Merry Karza and Happy New Acroyear, my fellow Micronautians. With 2010 upon me I resolved this would be the year I stop complaining about being behind with updating the Vintage Space Toaster Palace and finally do something about it. The problem is that doing so takes a lot of work and it is much easier to write GoBots jokes on my blog than do something worthwhile like working on my site. Hopefully this year I will find the balance between the fun of building the only website that contains thousands of ads but generates absolutely no revenue and chronicling the soul crushing adventures of a man who has distilled the fun of toy robots into the world's most boring hobby involving hours upon hours of library visits staring at microfilm machines.
BEING THE BIGGEST "MICRO" ANYTHING IS A BIT OF AN OXYMORON
Best 11/18/79
The one area of the VSTP that was really bugging me was how I left the reformatting of my Micronauts page unfinished, so that became my first priority this week. In addition to having several dozen ads worth of Micro backlog I also didn't know what to write for those brief introductory paragraphs on my Micronauts page that encapsulate the history of the line in newspaper ads. Those three paragraphs were the most daunting task. It was scary because on one hand I'm the guy amassing this collection of Micronauts material but on the other I really don't know much about them beyond what little experience I had playing with them when I was four years old. How could I possibly write anything authoritative on a subject I'm pretty ignorant about? Then I thought, hey I've been doing that for years on this blog and I never let that stop me. So I stuck with what little I knew and my historical retrospective on late 1970s Micronauts newsprint advertising ended up being more about Star Wars and Shogun Warriors but who cares anyways. It matters not that the biggest collection of Micronauts ads on the internet is run by the biggest Micro-poser ever, all that's important is people know 11 bucks was what it cost to buy something called a Hornetroid in 1979.Lionel Playworld 12/09/79
MICROFANS AND MICRONUTS SOUND LIKE PARTS FOR REALLY TINY COMPUTERS
Getting my Micro-act together is important because J.J. Abrams is supposed to be doing a Micronauts movie and Hasbro's acquired the toy license (which probably means a relaunching of this brand), all of which are signs of the Roboplastic Apocalypse. So I want to not embarrass myself by having a half-assed Micronaut page in case any real fans come by to check it out. More importantly I want to not mislead anyone jumping on the Micronaut bandwagon in the future in case the movie really takes off and wearing shirts of robot horses, space winnebagos, alien lobsters and Hornetroids becomes the cool thing to do among the Hot Topic crowd. People will have a tough enough time already trying to figure out what Micronauts is about without me confusing them. Hell, I call the Micronauts line a "vanguard of the modern toy robot age" and I'm naut even sure it's about robots. It's not possible to work so closely with the ads and not learn some things about the line but Micronauts still kind of confuses me. Like if you have a rocket car why do you need a robot horse? Here's hoping J.J. Abrams can do as great a job explaining Micronauts as he did with that Cloverfield backstory.
LIBRARIANS DON'T LOVE BOOKS THEY LOVE THE DEWEY DECIMAL SYSTEM
In a nautshell what I wanted to do with this post was let the world know that the Micronauts page of the Vintage Space Toaster Palace has been updated with a ton of new* entries including many nice ads I've blogged about within the past six months plus some other stuff. Although oftentimes I find Micronauts a disconnected uncohesive mess of varying action figure concepts, arranging all the ads in a way that makes sense of the assortments is challenging and fun. Therein lies the appeal and motivation in maintaining a page for a toyline I know very little about and have no real nostalgic connection to. I did wonder a couple of times why I was doing this as I was writing up the thousands of lines of Micronauts HTML for the page and it came down to the reason being more than recognizing the importance of this line's place in the history of the modern Roboplastic Age. Micronauts ads just look awesome! Like I've hypothesized before, toy robots fans are actually more fans of pictures of toy robots than the robots themselves and I may not know what a Hornetroid is but man it sure is pretty.
*30 years old
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