Four Star Stories OR:Vintage Space Toast Tour Houston-Space Toaster Cowboy Outlaws

Vacationing in my native state of Texas gave me the opportunity to wrassle some old toy robots newspaper ads. I had some fun times in Florida the week before and I was hoping that luck would continue. But unfortunately, in Houston we had a problem. The main library downtown was undergoing renovations and the microfiche archives were not physically located in the same building as the temporary library. This meant I had to request the reels and then wait for three hours for the staff to go into the old building and bring me what I wanted. Instead of getting a full seven or eight hours of newspaper searching, I only got three and a half because of the delay. But I still found some good stuff and between Florida and Houston there's a couple dozen new ads I may put up at the Vintage Space Toaster Palace.

Before I get into a couple of the ads I found, let me say that Canon 800 series microfilm scanner at the downtown Houston library was the most technologically advanced scanner I have ever worked with. The 800 series have widescreen displays, all sorts of crazy illuminated buttons that allowed me to manipulate the on screen images and the ability to capture and send images digitally through USB ports. You could take the most underexposed, blurry roll of newspapers on microfilm and it could be manipulated to look fantastic when viewed in that machine. I was able to get better copies of many ads I already had thanks to the power of the Canon 800 scanner. It was so advanced I suspect it was some sort of droid. In fact it made R2D2 noises when I operated it. It was truly the Omega Supreme of microfiche machines.

I was surprised to find out how strongly pharmacy stores like Eckerd were pushing Transformer knockoffs in their ads. These rogue toys are the outlaws of the wild west toy robots world. There were lots of blatant KOs that used the only slightly altered Transformer toy molds back in the 80s and they were featured prominently in the weekly circulars of little independent drug stores. "Transistor Robots" was one line of these Transformer knockoffs made by a company called Four Star and among their most infamous KOs is the heavily remolded Constructicon Devastator wannabe named "Hard Hat". This Gray Drug ad from December 1st 1985 shows the Hard Hat giftset, which retailed for about three-quarters of what the official Devastator giftset cost back then. Hard Hat had a Jetfire head and other bizarre mold modifications that made it a wonder to behold. You can behold it yourself in more detail at Fred's Workshop or the Super Toy Archive.

Another pretty blatant Transformer knockoff robot from the Four Star line was the Phantom F-15 fighter jet. This Eckerd drug store ad from December 24 1985 shows how they originally retailed for about six bucks. I've seen a lot of ads for the Four Star Phantom so I'm sure a lot of them were out there, yet they're hard for collectors to find nowadays. It's hard for me to believe there are collectors that want to find these in the first place. But honestly this company did a whole lot more than just ripoff the existing toys and give them different colors. The Four Star KOs are some of the most inventive and original in terms of toy robot knockoffs. If you want to check one out what one of these Phantoms looked like still in the box you can see that at the Super Toy Archive. I've also found ads for the Four Star Dinobots and Four Star Insecticons plus some other Transistor Robots that I didn't recognize as Transformers. Those will go up eventually at the VSTP. If you'd like to see more Four Star figures you can do so at Kidk0rrupt's bootlegs page or just google something like "four star transformers".

Here's another Transformerish robot in a drug store ad. This time it's the Shockwave mold that gets pimped in this Eckerd drug store ad from December 2nd 1984. I'm not sure that calling this a bootleg would be correct since the mold seems pretty dead on and ToyCo (the company that made the Shockwave mold) did license it out to more than just Hasbro. The "Galactic Man" Radio Shack version is a ToyCo licensed figure as is their own "AstroMagnum". Eckerd also ran a lot of Transistor robots ads but I doubt this was a Four Star Shockwave because the mold seems different from the Four Star version. You can see pictures of a Four Star Shockwave here at Kidk0rrupt's page. The quality of the ad image isn't good enough for me to definitively determine if this was possibly a Four Star Shockwave with a variant gun barrel but the box isn't pictured so I can't say for sure. I'd guess this is an ad for AstroMagnum.

With all the bootleg varmints I rounded up in Houston and Florida, I've got enough to start my own corral of outlaw toy ads at the Space Toaster Palace. I'd really like to promise here that I'll have it up by a certain date, but you know how big I am on chronological irrelevance.