All I am saying is give Force a chance!

If there was one section of the Vintage Space Toaster Palace that I'd be most guilty of being lackadaisical about maintaining, it would have to be the page I've made for Robo Force. I'm not a big Robo Force fan myself so it's hard for me to get enthusiastic when I feel like there's not a single other person out there who would appreciate a collection of old newspaper ads dedicated to Ideal's line of warrior robots with crusher arms and gripper bases. Unlike Voltron or Transformers or even GoBots there is no organized online Robo Force fandom with multiple webpages and message boards dedicated to these most unique and short lived toy robots from 1984. There is no shared enthusiasm to get a guy all hyped up about his Robo Force ads collection page, right? People aren't blogging about the awesome Robo Force figure they found the other day or talking about it on podcasts, right? You don't see Robo Force figures making cameos on Sesame Street, right? Nobody cares about Robo Force, right? Of course they do! You just have to know where to look. What I mean is you need a Robo Forced perspective!

YES I CAN TELL YOU HOW TO GET TO SENTINEL STREET

This all started a couple weeks ago when Robo Force began popping up in my life on a consistent basis in some of the wierdest places! First I was listening to the March 22nd episode of Art & Story Extreme when host Jerzy Drozd started going off about how he missed out on watching the the Robo Force cartoon special as a kid. This got me a little motivated to work on my site but the thought of dealing with writing all the code for adding over a hun-dred new ads was intimidating. Then not two days later I was watching Sesame Street with my son when all of a sudden there's a short sequence with a little boy dreaming about being in outer space between two robots and they used Sentinel and Vulgar from Robo Force in it! How weird and random was that? So I started halfheartedly working on getting the page updated while keeping my eyes open for another instance of Robo Force, because if things happen in threes I take it as an omen that I am supposed to be blogging about it, especially if it is toy robots. Sure enough, on March 29th, Shawn over at Branded in the 80s posted about a Robo Force figure he found at a flea market! The harbingers of the Robo ForceTastic Apocalypse were upon me! I had been shown the signs, I had been sucked in by the gripper base of fortune! I had been crushed in the crusher arms of destiny! My fate was Steeled!

WELCOME TO THE ROBO FORCETASTIC APOCALYPSE!

So with renewed vigor and enthusiasm I finished updating the Robo Force page at the Vintage Space Toaster Palace. Seeing so many ads for Robo Force made me want to learn more about this line I had totally overlooked when I was a kid. I pulled out an old hardcover Robo Force book I won in an eBay lot of Transformer stuff a couple years ago and read through it. I was amazed at how enjoyable it was even decades after it came out. So I was curious and I recently went back to eBay and other online venues and bought up every Robo Force book I could find. I looked all over the internet for anything that had to do with the fiction of the Robo Force universe. I wanted to explore its mythology and see what I missed out on when I was 10 in 1984. What was Robo Force really all about? What could be learned from its appearances in newspaper ads and other media? How different was Ideal's approach to marketing toy robots as compared to that of Hasbro and Tonka? How did those crusher arms work anyways? I hope to answer all those questions and more in this Robo Force themed week of the Roboplastic Apocalypse! If it all goes as planned I'll get a good five posts out and even do a Podcastalypse about Robo Force at the end of the week! Yup, it's all Robo Force all the time, all this week on the Robo-est, Force-iest, Robo Forceiest blogocalypse of all-The Robo ForceTastic Apocalypse!



Crush me in your crusher arms
Grip me in your gripper bases
Spin me with your 360 degree
spinning robot waistes...