On the fourth day of GoBots, Toys and Gifts Outlet gave to me..something that kind of looks like Boba Fett humping a Gobotronian sewer drain unclogger

Sometimes the best looking newspaper ads are for the worst looking toy robots. This has been historically true for the line of GoBots guns made by licensee Arco. Their gun modes had all sorts of great role playing functionality that went way beyond what the Transformers had in Megatron and Shockwave. The Arco GoBots were cap guns and water pistols. They were a lot of fun to play with but they looked ridiculous and the robot modes were awful.

Yet for some reason these toys had ads that made them look awesome. A while ago I was blown away by a beautiful line art rendition of the three Arco robots in a Tuesday Morning ad. I realized then that maybe the robots weren't as terrible as I thought and it was just their colors that made their design unappealing. They probably look great in ads because the black and white line art medium reduces these horrible multicolored robots to their most elegant mechanical forms. This December 15, 1985 ad from a store called Toys and Gifts Outlet makes Hot Chamber the GoBots cap rifle look pretty awesome to me, although I can see where Alex Bickmore from the Super Toy Archive is coming from when he says it looks like an alien butt probe.