Saturday Superday!

Drozd to the occasion!

There was a book fair down in Miami over the weekend where I got to meet the extremely prolific podcaster/comic creator Jerzy Drozd and see two funny guys from the Daily Show talk about their new books. I love Jerzy's animation centric Saturday Supercast and Art&Story EXTREME podcasts. Plus he's been to a couple of Botcons so there were jokes to be made and stories to tell. It's crazy how the internet makes it possible to know so much and have so much in common with a total stranger. I took a couple pictures and you can see them in the Miami Book Fair set at FlickrMacrocrania.

One time the Post Exchange made a mistake and sold me Beast Wars Megatron the big purple Tyrannosaurus for $9.99 (and other stories from Fort Hood)

I was 21 when I joined the Air Force in late 1995 and right after basic training my first duty station was Fort Hood, Texas. I was there from mid 1996 to mid 1998. It was my first real job, my first experience living away from home and my first real time on my own as an adult. It was at Fort Hood that I first learned how to use a computer and I'd spend hours at the post library internet room going to sites like ActionFigureTimes and BeastWars.net with Netscape Navigator. I remember hitting up the local Blockbuster in Killeen and ordering the first eight volumes of Streamline Pictures' VHS "Robotech Perfect Collection:Macross" one at a time. I never saw the Japanese versions of Robotech before so those tapes were a big event in my history of robotardation. Since I didn't have a VCR it was in the Fort Hood library VCR room where I first saw The Super Dimension Fortress Macross uncut, subtitled and in glorious Japanese (or at least the first 16 episodes of it). I went to my first anime convention at the Fort Hood Sportsdome-I think it was called DefCon II in '97 or '98-and I remember seeing one table with the most awesome Robotech poster I'd ever seen. Antarctic Press was doing their Robotech Comics around that time and I remember going comics shops just outside the post in Killeen to pick those up. There was one comic shop in nearby Copperas Cove where I would buy loose Transformers and talk about toys with the store owner who was an ex-Army warrant officer that got medically discharged when his helicopter crashed. I thought hell, Rick Hunter crashed his spacerobot jetfighter all the time even starting in the first episode and he never got hurt bad enough to be discharged. But that's the difference between reality and Robotech. If Robotech was real it would be the story of Rick Hunter jumping into a spacerobot jetfighter in the first 10 minutes, crashing, then running a comic shop on the SDF-1 for the next 35 episodes.

Most of all I remember that early morning in '96 when I was at the post hospital waiting for the bus to San Antonio. On my days off I would hitch a ride on these buses that left at like 6 in the morning from Fort Hood to the hospital at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. They were supposed to be the shuttles used to transfer patients to Lackland but if they had room they'd take anyone else, and they always had room. I remember that day I was in the lobby and half awake on the couch waiting for the bus when I turned on the television in the waiting area. It was during a commercial break but when the show that was ending got back the credits began to roll and this crazy bongo music was playing and the screen had wild animals turning into robots and some guys growling "BEAST WARS" and at the very end the Transformers logo flashed. I couldn't believe they brought back Transformers. I knew the toys were in the stores because I was a Target stockboy before I joined the military but I wasn't at all into them. But seeing Transformers had a new show with original episodes that were not a rehashing of G1 was incredible to me. Just before I got orders to Korea I remember watching the cliffhanger ending to Beast Wars Season 2 on my birthday in 1998 in my apartment in Killeen. Man I was pissed off about going to Korea-not because the little army camp I was going to was a speed bump on Kim Jong-il's South Korean invasion route and I'd be dead in minutes if the north attacked-but mostly because I wouldn't get to see the start of Beast Wars season 3.

So Fort Hood has a lot of memories for me. I'm thinking about them now as I read about the young men and women stationed there about the same age as I was back in 1996 but whose lives were cut short last week. My thoughts are with the families.

SoFlo Car Show-I've been spending most my life living in a mechaphiliac's paradise

This past Sunday was the very last day of the week long South Florida International Auto Show. I read about it in the local paper the day before it started and I wanted to go when they said the Corvette Stingray from Transformers Revenge of the Fallen would be there but I kept putting it off. Then my 15 year old nephew R.J. came over and I finally found motivation because he is everything I used to be-young, energetic and excited about today's toy robot Camaros and their transforming Corvette cohorts. I have updated Flickr Macrocrania with a new set of pictures called "SFIAS 2009" that we took while at the show.



So we walk in and right off the bat there's a robot. I guess Ford did not want to be outdone by the Transformer cars in the Chevrolet displays so they had an animatronic robot that would talk to people. Apparently instead of cars they are trying to build Terminators to go back in time to get your mom to buy a Ford. It was pretty impressive except that the robot couldn't walk and his voice sounded exactly like Stevan from Microsexuals.



As we got closer to the Chevrolet section there was a display of all the Indianapolis 500 Camaro pace cars! I stopped paying attention to Camaros in 1993 so all I remembered were the '67, '69, '82 and '93 pacers. They also had a 2009 pace car and a Pepsi 500 pace car. It was pretty cool to see them all in one place. I'd only ever seen one or two at car shows and dealerships before so to see them all in one place was incredibly cool.



Had I known that a 2010 Transformers edition Camaro would be there I would have gone during the week. Although R.J. is too young to drive I told him this is his car. This really is the Bumblebee of his generation. Trying to get a picture with this car proved nearly impossible with all the people swarming around it but R.J. had crazy Moses-like powers and whenever he stood in front of a car the sea of people would part around him. We couldn't get any good shots of me with Bumblebee because whenever I tried standing near it I'd get overrun like a paralyzed guy being attacked by zombies.



Sideswipe was a totally different story. What's funny is that while the Transformers edition Camaro was just an approximation of the car used in the film, this concept Stingray was one of the 'vettes used in Transformers Revenge of the Fallen. People didn't seem to know or care, though. Everyone around the Camaro was explaining to each other how it was the one from the Transformers movie (I guess having "Transformers" written on the hood helped) but talk around the Corvette was about how great it looked without Transformery mentions. Ditto for the 2010 Jaguar XKR that looked a lot like Alternators Ravage. There were probably more real life Transformers alt modes there (didn't they do a movie Cliffjumper?) but I wasn't knowledgeable enough on the new stuff to know which ones they were. It is as if they were robots in disguise.



IT'S THE DRACULAMOBILE!

THE EMPIRE STRIKES A TUNE: Star Wars in concert (and out of focus)

I'm the kind of dad that doesn't care if his 2-year-old son plays house with dolls or kisses teddy bears or wears pink sparkly Dora the Explorer dresses. I'm not dumb enough to believe that stuff will turn a little boy into a girl, but I do think engaging in girly activities should be done in moderation and it helps if little boys also do manly stuff to offset any exposure to excessive girlyness just in case. If there's even the slightest link of causality between cell phones and brain cancer then scientists need to study the possibility that teddy bears and girly clothes emit feminine rays that fry the boy parts of a brain. Until this phenomena is studied more in-depther I will be countering the fem rays as best I can by making sure my son also engages in more boy appropriate activities like playing house with 12 inch Star Wars "action figures", kissing plastic Godzillas and wearing Transformers dresses.

IT ALL STARTED WITH A MOUSE DROID

Unfortunately direct interaction with GoBots and Transformers won't undo fem ray damage as it is my experience that playing with toy robot Volkswagens and their transforming Lamborghini cohorts only turns people into raving asexual mechaphiliacs. So when my wife took us all to Disney Princesses on Ice last month for her birthday I felt a great imbalance in the Force and I knew what we had to do. The near lethal dosage of fem we got from watching skating princesses and teddy bears in September could only be countered by ditching mommy and going to see Star Wars in Concert the night before Halloween. George Lucas knows that if you absolutely positively must have princesses and teddy bears in your story, they need to be either mostly naked and chained to big turd colored gangster frogs or bloodthirsty Stormtrooper eating cannibals with primitive but deadly wooden weapons.

STAR WARS IN CONCERT FOOTAGE YOU WON'T FIND ANYWHERE ELSE!

THESE WEREN'T THE JPEGS I WAS LOOKING FOR

I was dropping off some cardboard boxes at a trailer park last month when I left my camera on top of my truck and then drove off. It's been lost since then and that's the last memory I have of it so I figure some kid at the trailer park got an early Christmas present with a 1 gig SD card full of pictures of me posing with people

dressed up in cardboard robot costumes and old toy robots newspaper ads. It was a crappy little red camera that I got for 100 bucks at Toys R Us in Rapid City, South Dakota, but it was of much historical value because it took over when my first camera died from taking tens of thousands of pictures of old toy robots newspaper ads for the Vintage Space Toaster Palace. (I've already finished the emotional mourning process for my camera so I'll be pissed if it's actually under my bed.) This mattered at Star Wars in concert because I could have snuck my little red camera in to get pictures but since I lost it I had to borrow my wife's Stormtrooper bazooka looking camera and when the lady at the door saw that hulking monster hanging from my neck she wouldn't let me in. Even though everyone else was sneaking in little cameras and taking all sorts of pictures with iPhones and cell phones I had to go back and leave Camerus Maximus in the truck. That sucked and really pissed me off but I did get some crappy shots with my cell phone of the various props and costumes they had on display (and by "various" I mean one picture of a Yoda puppet and 20 pictures of the Darth Vader costume). You might think after 30 years of seeing people dressing up as Stormtroopers everywhere they go any Star Wars costume display has had its wow factor diminished but the reason these empty suits are cool and why I wanted pictures with them is because they don't have crazy weirdos inside.

MANY BOTHANS LOST THEIR YOUTUBE ACCOUNTS FOR THIS INFORMATION

Although I couldn't take a good camera in, this monumentally significant event in the history of mankind is preserved for the ages in the same way as equally important extraterrestrial contact is documented-with grainy cell phone pictures and crappy bootleg YouTube videos. It's a shame. The renegade picture and video takers

do so at great risk to their seating assignments because the security is very serious about the no filming or photography rule. The YouTube video I've found here does a good job of capturing the Star Warsy excitement and craziness I felt and saw when I was there. Essentially Star Wars in Concert is Anthony Daniels reciting an abridged Cliffs Notes version of the Star Wars saga in between accompanying musical numbers performed by the orchestra under a giant LED screen that plays Star Wars money shot montages while giant green lasers dance and pulsate to the music. It's the six Star Wars movies distilled down to two hours of their loudest most exciting music with laser beams and lots of giant explosions. It gives me hope that maybe what Michael Bay has done is some sort of Transformers concert footage and later on we'll get the six movies that makes the current Transformers franchise make sense.

I HAVEN'T SEEN THIS MANY LUCASFILM PLANTS SINCE THE EWOK FOREST

There's one part where Anthony Daniels spazzes out a bit and starts talking and walking around jerkily like C-3P0 (which is captured on the YouTube clip here but from a different city than where I saw it). The audience went totally crazy over it but I just felt embarrassed for the guy. Then I realized he's probably a millionaire from acting like an effeminate wussy robot. His were not the most embarrassing actions, though. The most terrifying and cringe inducing moments of all came when Mr. Daniels did some casual name dropping of Star Wars characters during his narration and the crowd went wild just because he said "Han Solo" or "Millenium Falcon". This behavior is also captured on the YouTube and strangely enough it happened exactly like that at my location, too, almost as if on cue. It reminded me

of whenever the studio audience would freak out when Mr. Furley walked onto the set of Three's Company like Don Knotts was Jesus. It seemed really fake at times and I wondered how much of the audience were paid Lucasfilm employees (or droids) whose extreme passion was as rehearsed as the rest of the show. Luckily one guy booed when Daniels said "Luke Skywalker" so I knew at least he and I were humans.

NOW I KNOW WHAT THE BACKSEAT OF THE MILLENIUM FALCON FEELS LIKE

I don't think I can recommend paying for the seats on the floor closest to the stage. We were six rows back and the crane cameras they used to project images of the orchestra onto the big screen kept getting in my way, along with the gigantic head of the guy sitting in front of me. It was like sitting behind Chewbacca. It would be best to get seats anywhere but the floor because you can see more that way and are also less likely to get tazed by the IG-88 camera nazis when you record video to make you famous on YouTube. Even though the sound was from an orchestra playing right in front of me it was still only about as loud as a good movie theater. There's really no benefit to being so close unless you want that R2-D2's eye view up Anthony Daniels' nose. I didn't pay $30 for the concert program or $35 for any of the shirts because while they were nice, I thought the price was a bit much. I still think overall it was a good time and I highly recommend it to anyone who likes hearing Star Wars music and seeing authentic Star Wars costumes or just for anyone who has been forced to go see anything with ice skating Cinderellas.

Melancholy and the Infinite Bitness

My Playstation died just before I went yesterday to Miami's first video game convention, Infinite Bits. It really put a damper on what should have been a fun time. Can you imagine your grandma dying and then having to go to a grandma convention? That's what it was like, except imagine for $150 Sony can fix your grandma.



I AIN'T GOT NO BILLY

Infinite Bits had super special guests like video game heroes Billy Mitchell and Walter Day, plus the Nostalgia Critic and geek comedian Aaron Pabon. Or at least they did before I got there. Since I went the last day I missed seeing all those great guys except for the comedian. So that sucked but I later found out from reading one guy's blog that Billy Mitchell was charging $3 to take a picture with him! Holy crap I am not paying Billy Mitchell anything unless there is barbecue sauce involved.



THE GREAT CONSOLE-ATION

There was still fun to be had because I got to check out the interactive videogame museum. It was a large area of tables with all of the major home video consoles dating back to the mid 70s from Pong all the way to the Playstation 3. It was amazing and I got pictures of most of them for my Infinite Bits photo set at Flickr Macrocrania. Now they didn't have everything-I didn't see a Famicom Disk System or TurboGrafx CD for example-but they did have a ton of quirky goofy systems like the Vectrex, Sega 32X, Apple PipPin and Epoch CassetteVision. What was funny to me was how they secured the games in the systems with plastic bands to prevent theft. That may be a concern for some of the newer games, but really, who's going to try to rip off Bonk's Adventure for the TurboGrafx-16?



ROAR WITHOUT END

A big highlight of the show for me was getting to see geek comedian Aaron Pabon. I'd never seen him before but he's built up quite a reputation. What's so unique about him is he's carved out a niche as the world's first geek comic by doing stand up at pop culture conventions. I'm not really his target audience because I'm not knowledgeable about the latest Pokemons and Final Fantasys and Guitar Band games. On the opposite end of the spectrum was this one guy sitting next to me who was howling at everything Aaron said. But when the Aaron Pabon comedy train pulled into toy robots land with one joke he told about the life sized Gundam they made in Japan I was laughing along with everyone else. Sadly that was his only robot joke and my final fantasy was that I could understand what the hell he was talking about.



TO THE BITTY END

All in all I had a fun time during my one day there. I got to watch some insane video game commercials from the 80s that I hadn't seen since they first aired. (I think my mind was trying to repress the horrifically incredible commercial for Atari Joust because I don't remember that one.) I saw one dealer there with a ton of unop0ened, pristine condition robot related video games for many different consoles like Mystery of Convoy, Super Robot Wars Taisen, and lots of Macross and Gundam games I'd never seen before. I should have got a picture of his table. There was one dealer with reissue Transformers and the 20th/30th anniversary Transformers/Microman set for $40. I almost blew my Playstation resurrection money with those guys, but I held on. Although Infinite Bits was a bit bittersweet because of my personal PS3 circumstances and bad timing caused me to miss the guests I would go if they did another one next year. I still find video games infinitely interesting.

If you want to see other people having fun at Infinite Bits I suggest this video done by Those Gaming Guys and GamertagRadios' Flickr set.

The 1984 Hasbro Catalog concluded: The secret recipe for success that combines peace, freedom, tyranny and lots of crying and screaming

There's a game called Jenga where players build towers with strangely shaped little wooden blocks. Once the Jenga tower is built the players take pieces out without making the whole thing fall down, giving one an appreciation for the very important blocks near the base of the tower upon which the entire structure depends. I think the Transformers brand in 1984 was like a Jenga tower and three of those important blocks upon which the whole franchise depended were Soundwave, Megatron and Optimus Prime. Any other robot that year could have been removed from the lineup and it wouldn't have made much of a difference to the success of the Transformers. Taking away any other robot would be like taking blocks from the top of a Jenga tower and their absence would hardly be felt. Remove the characters of Soundwave, Megatron or Optimus Prime and Transformers 1984 collapses into a pile of oddly shaped transforming jet planes and Lamborghinis with little to differentiate them from GoBots, Zybots or Convertors. That gun, truck and tape deck really carried the rest of the line, which really wasn't much better than the competition. (However, take those three guys away and I still think I could come up with a compelling space opera about a young robot growing up on a Tattooine moisture farm who must learn the ways of the Force to find his destiny amongst the stars (plus he turns into a yellow Volkswagen)).

THE GREAT COMMUNICATOR

Line art of Soundwave in newspaper ads is not easy to come by, but not because he wasn't advertised much. From what I've seen the lack of Soundwave line art is mostly because stores preferred using actual pictures instead of drawings in their ads for larger Transformers like him. He got a good amount of ad exposure in '84 but retailers were always getting his name wrong for some reason. Although the '84 toy catalog from which the ad text originates clearly states his name is "Soundwave", retailers rarely ever capitalized the 's' or put the 'sound' and 'wave' together in one compound word. Then in my experience during 1985 the volume of Soundwave ads dropped considerably. Although he and Starscream are the only Decepticons from the original 1984 lineup to appear in the first three consecutive years of pack-in toy catalogs, I've never found any ads featuring either of them from 1986.

Carrs 11/20/85

It really bothers me that I've never found line art for the initial four Decepticon cassettes in newspaper ads. Thanks to page 69 of the '84 Hasbro catalog (shown above) I have an idea of what they'd look like since newspaper ad line art is created from these catalog images. There was also a set of "Color-Me" Decepticon stickers made by Diamond Toymakers that used line art derived from the catalog pictures. It gives a glimpse into what an ad for Ravage and Laserbeak would look like and it's as close as I'll ever get unless I find an ad for them someday.

It is interesting to me that Soundwave and Buzzsaw are the only two robots shown touching each other throughout all of the Transformer pages in the '84 catalog. I think this is because Hasbro wanted to be able to separate all the individual robots so that art of any single toy could be used to represent their whole assortment in retailer ads. Oftentimes I will see a drawing of one car figure or plane figure used in ads for all the cars and planes. Since Soundwave and Buzzsaw were together in their own assortment I assume it was no big deal if there was a little bit of photographic overlap between the two. Usually the only overlap in these pictures is between the robot and its alternate mode which is placed in front of it. I have seen instances where retailers attempt to sever the robot graphic from the alt mode, leaving the robot without a leg or foot (or both feet) in some cases but I've never seen an ad where Buzzsaw is removed from Soundwave's arm.

Swallen's 11/07/84


IF IT'S IN THIS CATALOG IT MUST BE CANNON

Megatron has the unique distinction of being the only Transformer in the '84 toy catalog to not be pictured touching another robot or his own alternate form. Unfortunately he is also distinguished by having a pretty bad mistransformation that was duplicated in the line art newspaper ads. Not only is his arm hanging off at a badly disjointed 90 degrees, but his Particle Beam Cannon accessory is assembled wrong according to his instructions. Consequently all the ads where retailers chose to use the line art of the cannon have this mistake. One could argue that it's not a mistake since Hasbro was still early in the development of the line and was trying to figure out how they wanted the particle beam cannon to look, but I think the '84 Hasbro toy catalog was made well after the instructions and pack-in toy catalog so it's not like they didn't know what they intended the transforms to look like. This then becomes the first officially released picture of a Transformer transformed wrong in what would become a 25 year history of publications including newspaper ads, publicity photos, toy catalogs and other media where photographers (like Megatron) shot first and didn't ask questions later.



FIRST LAST

The 1984 Hasbro toy catalog is unlike the pack-in toy catalog in that Optimus Prime does not immediately follow the other Autobots, instead his spread is reserved for the last two Transformer pages before the catalog switches over to G.I. Joe. Although the catalog offers up all sorts of pictures of Prime connected to and dancing around his trailer in combat deck mode, the only line art ads I've found of him remove the combat deck graphic entirely. It's always just the robot drawn standing behind the tractor trailer. So just as in the cartoon, in the line ads when he's a robot his trailer disappears.

Karl's Toys 12/05/85

There may be a difference in order of appearance between the two catalogs but there is one big similarity as well. The Optimus Prime pictured on pages 72 and 73 of the '84 Hasbro toy catalog has the same colors and configuration as the one shown in the toy pack-in catalog. Heck, I can almost guarantee it's the same Optimus because not only does it have the silver missiles, blue roller and metal plates in the trailer like the other catalog, it also has that uniquely shaped combat deck Roller launcher that's unlike any production Prime unearthed so far. This trailer is only ever seen in the '84 catalogs and a more production accurate version with black missiles and a normal launcher replaced it in the 1985 catalogs. So once again we have an example of a disappearing Optimus Prime trailer, except I know a collector who ended up with what is probably that very same photoshoot trailer in his private collection. But that guy got out of Transformers collecting a little while ago so I don't know if he still has it or it's disappeared yet again.



ALL TOY ROBOTS MAY BE CREATED EQUAL BUT THEY'RE NOT MARKETED THAT WAY

And so concludes my coverage of the Transformer action figure pages from the 1984 Hasbro Toy Catalog, a truly historic tome in the annals of roboplasticology. Hasbro did a fantastic job of presenting their toy robots in settings much more attractive than the single colored backgrounds we got with the toy catalogs that came with the 1984 figures. There were some surprises and strangeness within its pages like the '84 battle scene devoid of faction sigils on the robots, the black hooded Bluestreak and the mirror imaged minicars. The '84 Hasbro toy catalog is also interesting for what Transformers it doesn't show. There were a few known '84 releases like the Autobot car Skids, Decepticon Military Operations Commander Shockwave and Autobot Air Guardian Jetfire that missed the cut for whatever reason. Those three would make it into the '85 Hasbro toy catalog but would not be labeled as new for that year, unlike the Dinobots, Insecticons and other 'new for 1985' figure assortments. Other toys like Bumblejumper, yellow Cliffjumper and red Bumblebee never appeared in the '84 or '85 toy catalogs at all. Even though some guys got omitted, as far as the 1984 Hasbro toy catalog was concerned the line was complete with Soundwave, Megatron and Optimus Prime. As far as the '84 cartoon was concerned these would be the three that had the best voices. And as far as the ten hundred billion kids that watched the show these were the robots that were the awesomest. Hasbro, Marvel and Sunbow are given much credit for creating the secret formula that infused these three lifeless toy robots with strong personalities, making them some of the most memorable characters in pop culture cartoon history. What was the secret marketing formula that endeared these three in the hearts of billions? Was it some complicated process involving a combination of character archetypes throughout storytelling history, Jenga, and distilling essential truths about human existence and common mythic elements of the ages into various everyday household appliances? Well actually the secret was more like "the larger your price point was, the more lines you got on the show". GOBOTS DID NOT UNDERSTAND THIS.

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.