Babies sure do grow up fast. The Prince of Macrocrania has already tripled in size in his first five months and outgrown the Soundwave shirt I got for him at Hot Topic. It's as if I'm watching Bruce Banner turn into the Hulk right before my very eyes. The government must be exploding Gamma bombs in my backyard or something. Well even if he wears out shirts faster than the Hulk I can't exactly let him go without robots on his baby clothes. I would like to make him wear as much robot themed apparel before he realizes it's nerdy and learns to say "no". Unfortunately Hot Topic is doing a bad job of filling the void of robot themed baby clothes, although I do appreciate their Iron Maiden onesies that say "The Pooper".Rewind back to 1986 when a few Transformers came packaged with reflective iron on patches. The free patch also doubled as a game piece in the Transformers "Prizes in Disguise" instant win contest. You can see the commercial for the contest over at X-Entertainment.com. Grand prize was two guys in Transformer costumes crash your birthday party (5 were available), second prize was an electronic voice changer (100 were available) and third prize was a pack of action cards, of which there were 10,000 to give away. Overall chances of winning the five grand prizes were 1 in 710,000. So if you do the math, I guess by "a few Transformers" with patches I meant 3 and a half million of them.
Those were great prizes but I didn't win any of them because I never opened the only Transformer I ever bought with the patch. Now that I think abut it, that was pretty dumb. What normal twelve year old in '86 didn't open their robots with the iron on patches? On second thought, what normal twelve year old even still bought toys in '86? If my son ever keeps his toys sealed at twelve years old I will have a good indication that he is either a) living a lie and pretending to like robots to make me happy or b) a nerdy robot collector. I would rather he be lying to me. I don't know what I'd do if we had one of those confrontations where I pick up the unopened toy robot and I ask him "Where did you get this unopened robot? Who taught you to do this?" and he goes, "You, alright! I learned it by watching you!"
Sacrilege!
Hoping that cooler patches were out there, that old collector mentality kicked in and I wanted to know how many robot patches were in the set and which ones they were. By a stroke of luck, Jon Hartman (one of the founders of Botcon) was ebaying off a bunch of patches. I figured they'd go for a lot of money but I guess that's because I fail to realize that in this world of Michael Bay movies where Bumblebee is an ass kicking, gun toting warrior, the old ways have been abandoned. So I scored twelve iron ons for approximately five bucks plus shipping. This was a relief since individually these can be found in eBay stores for up to $12 each. Oh, and none of them were winning game pieces.
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I've since learned that there were ten patches in the set and after all was said and done I got seven of them. The remaining three I don't have are Snarl, Blitzwing and Inferno. I guess to some it is sacreligious to actually use these as iron ons after all these years but for someone who just wants to know what they look like it's almost impossible to find examples. I couldn't find pictures of the patches applied anywhere on the internet, probably since Transformer collectors are only interested in showcasing their mint unused samples. So I decided I'd take pictures of what I had for posterity's sake and for anyone who wanted to see the patches as Hasbro intended them to be seen. Some of mine have broken or damaged edges because I decided to use the beat up ones and save the good ones. Save them for what I do not know. Maybe to trade for the other three I don't have one day, but I seriously doubt that I'll ever find anyone else with extras even though over three million of them are out there.
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In the end thanks to Jon and eBay I made my son a couple more Transformer shirts that I hope will last for at least a few more months. Thanks to the gamma rays by the time he's one all the shirts I made will be too small and he'll be eight feet tall and green. Then when he learns to talk he'll tell me how dorky he felt wearing Ultra Magnus on his shirt. I will have to agree.
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UPDATE!
I did eventually find the last three reflective patches I needed and I made a shirt you can see from space using all ten of them that I wear only once a year at Botcon.
3 comments:
Thoroughly cool! (I wore the Soundwave patch proudly on my sleeve back in the day, but for some reason, I think that was the only one I had!)
Somewhere, I have a handkerchief with most of the patches ironed onto it. I wish Hasbro would do stuff like this today.
Yeah Mark, I could have sworn I had a single patch but I was afraid to wear it out and be made fun of by kids with so many patches that their shirts could be seen glowing from orbit.
Richard you must find that handkerchief!
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