Showing posts with label GoBots. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GoBots. Show all posts

Friday, March 20, 2015

GoBot or GoLanta!



The cracking of the 81st seal of the Roboplastic Apocalypse unleashes hundreds of action figure people, monsters, and robots blasting off in their little plastic space ships and shuttles for the Marriot Century Center in Atlanta, Georgia! Journey with the Nostrodomatron to the lost continent of JoeLanta where all manner of exotic action figures and people from the last 40 years of toy aisles gathered to buy toys, sell toys, dress up like toys, and drop toys on each others' heads from 15 stories high. Listen to bizarre stories of me talking to exciting new people like 90s Robotech artist Dusty Griffin, reuniting with exciting old people like Radio Free Cybertron's Brian Kilby, and skillfully avoiding katanas to my face while in the presence of Larry Hama. How much fun was it being a teenager drawing a Robotech comic book in the 90s? How much not fun was it missing out on the cool JoeLanta panels? And what happens when you enter a GI Joe convention's cosplay contest dressed in a cardboard GoBot costume? Find out all that and more in this GOing IS HALF THE BATTLE edition of the Podcastalypse!

Or download it directly

See a ton more of my JoeLanta 2015 pictures at Flickr Macrocrania.


SLAY YOUR WALLET AND ALL YOU DESIRE SHALL BE YOURS

It's been a long time since I've been to a convention in a hotel where the focus is purely on toys, and I've never been to one on the magnitude of JoeLanta. JoeLanta is like a Secret Wars world of toys where the Beyonder made a hotel from different 80s toy store aisles and combined them all into one absolutely magical old toy shopping experience. To describe this as a 12 inch G.I. Joe con or even just a hotel toy convention doesn't do it justice. JoeLanta is almost like visiting a Toys R Us that hasn't sold out of anything since 1976. There was every gigantic toy playset from every major toyline going back to the early 80s. I saw the Death Star, Castle Greyskull, Snake Mountain, Fortress Maximus, Defiant Shuttle Complexes, Terrordromes, Boulder Hill, the U.S.S. Flagg, and the GoBot Command Center. About the only notably missing stuff was playsets from lesser known lines like Robo Force, Voltron, and Robotech but they may have been there and I just didn't see them. It was an absolute blast because you never knew what you were going to see as you walked around. Just about every toyline from my late 70s/mid 80s childhood was represented by loose, boxed, or sealed toys or paraphernalia. Ironically I didn't see any Secret Wars toys but at JoeLanta you LIVE the Secret Wars of toys. .


WHEN TOYLINETINENTS COLLIDE

Highlights of the show for me included seeing a loose AND boxed Mattel Godzilla, a Matchbox Robotech Destroid Monster with the Kay Bee clearance price tag of $1.99, the entire first series of carded Rock Lords for 35 bucks each, and the hardcover version of the Kid Stuff read along Transformers book 'When Continents Collide'. (You can see a picture of me buying it here.) I didn't even know the hardcover version existed and I was further floored to find it had extra illustrations not included in the softcover version I grew up with! I will probably be doing a post about that in the future because I did not expect to make such a momentous new-to-me Transformers discovery like that. I was so pumped that I went online to research it and came across this great episode of the Fanholes podcast featuring an in depth exploration of When Continents Collide and also Satellite of Doom. Super huge thanks to Andrea's 80s Toys for selling me the book for five bucks. I haven't been this excited about continental collisions since 1985.


RETURN TO RETURN TO MACROSS

Dusty Griffin was just seventeen years old back in 1996 when he drew and inked the last seven issues of Academy Comics' 'Robotech: Return to Macross'. In the only portion of this episode actually recorded at JoeLanta, we talked about what it was like working for a tiny indie comic studio that somehow landed the international Robotech license. It was fun getting to meet a guy who was living the dream drawing the final seven issues of a Robotech book at an age when my biggest accomplishment was getting a letter printed in the Transformers comic. We hit on what it was like having critics (and how he handled one of his more outspoken ones), working with Harmony Gold, and how he's still drawing robotty stuff all these years later.


THE MOST DANGEROUS CON IN THE WORLD

The Saturday night parachute drop was pretty much my whole reason for attending. People would strap parachutes to their twelve inch tall GI Joes and drop them 15 stories from the top of the hotel onto the grateful heads of the assembled uplookers in the lobby below. Or at least that's what they were supposed to do. The figures whose parachutes successfully deployed weren't in the clear unless they avoided veering into lower floor hallways, getting stuck on the lobby light fixtures, or flying into the dreaded elevator shafts. This insanity is what sets Joelanta apart from your normal toy convention craziness. This insanity is also what separates the Marriot from hotels with working elevators.


Crappy phone pic I took at the Collecting Transformers panel.


Radio Free GoBotron! Scooter hangs with Andrew, Brian, and Rob from RFC.


CHALLENGE OF THE JOEBOT COSTUME

My Scooter costume was in terrible shape after the last time I wore it at Florida Supercon. It was smashed to hell all stuffed into a tiny suitcase, torn and broken with missing pieces, and I don't know what the heck I was thinking making his face eyerolling like that. So I decided what Scooter needed for GoLanta was a complete overhaul including new parts and getting that frown turned upside down. Unfortunately I decided to start working on this at the last minute but that was cool because driving yourself crazy finishing your ridiculous costume is standard practice as I learned from Yaya Han on that Heroes of Cosplay show. So I spent all night Saturday until 5 am Sunday fixing up the thing in the hotel bathroom so as to not disturb my family with the sound of unrolling duct tape and the smell of sharpie marker. Sunday morning once it was go time I realized I had to choose between attending Larry Hama's Silent Interlude panel dressed up as a cardboard robot or just going as a normal weirdo. Since I wanted maximum GoBot costume time and I didn't want to be a distraction at his panel, I chose to suit up and not attend. It was a tough choice but I think it was the right one because any convention where I can leave without getting my ass kicked by Larry Hama is a good one.


CALAMITY AND JOE

Last December I got to meet Larry Hama and he gave me thirty minutes that forever changed my life (or at least an appreciation of Broadway show tunes). This go round was supposed to be the momentous occasion where I introduced him to my kid (and the more momentouser occasion where I'd get my Bucky O' Hare Christmas cards signed). But we're there at his table and my son blanks out like he's never heard of Bucky O' Hare before, making me seem like one of Chuck Dixon's Seven Deadly Fans. Then I forgot to pull out my Bucky O' Hare Christmas cards and to top it all off I'm dressed as a cardboard GoBot. The whole time I get the feeling he was just waiting to plant a katana in my forehead if I gave him a reason to. So I wasn't exactly endearing myself to the man but he did sign my 30th anniversary copy of Silent Interlude, my Peter Porker #1, and my Blinky.


NO GOOD GOBOT COSTUME GOES UNPUNISHED

I was having my delusions of JoeLantean grandeur and gift certificates so I decided to enter the costume contest, which I've never done before despite my history of robot costume ridiculousness. In keeping with my GoBot or Go Home attitude I decided to answer all the emcee's questions in character with my horrendous Frank Welker impersonation which hopefully did not get recorded despite all those bright little red lights I saw floating in the sea of audience darkness. It was pretty trippy when the room exploded in applause after Scooter admitted being made of cardboard and duct tape. It was also pretty weird when the winner was determined by which contestant got the most cheers from the crowd and they cheered the loudest for me! But the most surreal part of the whole experience was when I went to collect my prize expecting to get a gift certificate to the dealer room and they instead gave me my choice of four Monster High dolls. But in the end I was just grateful that the JoeLanta crowd let any ani-GoBot hate go and elected me their king. And I was also grateful nobody showed up dressed as Optimus Prime.



SHOW NOTES OF THE PODCASTALYPSE
Posted by Evil King Macrocranios at 4:24 PM 2 comments
Labels: , , , , , ,

Saturday, January 17, 2015

The Bots Came Back!



The sound of the breaking of the 76th seal of the Roboplastic Apocalypse is the echo of a 30 years ago stampede of beeping, blooping, zipping, zapping, tape deck transforming, twin drill spinning, suction cup sucking, dinosaur stomping, Lamborghini crashing robots parading through the pages of Penny Power! Yes never before or since has a magazine ignored all the hype and marketing to bring kids the brutal truth about how much bang you got for your toy robot buck in 1984. This Consumer Reports magazine for kids took on all Tronians in an article titled "The Robots are Coming" from their Oct/Nov '84 issue before anyone even knew what a Decepticon Communicator was! Penny Power pulled no punches in its objective look at nearly every major robot line fighting it out in the early days of the Toy Robots Wars of the 1980s. It's the Starriors vs Armatron, the GoBots vs the GoDaiKins, RoboTron vs Robo Force, and Transformers vs...Magic Mike? Who will win? Who will lose? Whose transforms will leave the kids confused? Find out all this and more in this ONE WATCH TO RULE THEM ALL edition of the Podcastalypse!

Or download it directly

Read along with your own copy of the article here!



I CAUGHT A F.I.S.H.B.O.T.!!!

Waaaay back in episode 18 of the Podcastalypse I did a review of a Penny Power article from '85 where they evaluated some cool toy robots like the Zoids Giant Zrk, Starriors' Deadeye, and the Robotroid Space Station. But during the review I mentioned how there was an earlier Penny Power magazine article I remembered with tons more robot reviews in it that I didn't have. Then a couple months ago I talked to myself some more about how I'd missed out on an auction for that very most legendary issue and felt terrible about it. I felt bad because when it comes to my love of toy robots, Penny Power's "The Robots are Coming" article in their Oct/Nov 1984 issue is ground zero. I was a kid when it came out and it made a huge robot raygun blast right through my brain. In this episode I talk about the circumstances under which I saw it first come and go through my life in 1984 when I was in first grade reading it at the school library, taking it for granted and eventually seeing it nevermore. I had pretty much given up hope of ever finding it again because even on eBay issues of Penny Power are few and far between. Then last week the big penny in the sky used his power to give me another shot when I thought all my luck was spent. I was grateful and I learned that in life you can't count on second chances, but you can count on eBay's saved search alerts to let you know when somebody is selling the crap you want.

DO IT WITH BUY-IT-NOW OR DON'T BOTHER DOING IT

So the other day I got an email alert from eBay that someone was selling a stack of Penny Power magazines. I was super excited but the auction description said they ranged from '81 to '94 and although there were something like 24 issues in there, the range was wide enough that there was no guarentee that my issue would be one of the ones in there. What made it tricky to guess was that the only picture in the auction was of a pile of magazines where only the cover of the one on top was clearly visible. But thanks to the tiny little picture of the cover I saved from the last time someone was selling one, I was able to zero in on a very tiny sliver of the cover to the magazine buried at the very bottom of the stack. It took a ton of photo manipulation but I swore I could make out the hood of Jazz, the deluxe Autobot car from 1984. I was still not 100% sure so I sent the seller an email message asking if it was indeed the Oct/Nov 1984 issue. Well waiting for him to get back to me was more than I could bear. What if someone heard me talking about how legendary and great this issue was and set up their own eBay alert so they could buy one if it popped up? I couldn't stand the suspense so I just went ahead and bought the lot before the seller got back to me, which he eventually did and confirmed it was the issue I was looking for. I was elated and amazed and I felt really really lucky at having beaten my phantom competition. Then I laughed because I realized in order for it all to have played out like it did in my mind, someone would actually have to be paying attention to my show since episode 18.

First up it's GoBots, GoDaikin, RoboTron, the Radio Shack Armatron, and Robo Force!

Next it's Starriors, Magic Mike, the Kronoform Time Machine and then almost every assortment of Transformers available at the time.




With all those Ram-Mans and Robotrons it's amazing
Playworld ever went out of business!
SHOW NOTES OF THE PODCASTALYPSE


Posted by Evil King Macrocranios at 2:22 PM 3 comments
Labels: , , , , , ,

Friday, August 08, 2014

How to fail at robots without really crying

If a man tries to do a Transformer panel at a convention but there is no audience to see it, does he make a sound? Oh you bet your Confucious he does and that sound is the breaking of the 71st seal of the Roboplastic Apocalypse! Join me in glorious despair as I play recordings from my hellacious experience during an absolute train wreck of a con where nothing went right and I regressed into some strange adult version of my ten year old self crying about the ending of Fire in the Sky. It's a podcastalyptic convention catastrophe extravaganza as great unknown mysteries of roboplasticology are answered at the cost of great embarrassment and humiliation to your friendly neighborhood Nostrodomatron. Yet if there's one thing I know it's that with great embarrassment and humiliation comes great entertainment value. Because the beauty of MP3 technology is that if I can't have fun at a convention, you bet I'll share all the not fun with you. Hey which toy robot magazine article from 1984 changed my life? Did Mike Zeck pencil the cover to Transformers #3? Is it better to have paneled badly than never to have paneled at all? And what am I supposed to do with all this suck? Get answers to that and more in this HOW TO NOT HAVE FUN WHEN NOBODY'S LOOKING edition of the podcastalypse!

Or download it directly

F.I.S.H.B.O.T. of the episode-Penny Power October 1984

And just so I don't come across as a completely ungrateful crybaby, I would like to say that seeing Pat Broderick and Pablo Marcos at Ultracon was awesome.


Mr. Marcos signed the Kid Stuff books he co-illustrated with his daughter Judith.

I finally got to ask Mike Zeck if he penciled the cover to the old Marvel Transformers #3 at Tampa Bay Comic Con 2014. Let's just say it was a good thing I brought copies of ToyFare #74 for him to sign, too.


R2-D2 @ TBCC 14

Here's what I meant about the Megatron models being different on the covers to TF #2 and 3. The heads and cannons are different so I doubt Mike Golden did #3.


Navarro Pharmacy 25 November 1984



SHOW NOTES OF THE PODCASTALYPSE
Posted by Evil King Macrocranios at 7:27 PM 4 comments
Labels: , , , , ,

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

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!

Or download it directly



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.
Posted by Evil King Macrocranios at 1:19 PM 4 comments
Labels: , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)
 

Minibox 3 Column Blogger Template by James William at 2600 Degrees

Evil King Macrocranios was voted king by the evil peoples of the Kingdom of Macrocrania. They listen to Iron Maiden all day and try to take pictures of ghosts with their webcams.