OH MY ZOG!

L-R: Beaver Cleaver in drag, Bea Arthur, Dildo Smurf, Ted Danson, God cosplaying as Orko, Cucumber Satan

As if in answer to my prayers for pictures of the unproduced Zoggies, a French blogger has put up scans of the Wheeled Warriors portion of the 1986 Mattel Catalog. This contains pictures of what would have been the second year of Wheeled Warriors had it not been canceled. There's some great unreleased stuff like the Thunderstruction Environment and Vehicle sets, Motorvators and Monstervators snap on motorized vehicle chassis, new Monster Minds like Bru-Toss and the Grim Creeper, prototypes of the Fling Shot and Spray Gunner and of course the figures of Jayce and the gang (plus Zoggies!) and last but not least-Saw Boss the figure!

Unfortunately the blog triggers my Norton Anti-Virus because of a trojan in one of the .gifs related to the bloghost. The Norton report is here. If you're protected against Bloodhound.Exploit.281 then go ahead and check it out:

http://nhtpirate.over-blog.com/article-jayce-et-les-conquerants-de-la-lumiere-catalogue-mattel-us-1986-43701598.html

SEEING RED: My intergalactic pride in being a citizen of Earth and also my Netflix queue are derived from the movie sections of 30 year old newspapers

I was thinking the other day about how television signals propagate through space for all eternity and somewhere there are aliens two billion light years away just now tuning in to the first few episodes of Challenge of the GoBots. But with the recent changeover to digital broadcasting those aliens only have about 20 good years of over-the-airwaves TV left before they'll have to get cable. Boy are they going to be pissed when they can't watch Big Bang Theory anymore or get the last season of LOST. And when the angry alien ABC fans invade the earth looking for digital signal converters that they won't be able to buy because their digital converter box waiver coupons expired two billion years earlier it will be a scene not unlike this movie poster I found from December of 1980 for a movie called INFRA-MAN. I'd never heard of it before but holy hell does it not sound like the greatest movie ever. It's a Chinese sci-fi superhero action flick and I thought its Wikipedia article was vandalized because it seemed so outrageous. As it turns out everything you will ever read on the internet about INFRA-MAN is true. So when reviewers tell you the main bad guy in this movie is named Princess Dragon Mom and she's got an army of terrorist Godzillas trying to take over Hong Kong in a plot that's essentially Ultraman meets Super Mario Brothers, just believe it without question. Believe all of it, for it is true.

WE DO NOT NEED UFOS WE HAVE NETFLIX

I thought about how in a way I am like those space aliens from two billion light years away, learning about bygone earth culture from my viewings of 30 year old microfilm reels. Even with all the cultural connectivity that is the internet I still hadn't heard of INRA-MAN until I saw its poster on the microfilm machine. I wonder if I'm the first case of someone finding out about a movie from a 30 year old newspaper ad. It must really suck to be an alien turned on to a movie from the trailers airing on over the air Earth television only to realize you'll never be able to see it unless one of the Earth networks showed it years later. Even then it would be edited for content to fit in the time allotted and formatted to fit their alien screens. Maybe UFOs are just martians coming down here hoping to catch INFRA-MAN at the drive in theater. Fortunately for me I need not build faster than light spaceships to travel great distances so I can go see INFRA-MAN. This is why Netflix is superior to even UFO alien technology. Netflix is why being an Earthling rules!

THE CUCUMBERS WILL NEVER FORGIVE US

I was riding my bike and as I passed this really long row of perfectly square shrubs I thought to myself how much I am really grateful plants are a) immobile and therefore unable to seek revenge and b) not in charge. Because if they could fight back I'd probably be living in a world where plants would ride their bikes beside long rows of perfectly squared off human torsos. It got me thinking about the one cartoon where plants actually got their shot at creating human topiary-Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors. Thanks to a recent post Shawn did at Branded in the 80s about a website with old cartoons I watched some Wheeled Warriors episodes. It got me all fired up then one thing led to another and the next thing I knew I had updated and reformatted the Wheeled Warriors section of the Vintage Space Toaster Palace!

AM I GLAD TO SAW YOU!

Albertsons 11/07/85

Wheeled Warriors came out in '85 so that would make this year the 25th anniversary of the line. I felt like I was throwing my own Wheeled Warriors celebration as I spent the whole weekend immersed in it, doing internet research for the VSTP and watching the cartoons and working on the ads. It brought back a lot of memories. Back in '85 I was in 5th grade and our class got to go on a tour of the local UHF station. It was the channel that carried Wheeled Warriors and during some point of the tour a small group of us had to wait in the lobby. Wheeled Warriors came on and I will always remember being awestruck by Saw Boss's transformation in the opening sequence. Not because it was particularly dynamic or exciting, but because at home my dad didn't have a UHF antenna hooked up to the TV so our reception was always crappy. The signal was fantastic at the Channel 14 studios and I never realized UHF could look that great. This was the first time I ever saw the show all nice and clear and it really made an impression on me. Wheeled Warriors was one of those shows that you really needed a good signal to appreciate. I was happy to find the episodes really held up after all these years after watching some of them this weekend. I guess it figures I'd love it because it turns out the show was produced by J. Michael Straczynski with Larry DiTillio among the writers and Haim Saban wrote the theme song. Take those ingredients and add in some pissed off vegetable people that turn into armored Mad Max trucks and I'm sold.

Thrifty 11/14/85


YOU CAN'T GO WRONG WHEN YOUR BAD GUYS ARE THE VEGETABLE EQUIVALENT OF FURRIES

Wheeled Warriors does get compared a lot to Star Wars to the point of being called a rip off, but as a kid in 1985 I really wanted to see something Star Warsy in the post-original trilogy era when all we had on the air was Droids and Ewoks. Boy did Straczynski really deliver because Wheeled Warriors is essentially Star Wars where Darth Vader turns into a cucumber tank. Yet Star Wars wasn't the only parallel that could be made. I noticed Wheeled Warriors also had some of the technological sorcery society setting of He-Man plus many alien character designs reminiscent of Looney Tunes plus the transformation element of Turbo Teen. Also eggplants. Plus since the bad guys were motivated by their lust for the "magic root" (which was the most brazen marijuana metaphor in children's television ever) it also takes on a sort of intergalactic Miami Vice feel. It is essentially the further adventures of Luke and Han Solo as they travel the galaxy teaming up with furries from other planets to fight evil pimped out low riders with giant Venus flytraps on their hoods that want to steal Luke's stash of weed. It is no wonder the Star Wars prequels bombed! Straczynski raised the bar too high! Wheeled Warriors didn't rip off Star Wars, it destroyed it with stoned cucumbers.

ALL I KNOW IS THEY MAKE ME WANT TO PUT TOAST IN THEM

TG&Y 12/08/85

Unfortunately the toyline did not capitalize on the cartoon gold that was the Wheeled Warriors show. There were no figures of the cartoon characters and instead the drivers of the vehicles were necktie wearing dudes. (This would have been remedied in 1986 I think. I swear I saw pages online of unproduced prototype figures based on the show characters that would have been packed in with rereleased vehicles for the second year. They even meant to make the Zoggies.) Since the text in the newspaper ads was from Mattel promotional material not based on the cartoon it looks like the original story worked up for the toys was that the necktie dudes were fighting the evil plant tanks in a battle on Earth. That too sounds interesting but for some reason none of this really clicked with me enough as a kid to actually go out and get any of them. The ads tell the story of the line's release in 1985 and rapid demise until they were all being clearanced out by holiday season 1986. I can't say I found the vehicle designs all that interesting. They were kind of small and I couldn't figure out if the good guys were coming or going half the time (I am the same way with Volkswagens). Sometimes even the retailers selling the toys couldn't figure out which side of the good guy cars was the front as evidenced by this TG&Y ad from December of '85. I guess the front was whichever way the big drill or arm or gun was pointing. Actually the idea of space cars with laser beams AND giant melee weapons is pretty dumb if you think about it. But Wheeled Warriors was all about making dumb ideas look great by putting big chromed rims on them.

SOMEBODY'S SMOKIN' THE MAGIC ROOT

Man, being so drenched in the Wheeled WarryWorld as I've been over the last few days sure makes me sad the line died before I could get a figure of Jayce or Oon or Not Han Solo. Knowing those didn't get made eases the pain of not being able to afford the Wheeled Warriors I do see on ebay nowadays. It's kind of ridiculous but eBay sellers expect hundreds of dollars for these toys that were being clearanced at two bucks a pop in 1987. What would be really great is if Mattel would come out with a 25th anniversary Wheeled Warriors line with transforming Monster Minds. I'd love a cucumber tank that turned into a robot with a giant rubber brain. Considering some of the crazy crap Hasbro's been putting out lately Mattel needs to hurry up before they get beaten to it.

BEYOND THUNDER TOM: I should have known that robot wasn't a Japanese rock star by his lack of Heavy Metal

Sometimes I'll run across an ad for an old toy robot that looks awesome but whose origins and authenticity are questionable. To better illustrate this dilemma one must first imagine the most incredible awesome great guy in the universe. For the purposes of this demonstration we will use Bruce Dickinson. Now imagine if Bruce Dickinson was Japanese and you'd never heard of him before but one day you're at the store and there on the shelves is a toy robot of Bruce Dickinson. Would you buy it? Now imagine if in our scenario where Bruce Dickinson was Japanese you came across the robot of a Japanese Bruce Dickinson impersonator. It would be equally as awesome but would you know? Would you care? Now imagine in our scenario of Japanese toy robot Bruce Dickinson impersonators that there was a real Japanese band named Mosquito Butthole and they made robots of the lead singer and you saw those one day at the store but you never heard of Mosquito Butthole before. Would you still appreciate its awesomeness? These imaginary situations best illustrate two main points-a) that in the world of old toy robots ads, being fake and recognized is better than being original but obscure and b) that I am terrible at writing metaphors.

"OBSCURE" IS JUST ANOTHER WAY OF SAYING NOBODY'S WRITTEN A WIKIPEDIA ENTRY FOR IT YET

FAO Schwartz 11/13/77

Just because I don't recognize a robot doesn't mean it's crap, but that doesn't mean crap isn't cool. This first guy up is a good illustration of what I'm talking about. "Construction Super Robot" is from an ad I found in an FAO Scwartz circular from November of 1977. Here's the text which appeared separately from the picture:

"NEW! CONSTRUCTION SUPER ROBOT Tremendous power. Walks & runs on wheels. Construct him in various positions! Length 14" Batteries included. Ages 4 up. 391-30-0 $14.95"

When I first saw this I immediately recognized it had a lousy name but also that it had the innards of a familiar set of robots-the Japanese mecharobos that went on to become the Shogun Warrior Zargon. This toy shares the same style of reconfigurable limbs and accessories attached to a motorized body that Zargon had. I have no idea if Construction Super Robot is some kind of Zargon knockoff or if it's a legit licensed toy based on another less familiar robot in the mecharobo line because my knowledge of the Japanese origins of many toy robots is woefully inadequate. I'm sure there's someone out there banging their head on the keyboard yelling, "Hey! That's the comic relief character from the classic anime Super Milfy Robot Fighter Zargbotendizer-5 you idiot!" To which I respond, Well, maybe if Super Milfy Robot Fighter Zargbotendizer-5 wasn't such a piece of crap he would be more famous and I would know that.

GAIKING SOUNDS SO...GAI

Zayre 11/12/78	Goldblatt's 11/23/78

Eagle 12/14/78

I occasionally come across ads for very obvious bootlegs but there is a special kind of subtle robot ripoff that blurs the line between the traditional direct knockoff of a specific line and toys that are what I call "synchronistically marketed" to capitalize on a general trend. Such was the case with Sonic Sam and Thunder Tom here in these ads from teh Christmas season of 1978. At first glance they looked to me like a couple of Shogun Warrior knockoffs, given that they were unusually tall for action figures and were described as not needing batteries plus being able to fire various projectiles, which were two hallmarks of Shogun Warrior ads. Upon closer inspection the bodies didn't match any existing Shogun Warrior but thanks to a recent eBay auction for Sonic Sam and an old message board post about Thunder Tom I was able to figure out that these guys were indeed bootlegs, just not of the Shogun Warrior variety. Actually they're Taiwanese knockoffs of another Japanese giant robot line based on a cartoon called Blocker Gundan 4 Machine Blaster. The Peace Phantom packaging tried to emulate Shogun Warriors by incorporating Shogun-ish graphics and paralleling the Shoguns' "Invincible Guardians of World Freedom" tagline with gibberish text that read "Peace Phantom of World Freedom". These two robots' names may sound kind of silly but I think Mattel could have learned a thing or two from Peace Phantoms, specifically about westernizing their robots' names. I've always felt the Mattel should have come up with names more relatable to kids who had no idea what a Mazinga or a Raydeen was. All I know is if I was in a fight I'd want a guy named "Thunder Tom" on my side. Coincidentally, official licensed versions of the robots the Peace Phantoms were based on were marketed by Mattel in Italy as a line called Astro Robot. I've seen Italian Astro Robots toys pull hundreds of dollars even in crappy shape on ebay so I'm kind of interested in seeing how well Sonic Sam will do when his auction ends in a couple days, even though he is a knockoff.

NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH 5-IN-1 CAMARO-ER

GeeBees 12/15/85	I stole this from eBay

This next guy I kind of recognized because I'd seen this robot knocked off before. It's a combiner made up of five motorcycles originally from a cartoon called Galactic Gale Baxinger. The GeeBees ad above left from December 15, 1985 shows one of Baxinger's most common bootlegs, the 5-in-1 Mustanger. (There was also another bootleg of Baxinger sold in the Transistor Robots line where it was called "Cy-Robots".) Since Baxinger didn't make it over to the US officially this is a scenario akin to discovering the lead singer of Mosquito Butthole bootlegged as a five motorcycle robot team. Who cares what it's called, if I had these bikes they would immediately become the vehicles for SCHIZOPHRENIC ROBONINJA COMMANDO DEATHFORCE, my super sentai team made of 3 3/4 inch Snake Eyes, Zartan, Spider-Man, Darth Vader and Ben Kenobi.

ONCE YOU GOVARIAN YOU DON'T GO NOT VARIAN

Toys & Gifts Outlet 12/15/85

We wrap things up with the case of the Japanese Bruce Dickinson impersonator coming over and saying, Hey I am Japanese Bruce Dickinson! This Toys & Gifts Outlet ad from December 15, 1985 is very awesome because the bootleggers didn't bother coming up with a fake name like Sonic Sam or Mustanger, they just went with what the robot was called originally. "Govarian Robot" is from an old cartoon with the great name Psycho Armor Govarian. While I can't be 100% sure the robot in this ad is a bootleg, it probably is. The original toy was of course Japanese so that toy's box would be in Japanese. Unless Toys & Gifts Outlet had a bilingual ad writer they wouldn't be able to come up with much of a description if they were selling the real deal. However there was a Taiwanese bootleg of Govarian that had a box printed in English so I'm thinking that's the toy this ad is for. One thing bugs me a little and that's how the Taiwanese bootleg had metal feet and legs but no metal anywhere else yet this ad claims this toy has a metal center. Then again this ad claims a lot of things. Govarian is a transforming robot, but only if you consider laying down and pointing its toes a transformation. I give the ad writer lots of credit for coming up with that "transforms from fierce robot warrior to mighty intergalactic battle vehicle" line because it sounds great when in truth Govarian had a transform worse than the GoBot Tank. Who cares if the toy sucks when the line art looks that good, though. So the question here is, if you paid nine bucks to see Japanese Bruce Dickinson and felt ripped off, would you be more or less pissed off if you had the real thing? Well the answer is that here in the real world, Govarian was never really all that famous anyway and the real Bruce Dickinson doesn't transform from fierce robot warrior to mighty intergalactic battle vehicle. Not because he can't, but because you'll never get him to for 9 bucks.

WHAT THIS BLOG NEEDS IS NO FRIENDS AND EVEN LESS FOR ENEMIES

Slag is center stage representin' the Dino-bizzots in this Sears ad from October 6, 1985.

Roll out! (and in again and out again and in again etc, etc.)

So I'm at the library doing the microfilm thing when this late teens/early twenties girl taps me on the shoulder and asks if I could help her out with a problem she's having on her microfilm machine. And she's alright if you're into nerdy chicks. She said her roll was stuck somehow and I thought she should probably be asking the library people about this because whenever I try fixing a microfilm machine it always ends with blood. Well we get to her machine and what she's done to her roll is truly inhumane and unholy. There was bent, folded, spindled and mutilated microfilm shoved in and sticking out of places on that machine where microfilm was not meant to be. Then something became clear to me-not how she did it because my rudimentary grasp of physics cannot explain how this girl warped the very fabric of reality to do whatever she did to that poor roll of microfilm-but that she did it on purpose! She actively sabotaged her machine to be all talking to me. And I said, "Look, I know this is your way of flirting but after what you did to that microfilm there's no way I'm letting you anywhere near my wiener!"

The Zoids are back in Town! OR: Different Strux for different Folx

I started getting some hits from a Phillipines based Zoids site back in late 2008 when the Zoids section of the Vintage Space Toaster Palace was nothing more than a handful of blurry, grainy Zoids ads dumped together with no real organization. It was really embarrassing that I hadn't gotten my act together and formatted that page into something useful before people knew about it, but to my surprise those dudes still liked what was there. Well it only took a little over a year but this week I did get around to reformatting the NEW Zoids section of the Vintage Space Toaster Palace so that the information is more understandable plus I got all my Zoids ad backlog worked out. I'm really happy about getting it done, in fact you could say I'm overzoyed.

ZOIDS WILL BE ZOIDS (EVEN THE ONES THAT AREN'T)

Walgreens 12/09/84

I was a little worried that my decision to lump ads for both Zoids and Robo Strux together would cause a roboplastic apocalypse because technically they're two different lines separated by a couple of years. Aside from being motorized prehistoric model kits by Tomy, Zoids and Robo Strux share little else in common design-wise. As I was doing my research into whether or not it was kosher to combine them I realized that even Tomy's been a little confused as to what to call these things, initially releasing them as Mechabonica in Japan, then Zoids in the US before the name change to Robo Strux in 1985, which never happened in Europe and Japan where they just kept calling these things Zoids. I'm still a little unsure after reading the Zoids wiki and other Zoids websites how the line unfolded over time, specifically how long the original American release stayed on the shelves and whether or not it stayed in production through 1984 during the time of Tomy's other motorized figure line Starriors. The only Zoids ad I've ever found in 1984 is actually a mistake where Walgreens used Zoid line art in an ad that was really meant to be for transforming cars from the Convertors line. If I were to come up with a chronology of U.S. Zoid releases based on the line's frequency of appearance in newspaper ads I'd say the originals came out in '83, went on hiatus in '84 and came back as Robo Strux in '85. There is one exception in the Mammoth, a Radio Shack exclusive Zoid that I've so far only found one ad for from 1985. Some Zoid fans say they got their Mammoth in 1984 so either I've missed seeing that one or Radio Shack may not have advertised it back then. It bugs me because they only pushed their other famous exclusive robot, Galactic Man, for one year (coincidentally also 1985). For me to miss an earlier Mammoth ad means either it doesn't exist or I'm shacking off.

BAD ZOIDS RUNNING WILD

One notable ad on the Robo Strux side of things has especially crappy line art from a store called Zody's. It is intriguing to me since I know official line art existed for Robo Strux because I've seen it used in ads from Playworld and other places. The Zody's ad is so awful I'll bet it was made internally by the Zody's advertising people because I cannot imagine Tomy would officially approve this monstrosity. Terox looks like a poorly drawn Grimlock with toilet paper rolls stuck to the side of his neck. I'll bet whoever drew it discovered the only thing harder than putting Zoids together is drawing them. It reminded me of another example of strange and awful line art that appeared in an ad for Ninja action figures from Longs Drug. That one too looked little better than what a 10 year old could come up with. I don't know why stores would occasionally run bad line art like this but it is fun to see. Thankfully the rest of the couple dozen new* ads in the updated VSTP Zoids section are nowhere near as crappy. Though they're still kind of blurry and grainy the big improvement now is that there's lots more of them and they're organized so you can more easily find that crappy, blurry, grainy drawing of Terox you've always wanted to see. Go tell all your Filipino Zoids friends!

Zodys 12/20/85	Longs Drug 11/16/86

*25 years old

THE THURTEENTH DAY OF GOBOTS!

This is it! The big finish to my "Twelve Days of GoBots", the most wonderfully GoBotty, blasphemous, longest series of phone-it-in filler material I've ever attempted. To finish with a big gay bang of GoBotronical amazement more exciting and fist-pumpingly inspirational than the grand finale of a fireworks show or a UFO crashing into Wrestlemania, I present to you now a really great Sears GoBots ad that I've only ever seen in Denver, Colorado.

Sears 12/22/85


I don't know why but occasionally in my travels I will find ads by major retail chains that are exclusive to one city or region. The most common occurrence of this type is when retailers substitute a page or portion of their weekly circular in one city with a different page when it runs in a different city. For example there was one week in 1984 when Zayre ran a full page Transformer ad in Pittsburgh and in Florida that page was turned into Care Bears. Now this Sears ad is super rare because I've never seen it in any city outside of Denver. It's a pretty cool amalgamation of all sorts of GoBots line arts. Few retailers have ever assembled so much GoBo-tacity in one place and lived to tell the tale. They said it couldn't be done! They said it was too dangerous! THEY SAID THE SAME THING ABOUT WRITING TWELVE POSTS OF GOBOTS NEWSPAPER ADS!

On the twelfth day of GoBots, Yellow Front gave to me...a reason to do thirteen days of GoBots

I've never understood why toy manufacturers think kids will dress up like toys on any other day besides Halloween. You see adults doing it all the time if there's an anime convention or a chicken restaurant opening, but when I was little I don't think I ever knew any kid who had one of those dress up sets of He-Man or Transformers or Voltron. Those looked like they might have been fun because they somewhat resembled characters from their respective shows but this GoBot dress up set makes you look not like a cartoon character but the the entire GoBots merchandise aisle at Playworld:

Yellow Front 30 November 1984


When my son was a baby we always wanted to get him a good Halloween costume but my wife made it clear that we would not be getting him one of those "Elmo is eating my kid" jobs. There's a lot of costumes out there where it looks like some cartoon character is devouring somebody but this GoBots set makes it look like the kid is being abducted by a GoBot vagina.

TRANSIST AND SURVIVE! TRANSIST AND SURVIVE!

I'm doing my updates to the Vintage Space Toaster Palace where I put up a bunch of new* ads at the rate of one toyline a week. The year started off with Micronauts and last week I did GoDaiKin and this week was supposed to be Zoids. But then I started noticing some hits to the blog coming from a post Th0r4z1n3 did about the Four Star Phantom jets, which are some of the most infamous knockoffs of Starscream ever made. That got me thinking a little about my Four Star section at the VSTP and how it was in need of some big time updating. Then I got a shoutout on the latest episode of the Radio Free Cybertron podcast where the guys asked me about that time Hasbro pursued legal action against K-Mart for selling the Four Star Transistor Robots line. It always trips me out when podcasters mention me. I was listening to that show when I was at Wal-Mart opening the refrigerated door where they keep the milk and then BAM! I got mentioned, and not just mentioned but Rob the co-host was breaking the fourth wall and talking directly to me like Raphael from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Suddenly I felt as if Jesus was tapping me on the shoulder and whispering in my ear, "Hey dumbass, people really are reading your blog!" Or maybe it wasn't Jesus but just the guy stocking the milk on the other side of the shelf inside the refrigerator.

TRI-SPY WITH MY LITTLE EYE

TG&Y 11/10/85

Even more mysterious to me than secret whisperings from the milk man is how Four Star's Transistor Robots line continues to fascinate and terrify people all these years later. I was so inspired by the recent interest shown by the various bloggers and podcasters that I updated the Four Star Transistor Robots section of the Vintage Space Toaster Palace. Instead of just replacing some grainy ads and throwing up some new* ones I reformatted the whole page to make the information more understandable and useful. As it happens I got really immersed in the Transistor Robots universe and came away with a little bit of an understanding of the makeup of the line. Before this I was only vaguely aware of the more infamous figures like the knockoff Devastator, the jets and the Dinobots. Then after reorganizing my Transistor Robots page into the various sizes and prices I got an appreciation for the other figures in the line like the Jumpstarter knockoffs they named "Flip-Flops" and the weird one off robots I'd never seen before that had no recognizable parallels, like the remote controlled "Mastermind". So I've done my part to demystify the legend of the Transistor Robots a bit but there's still much unknown about this line. It's a freaky and crazy and wonderful selection of toy robots and it's no wonder that although it died off 25 years ago we're still talking about it today. If you want to marvel at some of the weirdest interpretations/improvements/molestations ever done to Transformers I'd also suggest Super Toy Archive's Four Star Transistor Robots page. They turned Kickback into a praying mantis! Holy crap what more could you ask for.

*25 years old

WHAT THIS BLOG NEEDS is a beer bellied robot Brontosaurus

My philosophy is that no toy robots ad is completely worthless but boy does this one come close. If it didn't feature great line art of one of the most ridiculous toys in roboplastic history I wouldn't have kept it because the price doesn't show up for some reason. Still it's pretty great because it's for the tremendously crappy "Beer Bellied Sludge" knockoff Dinobot:

Toys & Gifts Outlet 10/23/85


THIS IS WHAT SLUDGE WOULD LOOK LIKE IF DINOBOTS WORKED AT HOT TOPIC

Alex at the Super Toy Archive calls this Sludge the cheapest of all Dinobot knockoffs yet. It has plastic issues and a bad design that keep the dinosaur's back halves from separating, resulting in a robot with an enormous gut. But you gotta love the six legs, frill on the back and horns on its head that make it look like some sort of mutant juggalo Brontosaurus. I never expected to come across an ad for such an obscure and sucky toy but that's how Toys & Gifts Outlet rolled in 1985 and I'm grateful.

GOODBYE PS3 Strikes Back!

Just when I thought all of my Playstation problems were behind me a new chapter opened in the epic saga of man vs. technology (or at least me vs. Playstation Store). Old timey readers will remember how back in October my 60gb launch Playstation suffered the dancing yellow light of death which bricked it. Some people believe this is symptomatic of a hardware failure involving the melting of solder used to attach certain chips to a circuit board but whatever it was the end result was like someone just ran KILLALLNERDS.EXE on my PS3. So after a considerably long mourning period for all the lost episodes of Shin Mazinger Z and other animes on my hard drive, I sent my system in to get repaired then they sent me a new refurbished one. And we all lived happily ever after doing what the PS3 was made for-watching torrented animes, surfing BigBooty.com, downloading podcasts and occasionally playing a videogame, right?

Of course not.



I WISH THEY HADN'T CHANGED THE STATION

The other night I went to download a movie trailer and I got a weird message on the screen-"This PS3 system cannot be activated...you must deactivate another system." And I'm just stunned looking there trying to figure out what it meant. Did I miss something when I was doing the system setup on this new machine? Is my old system still alive somewhere and now I have to worry about my credit card info getting stolen? OMG DO I STILL HAVE KILLALLNERDS.EXE? Well thanks to people who have been through this before, I figured out what happened essentially was that Sony uses a form of DRM that forever associates my PSN ID with the first PS3 I used it on. This first system then becomes the only one on which I can watch videos I download from their Playstation Store. To break the association I'd have to do what they call "deactivating" that first system and only after I do that can I log on to a new PS3 with my PSN ID and watch videos I've downloaded. But the problem is my old system bricked before I was able to do that. I can't watch any new movie content and I can't deactivate the old system because Sony has it, or it's been refurbished and some other guy now has it. Regardless, deactivation of my account is no longer possible on the old machine wherever it is.

SONY WARS EPISODE IV-A NEW HELP

But all is not lost. After reading a couple of other stories like this on message boards I've figured out that it is theoretically possible for Sony to deactivate my old console on their end. The trick is finding someone there who understands my problem and asking them to do it in a way that does not make me sound like an irate douchebag. Most irate douchebags call Sony up immediately once they find their phone number but I chose to play by the rules and I sent an email first explaining the situation and here's what I got back (more or less)-

"Hello,

Thank you for writing to us about deactivating your PlayStation®Network account.

We will submit the request for you to our PlayStation®Network Account Specialists. After the request has been submitted, it will be processed within 3-5 business days. If the PlayStation®Network Specialist decides to deactivate your account, then we will e-mail your information to the Sign-In ID (e-mail address) associated with the PlayStation®Network account.

You can check on the status of your deactivation under Case#BLAHBLAHBLAH..."

And that's where I am now. Hoping that some account specialist will have the common sense to do what should have been done once Sony decided to send me a new refurbed system. I understand that Sony uses system activation to keep people from logging on to multiple consoles and downloading the same movies on multiple machines but in the case of a system being sent in for repair or replacement, deactivation should be part of the procedure. I'm pretty sure they'll see I'm not a movie pirate and this'll all be figured out in a matter of days, but if they don't then I don't know where I'm going from here (aside from BigBooty.com.)

------------------------------------UPDATE----------------------------------------

I got an email the evening of the same day I posted this. In it I got the news:

"Dear KingMacrocranios,

You recently requested assistance with your PlayStation® Network account and the Video Download Service. Per your request, we have deactivated your original console from your account.

You can now activate your new console."

AND THEN VOOWAAA-LA!: (if I could put exclamation marks after pictures this would get one)



So it got taken care of and I did it all via email instead of over the phone. It may have taken a bit longer than calling Sony directly but I weighed how much my time was worth being on hold versus getting on with my life. It was a little over 48 hours from January 12th when I first emailed Sony to January 14th when I got the notice I was deactivated. And we all lived happily ever after doing what the PS3 was made for...I hope.

On the eleventh day of GoBots, Toy City gave to me...well, it's a Gong story

There exist limits to even my vast pool of roboplastic knowledge. For even though my pool is vast, nobody's changed the water in a while and it's not really one of those olympic sized kidney bean shaped pools but more like one of those plastic kiddie pools about four feet across and there's some old floaty toys partially deflated, yet still floating around in it. It is also rather shallow-everything I know about toy robots is pretty much what I learned from spending a tryptzillion hours at Super Toy Archive, plus the first page of results when I Google something, plus 25 year old K-Mart newspaper ads. So it is not surprising when I come across an old ad for GoBots that befuddles and amazes me.

Toy City 12/20/84

Case in point is this Toy City ad featuring at first what looks like a Kronoform robot watch or the many unlicensed knockoffs thereof, but what is labeled as a GoBots watch. At first I thought it was a mistake because I've seen and found ads for the more widely known GoBot watch named Tic Toc and that one looks nothing like this. But then it dawned on me that Tic Toc was only one half of the GoBot watch war-he had a Renegade counterpart named Gong. In all my travels I have never seen Gong before. I've never seen one at Botcon or any other robot swapmeet I've been to. I've never seen one on message boards or websites or even the first ten pages of Google image results when I type "Gobot watch Gong". And I know I've never seen one on BigBooty.com. It bothers me because Toy City usually knew what they were talking about. I look at this ad and I'm wondering if it could possibly be true that there was a GoBot that was in effect a knockoff of a Takara product or possibly licensed from them. So Gong exists somewhere beyond the reservoir from which my garden hose of GoBots information gets the water to fill my pool of toy robots knowledge. Which leaves me realizing the only thing more embarrassing than being a grown man wading around in one of those plastic kiddie pools is doing it without a lot of water.

UPDATE!: The mystery deepens! I think both this blue guy and this red guy at Super Toy Archive are Tic Toc while Gong really is a copy of the Takara robot watch. I later found an ad for both Gong and Tic Toc during Vintage Space Toast Tour Miami that shows a very blurry picture of both watches carded. What's crazy is that Gong does indeed look like a different toy than Tic Toc and not just a recolor. The picture is pretty rough but it's the best evidence I've come up with so far supporting this crazy notion that at some point both Takara's Kronoform and Impulse's GoBots watches used the same toy!

Monday Morning Mecha Pilot: The Godaikin, the badakin and the uglyaikin

One of the most important jobs of a toy robots archaeologist is doing what I call Monday morning mecha piloting. A Monday morning mecha pilot looks back with 25 years of hindsight and tries to analyze why a given line of toy robots died out before Michael Bay could make a movie of it. It's based on the assumption that all toy robots are so awesome that every 1980s toy robot franchise had the potential to last longer than they did or 500 years (whichever came first) even the robots that turned into ladybugs, slot machines and McDonald's Big Macs. While everyone else nowadays goes about their lives in a daze driving their Transformers edition 2010 Camaros and not questioning their homogenized Hasbro childhoods, the Monday morning mecha pilot is asking, hey, why aren't we riding Cy-Kill edition Harley Davidsons? Why were dorks my age dressing up like giant penises from Star Wars instead of Tranzor-Z for Halloween last year? When I'm driving my car why can't I ram it into the butt end of a dump truck and then we jump in the air, combine with a jet and make a giant robot? Why hasn't Ford (the car company, not the Han Solo) invented that yet? WHERE IS MY VOLTRON MOVIE? If there's one thing I've learned from spending hours at the library in front of microfilm machines looking for old toy robots newspaper ads it's that the non-passage of all of these events and technologies is a direct result of the degree of success Bandai had marketing their toy robots in the 1980s. Show me a man who doesn't know what a Daltanias is and I'll show you why Michael Bay has a career. Let's look at where mankind went so terribly wrong.

GO-DIED-IN TRANSLATION

Whistle Stop 05 Dec 1983

As I roam the country's libraries riding in the jaws of the time traveling Tyrannosauruses known as the Canon 300 series microfilm scanners looking for old toy robots newspaper ads, one line's ads remain extremely elusive. Of all the toy robots franchises from the late 70s/early 80s that lasted more than two years, it is the ads from GoDaiKin-Bandai's line of giant Japanese die cast robots-that are the rarest. Why was it that other lines from that era that Bandai made toys for like Shogun Warriors (in conjunction with Mattel) and GoBots (in conjunction with Tonka) were the ones that got lots of retailer support while GoDaiKin hardly ever showed up in newspapers? I think it was because GoDaiKin was the first line Bandai tried to distribute without the help of an American toy company acting as the marketing middleman, as was the case with those other lines. It was their inexperience with the way advertising worked in America that crippled GoDaiKin from the start. Bandai learned nothing from their previous joint venture with Mattel and in disregarding lessons that could be gleaned from the successes of Micronauts and Shogun Warriors, they set back toy robots marketing to the stone age.

RICH PEOPLE WILL BUY ANY TOY ROBOT AS LONG AS IT'S EXPENSIVE

Karls Toys&Hobbies 12/08/83

The vast majority of toy advertising done during the late seventies/early eighties in the US was by major retail chains like Zayre, Target and K-Mart and the big box toy supermarkets like Toys R Us, Lionel Playworld and Children's Palace. Yet these were not the places carrying and advertising GoDaiKin from the line's introduction. Early GoDaiKin ads came from mall department stores and independent Mom&Pop toy importers-places that didn't run weekly toy circulars in Sunday papers during the holiday season. I once spoke with the co-owner of one such independent toy store in Rapid City, South Dakota who told me they carried GoDaiKin because they wanted to carry high quality, larger ticket toys that were an alternative to what was being offered in the mainstream. They felt Bandai's robots were in the same class as toy train sets they imported from Europe and finely crafted wooden building blocks from Germany. It was these smaller stores and department store chains like Foley's and May Company who were willing to carry toys like GoDaiKins, which sold at price ranges higher than what major retail and toy supermarkets were comfortable with. My fellow Monday morning mecha pilots across the internet believe that the higher cost of GoDaiKin robots in relation to other toys of the day was one of the line's biggest faults. If the market was Joe average Toys R Us customer looking to save a few bucks then that'd be true, but the GoDaiKin target market was the more discerning upper middle class toy buyer who was more likely to shop at toy importers and department stores like Foley's or May Company than toy discount chains.

May Company 11/23/84


GOD, AI KIN'T REMEMBER THE NAME OF THIS ROBOT

Yet it's evident from the kind of ads I do find for GoDaiKins that Bandai was not supporting these stores with the kind of promotional materials they needed to advertise the line. Since the small Mom&Pop stores didn't run full color weekly circulars what they needed were simplified line art and bullet point style product descriptions for use in their newspaper toy ads, which were black and white copy that ran in the body of the newspaper.

Land of Oz 12/15/85

Bandai provided text descriptions that were overly wordy and they left the toy stores to come up with their own product art which oftentimes resulted in grainy black and white photos of one toy alongside generic descriptions of the whole line, if they even ran pictures of the robots at all. During the height of GoDaiKin advertising in 1984 it was most common to see them lumped in with robots from other competing toylines in one big generic robot sale. Getting lost in these smorgasbord robot buffet ads was somewhat appropriate since the GoDaiKin line itself was a hodgepodge of various robots from differing Japanese franchises with very little in common aesthetically to tie them together. They may have been superstar robots with TV shows in Japan at one point but with no strong marketing push to differentiate them from the crowd and absolutely no brand recognition in the US, the line was dying on the shelves in '85 at the height of the toy robots craze.

THE ONLY SACRIFICE A SUCCESSFUL TOY ROBOTS LINE REQUIRES IS THE IMAGINATIONS OF CHILDREN

Perhaps the biggest nail in the GoDaiKin coffin was the lack of media-tie ins for the line. Comics or television shows that raised awareness and promoted the toys were the most basic of ingredients for a successful toy line back then. This I feel is embarrassing because it raises the question was the problem GoDaiKin or was the problem us? These were some great toys. The failure of this line was more an indictment of our lack of imaginations as children. Were we just not able to appreciate robot lions that combined with space Winnebagos to make giant robots? One great example of the marketing opportunity being missed here (and how brain dead my generation of 10 year olds was) arose when Matchbox in 1985 licensed and rebranded the 1983 GoDaiKin GoLion as a toy tie-in with the enormously popular Voltron TV show.

Robinsons 11/30/84

If kids had to be shown Voltron so they'd get how GoLion was cool then maybe kids were stupid. Maybe consumer advocate groups who felt toy cartoons were the equivalent of mind control were overestimating the imaginative genius of kids. Maybe we needed our lame imaginations kick started and force fed a specific play pattern down all our throats. Maybe Jabba the Hutt costume is karmic restitution for our not knowing a great robot lion if it bit us in the butt when we were kids.

PONTIAC YOU ARE DEAD BECAUSE YOU DID NOT INVENT WHEELED WARRIOR STACK AND ATTACK TECHNOLOGY

In the end, who's to say what failure is anyways? Just because a toy robots line didn't last 25 years or long enough to have awful movies made about it doesn't mean it failed. Without an insider's perspective of why business decisions are made, any assumption of failure is just uninformed speculation on the part of Monday morning mecha pilots. So I am not going to claim I know why Bandai's GoDaiKin line of giant robometallicos had such a brief life in the early 1980s, but it seems to me they could have done a better job of getting the word out. This became apparent as I updated the GoDaiKin section of the Vintage Space Toaster Palace with a measly six new* ads. Seeing how few ads I've accumulated for this line when I've found hundreds of Transformers ads in each of its first three years had me putting myself in the position of retro-Bandai marketing executive wondering what went wrong. I ended up with the conclusion that there are no solid definitive conclusions that can be made from my second hand observations and 25 years of retrospective. Even I with my thousands of 1980s toy robots ads and several years worth of Hobby Japan magazines can't begin to put the pieces together. All I know now is it is foolish for me to think I could understand consumer market economics and the mystifying motivations behind Bandai, Ford, Hasbro or any other companies that used to make shiny metal things with lots of chrome and rubber tires. I've learned it is best to leave the Monday morning mecha piloting to the professionals...but wait there's more! I'll be damned if while researching this thesis on failed Bandai robot toylines I haven't uncovered the real reason the Shogun Warriors was canceled! Stay tuned next time my fellow Macrocranians as I definitively blow the lid off the biggest scandal in toy robots history!

NEXT TIME ON ROBOTASTIC ARCHAEOLOGIST: THE FALL OF THE SHOGUN EMPIRE!

On the tenth day of GoBots, Target gave to me...A name worse than Tobor

Target 12/25/84

If you listen to any interview with the people responsible for naming Transformers they're always harping on how important Hasbro feels it is to have strong names for the robots. But what's stupid is Hasbro either goes super dramatic or extremely plain with their names-there's no jokey middle ground. You can't just name a helicopter robot "Cop-Tur" and expect Hasbro to go along with it. Hasbro's policy with names seems like it's gotta either be superpowerful sizzletastic or be extremely bland. It's gotta be "CopterBlast" or "Heli-mus Coptorus" but if those are already taken (and they usually aren't) they'll settle for "Blades". That's why GoBot names were a lot more fun. Today's ad is for a GoBot robot cap gun made by Arco, except this is the version of the toy before it became a GoBot. RoGun would eventually become part of the GoBots toyline once Arco got the GoBot license. For GoBots they'd slightly redo the packaging but Tonka knew a good thing when they saw it and they kept the name. The main packaging change for the GoBot version was they plastered the GoBots logo over the area where RoGun's box originally spelled out the concept with "It's a robot. It's a gun. RoGun", which is probably the most ridiculous line of ad copy in the history of roboplastic marketing. Unlike working for Hasbro, naming toy robots and designing packaging for Arco must have been the easiest job in the world. I'll bet that guy still can't believe they paid him for that one. I know I can't.

WHAT THIS BLOG NEEDS IS SOME OMEGA SUPREME HAT

How I long for the days when a man and his son could walk around wearing gigantic foam front trucker caps of their favorite cartoons and TV shows. Nowadays wearing caps is solely the domain of sports fans, paparazzi, rappers, gangsters and other douchebags. And I guess cancer patients. This Zayre ad from November 17, 1985 makes me so nostalgic I want to buy an uzi and ten tons of cocaine, join the Miami Vice and a fire up ol' Omega Supreme like it was the good old days. It's so good it makes me want to be a douchebag gangster rapper sports fan just so I can wear these hats. It's so good it makes me want to buy some cancer.

This site is outrageous!

Remember last year when I talked about how cool that Jem site with all the Jem-specific Hasbro catalog scans was? And how fantastic it would be if someone would do the same for Transformers-scan the pages of the Hasbro Toy Fair catalogs relating to them on a Transformer specific site? Well some other Jem site owner did it! It's called BOTRIOT and it contains G1 era scans of Hasbro Toy Fair and pre-Toyfair catalogs from '86 through 1990. Go check it out if you're into prototypes, line art or just generally pictures of old toy robots.

On the ninth day of GoBots, Lionel Playworld gave to me...The Parable of the Toy Robot Pedalers

I had a nephew ask me last week what it was like growing up in the 1980s with all those toy robots like GoBots and Robotech and Voltron as opposed to now where if you want a toy robot in the U.S. you can have whatever you like as long as it's one of ten million flavors of Bumblebee. Well right there on the fly I couldn't think of anything except it was "more powerful than you could possibly imagine", which really didn't make sense but sounded cool when Ben Kenobi said it. Then later on I remembered a GoBots power cycle ad Lionel Playworld ran on December 4th, 1985 and I came up with a story that perfectly encapsulates seeing the Toy Robots Wars of the 1980s happen all around me when I was growing up.



Imagine some 2nd graders running a big wheel race down a neighborhood street in 1985. There are a about five little kids and their big wheels in this race but two of them have the most friends assembled on the sidewalk to watch. The race starts at a time of day when most of the other kids are still in the playground playing with GI Joes and He-Mans but the word spreads and those kids come over, too. So the race starts and this one kid is riding his GoBots power cycle and he gets a head start but about halfway down the street he crashes when all his tires fall off and it doesn't matter anyways because the other little kids in the crowd stopped watching him shortly after he took off. Then there's a second kid in his Transformers cycle and he starts late but all the other little kids on the sidelines are cheering him on as he pedals furiously and accidentally runs over the little GoBots kid that fell off his bike. Well Transformer boy reaches the finish line first and all the little kids cheer but he keeps on going well after anyone cares, then BAM! A Nintendo semi runs him over. The other three kids never finish the race because they got off their cycles and just went back to playing with Matchbox cars or whatever they were doing before. And the crowd of little kids went back to playing with their He-Mans and GI Joes.

PART II

Then 25 years later the little boy on the Transformer cycle is all grown up and he's crippled and brain dead but he gets a man named Mike to fix his big wheel for him. Mike doesn't really know much about big wheels so it still looks all mangled like a Nintendo truck ran it over but he's put some fuzzy dice on it and those mudflaps with the sexy hooker silhouette on the back wheels and taped lots of firecrackers all over it. And unbelievably even though it's 25 years later and you'd think the other kids would have grown up by now and be into other things, they still show up in droves to watch Transformer boy pedal his beat up, broken old exploding big wheel down the street in a race against nobody. Then BAM! A Nintendo semi runs him over again. And although all the grown up kids know it's awful and they know they shouldn't look, they keep coming back to see how many more slutty whores and firecrackers Mike can fit on that beat up rotting old carcass of a big wheel. And when I asked Jesus why there was only one set of footprints in the sand during the hard times he said, Hey don't look at me, I wanted the kid on the GoBot bike to win.

Naut a VSTP Update! OR: IT'S MISS JACKSON IF YOU'RE NAUGHTY

Merry Karza and Happy New Acroyear, my fellow Micronautians. With 2010 upon me I resolved this would be the year I stop complaining about being behind with updating the Vintage Space Toaster Palace and finally do something about it. The problem is that doing so takes a lot of work and it is much easier to write GoBots jokes on my blog than do something worthwhile like working on my site. Hopefully this year I will find the balance between the fun of building the only website that contains thousands of ads but generates absolutely no revenue and chronicling the soul crushing adventures of a man who has distilled the fun of toy robots into the world's most boring hobby involving hours upon hours of library visits staring at microfilm machines.

BEING THE BIGGEST "MICRO" ANYTHING IS A BIT OF AN OXYMORON

Best 11/18/79

The one area of the VSTP that was really bugging me was how I left the reformatting of my Micronauts page unfinished, so that became my first priority this week. In addition to having several dozen ads worth of Micro backlog I also didn't know what to write for those brief introductory paragraphs on my Micronauts page that encapsulate the history of the line in newspaper ads. Those three paragraphs were the most daunting task. It was scary because on one hand I'm the guy amassing this collection of Micronauts material but on the other I really don't know much about them beyond what little experience I had playing with them when I was four years old. How could I possibly write anything authoritative on a subject I'm pretty ignorant about? Then I thought, hey I've been doing that for years on this blog and I never let that stop me. So I stuck with what little I knew and my historical retrospective on late 1970s Micronauts newsprint advertising ended up being more about Star Wars and Shogun Warriors but who cares anyways. It matters not that the biggest collection of Micronauts ads on the internet is run by the biggest Micro-poser ever, all that's important is people know 11 bucks was what it cost to buy something called a Hornetroid in 1979.

Lionel Playworld 12/09/79

MICROFANS AND MICRONUTS SOUND LIKE PARTS FOR REALLY TINY COMPUTERS

Getting my Micro-act together is important because J.J. Abrams is supposed to be doing a Micronauts movie and Hasbro's acquired the toy license (which probably means a relaunching of this brand), all of which are signs of the Roboplastic Apocalypse. So I want to not embarrass myself by having a half-assed Micronaut page in case any real fans come by to check it out. More importantly I want to not mislead anyone jumping on the Micronaut bandwagon in the future in case the movie really takes off and wearing shirts of robot horses, space winnebagos, alien lobsters and Hornetroids becomes the cool thing to do among the Hot Topic crowd. People will have a tough enough time already trying to figure out what Micronauts is about without me confusing them. Hell, I call the Micronauts line a "vanguard of the modern toy robot age" and I'm naut even sure it's about robots. It's not possible to work so closely with the ads and not learn some things about the line but Micronauts still kind of confuses me. Like if you have a rocket car why do you need a robot horse? Here's hoping J.J. Abrams can do as great a job explaining Micronauts as he did with that Cloverfield backstory.

LIBRARIANS DON'T LOVE BOOKS THEY LOVE THE DEWEY DECIMAL SYSTEM

In a nautshell what I wanted to do with this post was let the world know that the Micronauts page of the Vintage Space Toaster Palace has been updated with a ton of new* entries including many nice ads I've blogged about within the past six months plus some other stuff. Although oftentimes I find Micronauts a disconnected uncohesive mess of varying action figure concepts, arranging all the ads in a way that makes sense of the assortments is challenging and fun. Therein lies the appeal and motivation in maintaining a page for a toyline I know very little about and have no real nostalgic connection to. I did wonder a couple of times why I was doing this as I was writing up the thousands of lines of Micronauts HTML for the page and it came down to the reason being more than recognizing the importance of this line's place in the history of the modern Roboplastic Age. Micronauts ads just look awesome! Like I've hypothesized before, toy robots fans are actually more fans of pictures of toy robots than the robots themselves and I may not know what a Hornetroid is but man it sure is pretty.

*30 years old

On the first day of 2010....WAS THE EIGHTH DAY OF GOBOTS

Ah, the first post of the new year. It sets the tone for all other bloggery that follows in the next three hundred something days. I was quite intimidated by the thought of writing this, the most definitive post of the year. It will define the trend, it will set the bar, it will mark where I was in my life on the day the twentyteen decade began. This post would serve as a snapshot of my soul-of the things most important to me at the start of the year that would mark my 36th ride around the sun. What great themes would inspire me to sit down and commit to internet a permanent record of my state of mind as I look forward to a new age of peace and happiness till all are one, till all are one, till all are one? Would I write of honor and sacrifice, or of world freedom and its invincible guardians? Would I write of love, or of family and other miscellaneous sentient beings? What weighty matter deserved this most sacred position in the chronicle of the Roboplastic Apocalypse? AND THEN I'M LIKE, DUDE, SUPER GOBOTS! Whenever I find myself faced with tough questions, Super GoBots is always the answer!

Montgomery Ward 12/18/85


GIVE ME A FACE!

I remember kids bringing Super GoBots to school in '84 and I just could not get very excited about them . The biggest problem was that the majority of the first Super GoBot series shared the same transformation scheme (cockpit becomes the head and hood becomes the chest/torso) and the vehicles were not very dissimilar to each other. The tank guy named Destroyer and 1985's Staks the orange semi were standouts not because they were good looking but because they proved recycling that transform could have been more interesting if it was applied to more than just Volkswagens, Porsches and Datsun 280-Zs. Psycho the future machine was probably the best of the car cockpit heads but you had to be a certain kind of kid to appreciate these robots without discernible faces. I was not that kind of kid. I could handle it when Robotech did it with their faceless robot jets but those were faceless, badass, armored, million missile launching, robot jet fighter planes in space. I'm only willing to forgive so much when all you do is turn into a Volkswagen (even if you're a Volkswagen with roof mounted missiles).

Montgomery Ward 11/10/85	TG&Y 11/17/85

SPAY-C YA NEXT YEAR

Toys R Us 11/06/85

But there was one Super GoBot I owned that I absolutely loved. It was Spay-C, the robot space shuttle. I had a thing for Space Shuttles just like every other kid in the mid eighties until that sort of blew up in our faces. But robot plus space shuttle were two great tastes that tasted great together. I had that little green Transformer one named Blast Off and the big white Transformer one named Astro Major that turned into a robot chicken riding a robot cat. There was also Astrotrain during the height of the Transformers' popularity but for some reason Hasbro just couldn't get it right and deliver a white space shuttle that turned into a humanoid robot. That's all I wanted and that's where Tonka's Spay-C saved the day. I loved that toy literally to pieces. All that's left of my Spay-C are a few broken bits of plastic and metal all beat to hell and unrecognizeable for what they once were, just like the real space shuttle! I swore one day I would rebuy Super Spay-C but every time I go to Botcon I see the prices dealers want for unopened ones and all I know is the one day I'm talking about definitely isn't Botcon day.

WALK A MILE IN MY LEADER-1DERPANTS

My father-in-law has said what a man finds himself doing on the first of the year is what that man will be doing every day for the rest of the year. Here I am sitting in a little room surrounded by the ghosts of 25 year old space shuttle robots and their transforming tank-faced cohorts reminiscing about when I was in fifth grade. That's kind of dumb but I'm also getting a bunch of GoBots ads ready for inclusion at the GoBots section of the Vintage Space Toaster Palace. I'm hoping that working on GoBots ads today means I'll be finding more of them this year. Although I have a decent representation of almost every GoBots figure and assortment for 1984 through 1985, in 1986 GoBots ads become extreeemly scare. Even if I do find GoBots ads in '86 they always feature older robots and it's always some sort of clearance. That sucks because '86 was when some of the best GoBots ever came out, super or not. What also sucks is that one time my father-in-law caught me wearing my wife's pants. He was like, um do you always wear my daughter's pants? And I was like, Dude! Super GoBots! That was one time Super Gobots was not the answer.