The first hard rock robots movie!

With all the great stuff that came out celebrating the 25th anniversary of The Transformers: The Movie I forgot that this year is also the anniversary of GoBots: Battle of the Rock Lords. I ran across the newspaper version of the BotRL theatrical poster from its opening day (March 21, 1986)*. I don't remember seeing this one as a kid, or if I did it didn't make much of an impression. I wouldn't say it's a terrible ad-it's just the worst looking newspaper ad for an animated movie I've ever seen. It looks like all they did was rip out a page from a coloring book and call it a day. Actually this art does have its origins somewhere else. The original GoBots Battle of the Rock Lords theatrical poster it came from is pretty nice looking in full color but it suffers here in the transition to black and white line art. I don't know why they didn't go with a greyscale version of the color poster like what was done for The Transformers: The Movie in newspaper movie sections. The GoBots newspaper ad consequently looks rather crude and lacking in sophistication by comparison. It's kind of odd considering they ran all sorts of nice greyscale promos for the GoBots cartoon and then this thing looks little better than an ad for a direct to home video 22 minute cartoon.



*Which also happens to be opening day for the BMX bike epic RAD