NAUT cool

Since this post will be full of robot nerd geeky talk, let me use this disclaimer as a preemptive F.U. to those who are not comfortable reading my thoughts about twenty year old newspaper ads for the shittiest robot toyline ever made.

Micronauts was what your grandparents bought you in 1978 because they thought it was Star Wars. Oh they were awful. I knew better than to show up at recess in kindergarten with Micronauts toys. All the other five year old kids would be like, "Oh, we'll be playing over here in this corner with actual Star Wars toys our smart grandmas gave us, recreating actual movie scenes that can only be recreated with official Star Wars figures while you can go over there and fuck yourself with Micronauts that are not based on a fantastic space opera movie." To celebrate the suck of this horrible toyline I have an ad featuring two Micronauts toys. It was from the store Lewis Osco and it ran on December 6th, 1978.



Although this ad describes the toy illustrated as the Micronaut Biotron, what's actually illustrated is the Giant Acroyear. Giant Acroyear was a Micronauts combiner robot whose combined form was made up of two smaller Micromen, a mobile cannon platform and a jet. At first a combining jet/cannon/robot team sounds cool but in reality it pretty much sucks ass like all the other Micronauts toys. Micronauts had a lot of cool ideas but they physically looked so not like what a robot should look like. Micronauts were spindly and anemic. They were the nerd robots who got beat up by the jock robots in junior high. So while the cool robots like the Shogun Warriors were out there getting laid and fighting Godzilla, Micronauts was getting its glasses broken and its underwear pulled up in gym class.

As a kid I had the Micronauts Gammatron and god it was so friggin retarded. It was sort of motorized-I can't really explain what was supposed to happen when the Gammatron worked. The only way I can describe the Gammatron is that it looked like a dildo with wheels and skinny robotic arms that flailed about wildly. It was like if Gumby ate a toilet and started moshing. Toys like that didn't stimulate my imagination-they kind of sat my imagination down and then had seizures in front of it.



There was one absolutely decent Micronauts toy and it was the Battle Cruiser. The Battle Cruiser was a bunch of smaller misshapen Micronaut hubris that when combined sort of looked like a space ship made of junk with laser guns for wings. The laser gun wings were the only thing that made this toy almost cool, because if your Grandma got you the Micronauts Battle Cruiser for Christmas thinking it was the Millenium Falcon, you could bust out the laser guns and pistol whip her then pretend to kill yourself in front of the Christmas tree.