents or comic stores around your area?

Anyway, even with supporting canon the toys were still pretty lame. It's interesting to see how writers tried to deal with such an odd concept. While in Japanese (Masterforce) continuity the Pretenders could mass-shift themselves inside their shells and switch between human/TF scale, in Anglophone continuity the Pretenders just happened to be gigantic humans and monsters! For the Decepticons this worked pretty well, but for the Autobots it was just... odd. It was awkwardly handled when they debuted... the Autobots guarding Ethan Zachary's lab compound and when the Decepticons attacked they saw "puny" humans guarding and one of them remarked that they looked too big to be humans and Scorponok replied that it simply meant that their cowardice is greater!! (What the Fakkadi?! ). The Autobot Pretenders' shells only worked as disguises when they were taken off Earth to places where giant humans existed (e.g. Grand Central Space Station, Femax, Pequod, Cheyne, Pz-Zazz, VsQs etc.)

By time they got around to the Pretender Beasts I think writers just gave up on trying to make them robots-in-disguise (not that any of the animal-moded G1 TFs have ever been robots in disguise anyway )