Bots to be Thankful For

October 12th was the Saturday of New York Comic Con 2013! Well, not for me. Instead of going to NYCC all I did was dwell on how I was stuck in a beachy vacation paradise while I cracked open the 65th seal of the Roboplastic Apocalypse. Yet somehow I was able to drown my sorrows with a weekend of fun doing south Florida style convention stuff at UltraCon 2013 . Trust me, it was really hard trying to be happy while surrounding myself with young half naked women in tiny costumes made of salad. Despite the fantastic comic book based boobery I was enjoying, my mind continued to wander off to the northern side of the east coast where Robo Force was being relaunched at New York Comic Con! What do the new Robo Forcers look like? What insanely rare and incredibly low priced Transformers artifacts did I find at the convention I went to? And why has it taken me 65 episodes to finally do a listener appreciation show? Find out all that and more in this ALL I NEED TO BE HAPPY IS FOUR LISTENERS AND A BOTTLE OF RANCH DRESSING edition of the podcastalypse!

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CALLING MISTER ROBO FORCE

First of all I want to thank tremendously John of Toyfinity.com who sent me this picture of the new Robo Force toys slated to be released later this year. He had a table at NYCC where he debuted the figures and even put some orange Maxx Zeroes out. Keep checking TheRoboForce.com for more news on this most robotastic of 80s toyline rebirths.


NOW THAT'S CARGO SPACE

I loaded up the van with some 80s Hasbro Toy Fair catalogs and my giant cardboard SDF-1 and took it all to UltraCon! The idea was that I'd meet up with some guys that are in this south Florida collector club I'm a part of and we'd all take pictures with the Macross and look through the books and be happy and boy was I wrong. That didn't happen but it is kind of fun listening to me trying to complain about it all even though I was pretty happy with how everything else went. I guess the point of the story is don't assume everyone is going to be ready when your giant superdimensional space fortress crashes the party.


ONE LOCO DISPLAY

It's always fun seeing what UltraCon convention organizer Irving Santiago literally brings to the table. His display of thousands of action figures for sale from the 80s through today was overwhelming as usual. Of course I gravitated towards the Transformers and GoBots he brought. It was fun seeing a bunch of Dinobots hung up in plastic boxes like slabs of beef at a slaughterhouse. It reminded me of my idea that Jurassic Park should have been a restaurant that served dinosaurs to eat and not a theme park that raised them just to look at.


THE TRANSFORMERS BUFFET

Speaking of eating the robots, one table at UltraCon had this crazy setup where all the Transformers were in to-go boxes like you'd get at a restaurant! The big jumble of parts that was Computron sort of looked like Thanksgiving Day leftovers as he lay in his big foil turkey dish.


A DOGGY BAG OF DESTRUCTION

So I'm at the buffet and everything seems a bit high priced, but then I spy a sandwich bag with some decoys. But not just any decoys, a couple of red Decepticon decoys! You may recognize the red US released Decepticons as the most sought after of the decoy variants. I knew this but not really being up on the decoy secondary market I kind of shrugged when the guy said he wanted ten bucks each for them. After doing a two-for-fifteen on the red Scavenger and Megatron I still kind of felt like I paid too much. But when I checked how much a red Megatron went for recently on eBay I was floored. It looks like the $7.50 I spent on him wasn't too bad after all!



I doubt that same sort of magic will happen for me, especially since only one guy bid on the thing. It may be that the only guy in the world who was willing to go that high was the guy who found that auction. But I wouldn't mind putting the ones I got at the show up to see if a little rubber Megatron I bought for $7.50 can finance my purchase of a $90 Masterpiece G2 Side Swipe.


COLOR ME GRATEFUL

And now I would like to thank a few listeners whose recent communications with me have led to my acquisition of wonderful knowledge or just cool stuff. First off a big thanks to Jared Cronin for giving me the heads up on a super affordable set of Decepticon Color Me Stickers. I complained in an earlier episode about missing out on these and explained in my review of the Soundwave pages of the 1984 Hasbro Toy Fair catalog why I was so intensely interested in them. They're actually based on the line art that was used in '84 Transformers newspaper ads (which was in turn derived from the '84 Toy Fair catalog pages as you can see below). So if you're a line art nut then they're cool to have. And if you're not a line art nut, then they're still kind of cool to have in an obscure artifact kind of way. Either way I wanted to publicly thank Jared for giving me the heads up on these.

Thanks, Irving Santiago!

CLOSING THANKS

I also wanted to do a shout out to Aaron Schnuth of Scnuth.com, who used to do the Weekly Anime Review Podcast. WARP was definitely an early inspiration to me and it's funny to think that he's listened to an episode or two of mine.

Last but not least I wanted to thank the anonymous commenter who pointed out to me this Houston Chronicle slideshow of pictures featuring a giant 3 1/2 foot Leader-1 in jet mode. We believe it may be the same figure I posted a robot mode picture of but couldn't identify. All I knew is that a giant GoBot existed thanks to newspaper reports of the Robert Malone GoBot publicity tour in 1984, but I never found a picture of it. So this Houston Chronicle picture is like the linchpin that ties it all together. It's extremely rare evidence of an even rarer artifact that I've not seen documented anywhere else.