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.

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.

Nothing says Merry Christmas from 1985 like a battery operated transforming toy robot Uzi

About the only thing more wonderful, iconic and fun than a toy robot in 1985 was an Uzi. Kids of all ages thrilled to the television adventures of their favorite Uzi toting heroes like Snake Eyes, Rico Tubbs from Miami Vice and future president of Texas Chuck Norris. Hell, when I was a kid I even had a battery operated Uzi water pistol that I totally rocked out with as I pretended to be every bad guy ever on the A-Team. The children of the 80's love affair with uzis and toy robots were two great tastes that were destined to go great together like stalled school buses and railroad tracks.

Toys and Gifts Outlet 12/15/85

So after my initial reactions of shock, horror, dismay and denial at finding this Christmas season 1985 ad from a store called Toys and Gifts Outlet from Tampa, Florida, I was not at all surprised that somebody actually made a battery operated toy robot that turned into an Uzi. Part of me wonders if this was all a big misprint or other sort of mistake and there wasn't actually a toy robot Uzi but when I think about it, toy robot Uzi totally falls within what I call the Evil King Macrocranios Intergalactic Governing Rule of Inevitable Fuckuppedness. I came up with it after watching the news and just generally being alive for the past 35 years. The Intergalactic Governing Rule of Inevitable Fuckuppedness states that over the course of the thousands of years of human existence and the infinite number of human interactions every person who has ever lived has had with every other person who has ever lived, every good wonderful positive thing you could possibly imagine has probably not happened, but every horrible fucked up thing you could possibly imagine definitely has. So I can guarantee for example that in the entire history of humanity nobody has ever invented a teddy bear that could make me a sandwich, but convertible Uzi robots? Oh hell yeah. So although I have never seen an "Uzi convertible robot" I am sure they exist or at least existed at one point but probably don't exist now because they were all destroyed in a hail of gunfire when the little boys who had them were all shot by the cops.

The Mighty Morphy Toy Robot Orgy

On top of a backlog of things I want to blog about I've also got a billion other projects I'm working on all designed to establish a larger physical and political presence for the Kingdom of Macrocrania on the internet. I noticed from my blog statisticals that using the Blogger search box at the top of the page isn't as useful as I thought it was. I always thought it was at least good enough that people looking for important things like Voltron and Wheelie and the Chopper Bunch could find all the incredibly useful insights, analysis and conspiracy theories I've written on such subjects. But it turns out that search box is total crap so I'm working on tagging every post I've ever written with useful topic titles like "Life is like a furricane" and "We are all Peter Cullen's unwanted children". I'm also working on writing a Transformers podcast about toy robots that are not Transformers because somehow for some reason podcasters are ignoring the incredibly tiny and practically non-existent non-vocal minority audience of people wanting to hear somebody talk about Mighty Orbots and Tranzor-Z. And of course in addition to these things I'm also working on a gigantic backlog of toy robots ads from Rapid City, Pasadena and Miami for the Vintage Space Toaster Palace. But when I say I'm working on all these things I really mean I'm thinking about doing them but instead when I sit down at the computer I end up looking at pictures of Japanese toy robots auctions all day.


If I won the lottery I would buy a 2010 Bumblebee Camaro and paint it like this

There is a public auction about to be held in Pennsylvania where they are going to sell off one of the single most concentrated masses of Japanese toy robots in all creation. The tale of cataloging, identifying and processing the hundreds of individual roboplasticos and robometallicos is being told by the men called to do it at their blog. I do not envy their job but it must be really cool to know so much about robots that people would come to you in situations like that. Once an old lady in Tucson asked me to identify some robots so she could sell them at garage sales and I ended up misidentifying some and I think I told her some of her GoDaiKins were from She-Ra. Being the low class bourgeois Transformer trash fan I am most all of that Philadelphia collection is stuff way beyond my level of knowledge and appreciation. But hot damn there's some crap there that's so incredible I recognize I'm not worthy to even be looking at the jpegs. First you've got the things that joe average neurotypical toy robots fans people like me know about. There's your lots with GoBots, the SDF-1 Macross, some Shogun Warriors, a couple Joons Valkyries, every Soul of Chogokin Mazinger in one shot, and throw in some Masterpiece Transformers and any one of those is like a good day searching on ebay. But then you know you're not in Kansas anymore when you start seeing things like an original GA-01 gold thigh Mazinger or an authentic all gold GA-01 or holy hell a non-GoDaiKin Combattra! Then after you've seen every rare incredible Japanese robot thing ever made you get to what looks like a convertible '72 Ford Fairlane painted in the colors of the Mexican flag and customized in the most awesome Great Mazinger deco ever. Then you realize no matter how many women you lay, no matter how many toy robots you own, no matter how many powerballs you win, you will never truly be a man until you drive something that looks like that in real life.

HASBRO MAKE THIS TOY

Then it all just starts going Twilight Zone and after a while you stop asking why is Great Mazinger flying a boat or driving a race car and the existence of such toys not only stops being weird it all makes perfect sense. Then you realize that no matter how cool it was to have a Transformer power cycle when you were a kid, your childhood pales in comparison to some four year old Japanese guy who grew up riding the Dol Giran robot dragon wagon. Then finally everything you thought you knew about life, love, god and toy robots crumbles with your sanity when you see a toy of Mazinger-Z driving a rocket launcher equipped convertible red Volkswagen that looks like Wheelie and the Chopper Bunch. Suddenly blog tags, podcasts and websites of old toy robots ads lose all significance in light of this new goal that becomes the overriding focus in your life-leaving your family and everything else behind to illegally break in to Mexico to learn how to paint giant robots on cars.

For this one you have to know that in spanish, "chair" is spelled "silla" and pronounced "see-ya"

I always thought it would be a good idea to have a robot who turns into an electric chair. It wouldn't be human sized, but around 30 feet tall so the other robots could sit in it. He could be the guy all of his friends use to charge up. Then in battle he could turn into a chair in the middle of the battlefield and wait around for some robot from the opposing side to sit in him so he could electrocute the guy. Here are my top ten name ideas for transforming electric chair guy:

Bumblecharger

10 Headblaster

9 Pantsstreaker

8 Barbecue Prime

7 Ultra Crispy

6 Sparkytron

5 Chargy Maximus

4 Chairfire

3 The Shocky

2 R2-BBQ

1 El Silla-lator

Rejected Transfromer art contest ideas number 1