MANIC EXPRESSIONS: Toy robot shaving cream won't turn you into a man, but if you hold on they'll probably do Transformer brand Megan Fox blow up dolls

I was at a comic book store over the weekend where I saw two old board games from ages long ago-"The World of Micronauts" and "Voltron: Defender of the Universe". They brought tears to my eyes because they reminded me of how awesome my childhood was, full of toy robots and meaningful tie-in merchandise. Back then they didn't just slap a toy robot name brand on an existing game like Risk, Stratego or Monopoly as they do nowadays. Back when I was a kid board games were custom designed specifically for each franchise and everyone from GoBots to Robo Force to Transformers had one. Of course other properties like Smurfs and Muppet Babies had board games, too, but there were also instances of toy robots merchandising crossing over into areas Smurfs dare not tread. There was the Transformers Battlin' Robots game, which was a pretty good ripoff of Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots that combined the classic brutal Rock 'em Sock 'em style boxing ring combat with the fun of Cybertronian civil war. You couldn't do that with Muppet Babies!

HEY HASBRO DO ME A FAVOR-DROP THE "TRANS" AND JUST CALL 'EM "FORMER ROBOTS"

Here we are 25 years later after the Toy Robots Wars of the 1980s and all the classic robot lines are dead, save for the one surviving victor and a newer line in which the robots are a tacked on sideshow. I'm talking about what Hasbro passes off today as Transformers and Bandai's Power Rangers, which I count as one and a half toy robots lines since Power Rangers is less about robots and more about kids in color coordinated costumes dancing around like spastic ninja Teletubbbies. Transformers is getting increasingly watered down, too, with Hasbro devoting more and more attention to Transformers that don't transform.

From Weeble Wobbles to their RPM line of die cast cars with the robots molded on the bottom, it's getting trickier to figure out what it means to be a Transformer. There are more toys to choose from but they're increasingly removed from the traditional notion of what a Transformer is. As Habro's focus moves further away from the manufacture of transforming toy robots and more to creating "expressions of the brand" the line between product and advertising blurs. Just putting the picture of a robot on a toy doesn't make it a robot, does it? And boy do they love putting pictures of robots on stuff. Toy robot marketing has gotten way out of control in this age of Power Rangers fishing poles and Transformers shaving cream where they'll put a robot on anything. Robots licensing has run amok and you can see it in the sad dead eyes of this kid who did a video review of the Transformers shaving set on YouTube. Much like the fake razor with which he shaves Optimus Prime's robot cream from his face, toy robots and their associated cross promotional merchandising have lost their edge.

EACH CHILDHOOD SOLD SEPARATELY-1985 NOT FOR USE WITH SOME GENERATIONS

Just pointing out how much it sucks to be a toy robot fan nowadays doesn't get us anywhere and it doesn't help the poor kids born into this dilemma. In addition to complaining what must also be done is a good amount of gloating about how much better I had it 25 years ago. Now I'm not saying the 1980s toy robot lines were devoid of their share of absurd cross promotional merchandising like underwear, big wheels, slot racing tracks and Halloween costumes that transformed children into miniature mascots of their parent's favorite toylines. But occasionally toy robots got it right and made it onto promotional items that struck a perfect balance between things that were not action figures but still did an incredible job of capturing the character and spirit of la vida roboto. So instead of feeling bad for the kids today and their Transformer themed fishing poles and personal hygiene equipment, I instead choose to retreat into the past and look at the greatest examples of toy robot cross promotion of all time. Actually this is what I do whenever I'm feeling bad about anything in general.

NEXT TIME ON ROBOPLASTIC COMPLAINALYPSE: THE FIVE GREATEST TOY ROBOT LICENSING TIE-INS OF ALL RECORDED HISTORY EVER IN THE UNIVERSE THAT I ALSO HAPPEN TO HAVE FOUND NEWSPAPER ADS FOR

Behold the Lunar Podcastalypse!

The never ending intergalactic robot war continues as the Kingdom of Macrocrania dispatches its mighty king to do battle against those who fight robots on the moon! Yes I'm talking about me dropping in on the Moon Masters episode 179! I explore various issues of ethics and technology with my podcast heroes Apoc D and Mick Aloha as we take a look at using podcasts to scam money off of anime fans, the legality of running a site full of 25 year old toy robots ads, why Amazon.com hates Antarctica and how I'm probably not cut out to be a motivational speaker.

OH MY ZOG!

L-R: Beaver Cleaver in drag, Bea Arthur, Dildo Smurf, Ted Danson, God cosplaying as Orko, Cucumber Satan

As if in answer to my prayers for pictures of the unproduced Zoggies, a French blogger has put up scans of the Wheeled Warriors portion of the 1986 Mattel Catalog. This contains pictures of what would have been the second year of Wheeled Warriors had it not been canceled. There's some great unreleased stuff like the Thunderstruction Environment and Vehicle sets, Motorvators and Monstervators snap on motorized vehicle chassis, new Monster Minds like Bru-Toss and the Grim Creeper, prototypes of the Fling Shot and Spray Gunner and of course the figures of Jayce and the gang (plus Zoggies!) and last but not least-Saw Boss the figure!

Unfortunately the blog triggers my Norton Anti-Virus because of a trojan in one of the .gifs related to the bloghost. The Norton report is here. If you're protected against Bloodhound.Exploit.281 then go ahead and check it out:

http://nhtpirate.over-blog.com/article-jayce-et-les-conquerants-de-la-lumiere-catalogue-mattel-us-1986-43701598.html

Roll out! (and in again and out again and in again etc, etc.)

So I'm at the library doing the microfilm thing when this late teens/early twenties girl taps me on the shoulder and asks if I could help her out with a problem she's having on her microfilm machine. And she's alright if you're into nerdy chicks. She said her roll was stuck somehow and I thought she should probably be asking the library people about this because whenever I try fixing a microfilm machine it always ends with blood. Well we get to her machine and what she's done to her roll is truly inhumane and unholy. There was bent, folded, spindled and mutilated microfilm shoved in and sticking out of places on that machine where microfilm was not meant to be. Then something became clear to me-not how she did it because my rudimentary grasp of physics cannot explain how this girl warped the very fabric of reality to do whatever she did to that poor roll of microfilm-but that she did it on purpose! She actively sabotaged her machine to be all talking to me. And I said, "Look, I know this is your way of flirting but after what you did to that microfilm there's no way I'm letting you anywhere near my wiener!"

GOODBYE PS3 Strikes Back!

Just when I thought all of my Playstation problems were behind me a new chapter opened in the epic saga of man vs. technology (or at least me vs. Playstation Store). Old timey readers will remember how back in October my 60gb launch Playstation suffered the dancing yellow light of death which bricked it. Some people believe this is symptomatic of a hardware failure involving the melting of solder used to attach certain chips to a circuit board but whatever it was the end result was like someone just ran KILLALLNERDS.EXE on my PS3. So after a considerably long mourning period for all the lost episodes of Shin Mazinger Z and other animes on my hard drive, I sent my system in to get repaired then they sent me a new refurbished one. And we all lived happily ever after doing what the PS3 was made for-watching torrented animes, surfing BigBooty.com, downloading podcasts and occasionally playing a videogame, right?

Of course not.



I WISH THEY HADN'T CHANGED THE STATION

The other night I went to download a movie trailer and I got a weird message on the screen-"This PS3 system cannot be activated...you must deactivate another system." And I'm just stunned looking there trying to figure out what it meant. Did I miss something when I was doing the system setup on this new machine? Is my old system still alive somewhere and now I have to worry about my credit card info getting stolen? OMG DO I STILL HAVE KILLALLNERDS.EXE? Well thanks to people who have been through this before, I figured out what happened essentially was that Sony uses a form of DRM that forever associates my PSN ID with the first PS3 I used it on. This first system then becomes the only one on which I can watch videos I download from their Playstation Store. To break the association I'd have to do what they call "deactivating" that first system and only after I do that can I log on to a new PS3 with my PSN ID and watch videos I've downloaded. But the problem is my old system bricked before I was able to do that. I can't watch any new movie content and I can't deactivate the old system because Sony has it, or it's been refurbished and some other guy now has it. Regardless, deactivation of my account is no longer possible on the old machine wherever it is.

SONY WARS EPISODE IV-A NEW HELP

But all is not lost. After reading a couple of other stories like this on message boards I've figured out that it is theoretically possible for Sony to deactivate my old console on their end. The trick is finding someone there who understands my problem and asking them to do it in a way that does not make me sound like an irate douchebag. Most irate douchebags call Sony up immediately once they find their phone number but I chose to play by the rules and I sent an email first explaining the situation and here's what I got back (more or less)-

"Hello,

Thank you for writing to us about deactivating your PlayStation®Network account.

We will submit the request for you to our PlayStation®Network Account Specialists. After the request has been submitted, it will be processed within 3-5 business days. If the PlayStation®Network Specialist decides to deactivate your account, then we will e-mail your information to the Sign-In ID (e-mail address) associated with the PlayStation®Network account.

You can check on the status of your deactivation under Case#BLAHBLAHBLAH..."

And that's where I am now. Hoping that some account specialist will have the common sense to do what should have been done once Sony decided to send me a new refurbed system. I understand that Sony uses system activation to keep people from logging on to multiple consoles and downloading the same movies on multiple machines but in the case of a system being sent in for repair or replacement, deactivation should be part of the procedure. I'm pretty sure they'll see I'm not a movie pirate and this'll all be figured out in a matter of days, but if they don't then I don't know where I'm going from here (aside from BigBooty.com.)

------------------------------------UPDATE----------------------------------------

I got an email the evening of the same day I posted this. In it I got the news:

"Dear KingMacrocranios,

You recently requested assistance with your PlayStation® Network account and the Video Download Service. Per your request, we have deactivated your original console from your account.

You can now activate your new console."

AND THEN VOOWAAA-LA!: (if I could put exclamation marks after pictures this would get one)



So it got taken care of and I did it all via email instead of over the phone. It may have taken a bit longer than calling Sony directly but I weighed how much my time was worth being on hold versus getting on with my life. It was a little over 48 hours from January 12th when I first emailed Sony to January 14th when I got the notice I was deactivated. And we all lived happily ever after doing what the PS3 was made for...I hope.

On the first day of 2010....WAS THE EIGHTH DAY OF GOBOTS

Ah, the first post of the new year. It sets the tone for all other bloggery that follows in the next three hundred something days. I was quite intimidated by the thought of writing this, the most definitive post of the year. It will define the trend, it will set the bar, it will mark where I was in my life on the day the twentyteen decade began. This post would serve as a snapshot of my soul-of the things most important to me at the start of the year that would mark my 36th ride around the sun. What great themes would inspire me to sit down and commit to internet a permanent record of my state of mind as I look forward to a new age of peace and happiness till all are one, till all are one, till all are one? Would I write of honor and sacrifice, or of world freedom and its invincible guardians? Would I write of love, or of family and other miscellaneous sentient beings? What weighty matter deserved this most sacred position in the chronicle of the Roboplastic Apocalypse? AND THEN I'M LIKE, DUDE, SUPER GOBOTS! Whenever I find myself faced with tough questions, Super GoBots is always the answer!

Montgomery Ward 12/18/85


GIVE ME A FACE!

I remember kids bringing Super GoBots to school in '84 and I just could not get very excited about them . The biggest problem was that the majority of the first Super GoBot series shared the same transformation scheme (cockpit becomes the head and hood becomes the chest/torso) and the vehicles were not very dissimilar to each other. The tank guy named Destroyer and 1985's Staks the orange semi were standouts not because they were good looking but because they proved recycling that transform could have been more interesting if it was applied to more than just Volkswagens, Porsches and Datsun 280-Zs. Psycho the future machine was probably the best of the car cockpit heads but you had to be a certain kind of kid to appreciate these robots without discernible faces. I was not that kind of kid. I could handle it when Robotech did it with their faceless robot jets but those were faceless, badass, armored, million missile launching, robot jet fighter planes in space. I'm only willing to forgive so much when all you do is turn into a Volkswagen (even if you're a Volkswagen with roof mounted missiles).

Montgomery Ward 11/10/85	TG&Y 11/17/85

SPAY-C YA NEXT YEAR

Toys R Us 11/06/85

But there was one Super GoBot I owned that I absolutely loved. It was Spay-C, the robot space shuttle. I had a thing for Space Shuttles just like every other kid in the mid eighties until that sort of blew up in our faces. But robot plus space shuttle were two great tastes that tasted great together. I had that little green Transformer one named Blast Off and the big white Transformer one named Astro Major that turned into a robot chicken riding a robot cat. There was also Astrotrain during the height of the Transformers' popularity but for some reason Hasbro just couldn't get it right and deliver a white space shuttle that turned into a humanoid robot. That's all I wanted and that's where Tonka's Spay-C saved the day. I loved that toy literally to pieces. All that's left of my Spay-C are a few broken bits of plastic and metal all beat to hell and unrecognizeable for what they once were, just like the real space shuttle! I swore one day I would rebuy Super Spay-C but every time I go to Botcon I see the prices dealers want for unopened ones and all I know is the one day I'm talking about definitely isn't Botcon day.

WALK A MILE IN MY LEADER-1DERPANTS

My father-in-law has said what a man finds himself doing on the first of the year is what that man will be doing every day for the rest of the year. Here I am sitting in a little room surrounded by the ghosts of 25 year old space shuttle robots and their transforming tank-faced cohorts reminiscing about when I was in fifth grade. That's kind of dumb but I'm also getting a bunch of GoBots ads ready for inclusion at the GoBots section of the Vintage Space Toaster Palace. I'm hoping that working on GoBots ads today means I'll be finding more of them this year. Although I have a decent representation of almost every GoBots figure and assortment for 1984 through 1985, in 1986 GoBots ads become extreeemly scare. Even if I do find GoBots ads in '86 they always feature older robots and it's always some sort of clearance. That sucks because '86 was when some of the best GoBots ever came out, super or not. What also sucks is that one time my father-in-law caught me wearing my wife's pants. He was like, um do you always wear my daughter's pants? And I was like, Dude! Super GoBots! That was one time Super Gobots was not the answer.

On the seventh day of GoBots, BnB Hardware gave to me...THE KING OF GOBOTRON

It was absolutely heartbreaking to see my favorite GoBot of all time sell on eBay the other day. Yes, a pristine example of the greatest GoBot and largest toy robot ever sold at retail went up on eBay and only pulled 26 bucks. I was so sorely tempted and yet I had no practical use for it because although my son is two he's more into his electric powered ride on car (that doesn't turn into a robot). Although I've loved this GoBots thing since the day I first found an ad for it, I felt like if I got it for the Prince of Macrocrania I would be forcing the robots on him which I really don't want to do, plus if I were to buy it for me I really have no room for this toy that's larger than Fortress Maximus. What's a 35 year old guy gonna do with a ridey toy for toddlers anyway? But oh well. At least I will still have this great ad I found for the GoBot ride-on from a store called BnB Hardware that ran December 19, 1985. OH WHO AM I KIDDING OF COURSE I WOULD HAVE TRIED TO RIDE IT.

VINTAGE SPACE TOAST TOUR ORLANDO ANYONE?

Florida manages the trifecta of Robotardation! First I move to Miami, then Star Wars Celebration 5 comes to Orlando in 2010 and now this. I have never before been so sure that my life is a hallucination and I am actually 10 years old and in a coma in 1984.

Death takes a holiday (and then goes to the library to look at toy robots ads)

It was about a year ago that my wife got the news we were moving to Miami so to introduce me to the area we started watching a tv show she liked called Dexter. I don't know if she was trying to make me feel comfortable or scare the crap out of me because Dexter is about this cereal killer guy who goes around Miami serial killing people without ever getting caught. Despite the specifics of the subject matter there are many close parallels between Dexter and anyone who lives with an overriding obsession that consumes their life-especially an obsession like looking at old toy robots ads in library microfilm archives. Dexter's constant struggle to maintain a normal appearing life while balancing the roles of father, husband, serial killer and guy with a job are much like my own juggling of life and collecting old toy robots newspaper ads at the library. Except without the serial killer part. Or job.

THE IMPORTANCE OF DEXTERCURRICULAR ACTIVITIES

Today the Queen of Macrocrania wanted to take the family to the big snow carnival for kids at the park but I wanted to go to the Fort Lauderdale main library to look for old toy robots newspaper ads. Lauderdale's library isn't open Sunday so the only shot I had was to hit it Saturday, which was the same day as the snow carnival. Snow carnival also only lasted for four hours and this was the one day it would be in our area this year. After consulting with the Queen we compromised on a plan where they would go alone without me and I would get to do what I wanted. But like Dexter what I really wanted was to do everything.

So we went to snow carnival and we waited in the hellaciously long line to dance with the Prince of Macrocrania on the snow hill and we got some pictures and I was satisfied with myself for doing the dad thing. Then I got on the bus just outside the gate of snow carnival land and went to the library, leaving my family behind. You know how the most overused self justification for engaging in retarded behavior is "Well at least I'm not doing drugs?" I wonder if serial killers think that.

DOING TODAY WHAT YOU COULD DO TOMORROW GETS IN THE WAY OF CATCHING UP ON WHAT YOU SHOULD HAVE DONE YESTERDAY

I was on the bus and I started wondering if I had done the right thing. Regret started welling up in the back of my mind. Not because I had abandoned my family but because I have such a huge backlog of old toy robots ads on my hard drive I haven't yet gotten up at the Vintage Space Toaster Palace. Knowing there's so much work to be done is overwhelming and it almost kills the fun of the hobby. Should I really have been looking for more ads when I have literally hundreds that already needed processing? Another thing I wonder about serial killers is if they find themselves in large crowds and feel overwhelmed by all the people there are to kill.

I'M A SERIAL TIME KILLER AND MY VICTIMS ARE ALL MY SATURDAYS

I don't even care where this came from

This trip marked my return to the library I was once so impressed by I called it FortLibrarius Maximus. But now lots of stuff has changed. The rows and rows of easy access microfilm reel drawers are all gone, hidden behind a booth. I have to ask the librarian for rolls and I can't get more than 4 at a time. Plus the whole visit was a total waste of time. I didn't get any new ad that really caught my eye. The most interesting one was for some obscure robots called Super Changers but even that was scraping the bottom of the barrel. The whole trip was real disappointing. I haven't had a library visit where I came out so let down. As I rode the bus back home I wondered if Dexter ever had one of those days where he really busted his ass to make his family happy and then later he killed somebody but felt disappointed. Disappointed that the guy he killed wasn't really that interesting. Unfortunately robots ads and murder are the kind of hobbies you can't complain to people about without them looking at you funny (and possibly calling the police).

C'mon baby give me a Whirl (and a Roadbuster, too while you're at it)

Vintage Space Toast Tour 2009 came to a grinding halt in September when I lost my camera. It was the replacement for the original Vintage Space Toast Tour camera that died after taking over 5,000 pictures of old toy robots newspaper ads and me standing there. Unfortunately VSTT Cam II did not get to die of old age like his predecessor but instead fell victim to my forgetfulness and the possible thievery of certain trailer park residents. The last memory I have of the camera was putting it on the roof of Optimus Lime and then driving off after delivering some cardboard boxes to a trailer park. I thought about calling the park and seeing if they had a lost and found but that camera had a smudge inside the lens that was affecting its performance so I let it go. Then last week I realized that the SD card inside not only had all of the pictures I took at Mizucon but it also had all of the 1987 newspaper ads I had collected so far from Miami. Reaccomplishing 1987 was going to be a lot of work and just thinking about it got me real down so absolutely no progress was made over at the Vintage Space Toaster Palace since August. I felt overwhelmed like I just fell off a Tyrannosaurus but they always say when you fall off the best thing to do is get right back on that Tyrannosaurus.

GETTING BACK ON THE TYRANNOSAURUS

Then Black Friday came along and Office Depot was having a doorbuster sale on some incredibly crappy camera for just 50 bucks. Black Friday doorbuster camera sales are always underhanded marketing trickery designed to liquidate terrible cameras so I feel really bad for anyone who buys Black Friday cameras non-ironically. All I needed was something that could take pictures of toy robots newspaper ads off a microfilm monitor at 1024x768. I don't do the wake up early thing so I went in at 1 in the afternoon, confident that even that late on the biggest shopping day in the galaxy they would still have them because a) they were crappy cameras and b) nobody shops at Office Depot.

THE GOOD THAT MEN DO IS OFT INTERRED WITH THEIR NEWSPAPER ADS FOR ROBOT TYRANNOSAURUSES

So I got the camera and last weekend I made the trip to downtown Miami and spent a couple hours at the main library breaking in the new camera, which after a rough start ended up working really great. I forgot how disheartening it is to sit in front of a microfilm scanner and look through reels and reels of newspapers full of 25 year old plane crashes, murders and car accidents just to find one or two ads for Dinobots. Perhaps the hardest part of my hobby is revisiting the terrible catastrophes and all the evils that men do I thought forgotten to me until I cracked open those microfilm rolls.

TG&Y Family Center 12/15/85

But I also forgot the joy and elation I experience when I unearth a pretty good toy robots ad that hasn't been seen in decades, as was the case with this TG&Y ad from December of '85 for the Deluxe Autobots Whirl and Roadbuster. It was a big deal because I've never found an ad featuring Whirl before. Heck, Deluxe Autobot ads are pretty rare in the first place-I've only ever found two and they both show Roadbuster line art. But with every great toy robot ad triumph there is always some huge downer in the rest of the paper like a school bus getting murdered by lions and I feel bad. Bad because all those kids never got to grow up to appreciate the joy a deluxe Autobot can bring, but more importantly they will never get to read my blog or see the next update over at the Vintage Space Toaster Palace. This holiday season as I complain about having to ride my time traveling Tyrannosaurus all the way back to 1987 a second time I will be appreciating that I did not die in a plane crash murder car accident in 1985. Most of all I will be grateful that neither did you, my fellow Macrocranians. I LOVES ME READING DEM SITE STATISTICALS.

Nothing says Merry Christmas from 1985 like a battery operated transforming toy robot Uzi

About the only thing more wonderful, iconic and fun than a toy robot in 1985 was an Uzi. Kids of all ages thrilled to the television adventures of their favorite Uzi toting heroes like Snake Eyes, Rico Tubbs from Miami Vice and future president of Texas Chuck Norris. Hell, when I was a kid I even had a battery operated Uzi water pistol that I totally rocked out with as I pretended to be every bad guy ever on the A-Team. The children of the 80's love affair with uzis and toy robots were two great tastes that were destined to go great together like stalled school buses and railroad tracks.

Toys and Gifts Outlet 12/15/85

So after my initial reactions of shock, horror, dismay and denial at finding this Christmas season 1985 ad from a store called Toys and Gifts Outlet from Tampa, Florida, I was not at all surprised that somebody actually made a battery operated toy robot that turned into an Uzi. Part of me wonders if this was all a big misprint or other sort of mistake and there wasn't actually a toy robot Uzi but when I think about it, toy robot Uzi totally falls within what I call the Evil King Macrocranios Intergalactic Governing Rule of Inevitable Fuckuppedness. I came up with it after watching the news and just generally being alive for the past 35 years. The Intergalactic Governing Rule of Inevitable Fuckuppedness states that over the course of the thousands of years of human existence and the infinite number of human interactions every person who has ever lived has had with every other person who has ever lived, every good wonderful positive thing you could possibly imagine has probably not happened, but every horrible fucked up thing you could possibly imagine definitely has. So I can guarantee for example that in the entire history of humanity nobody has ever invented a teddy bear that could make me a sandwich, but convertible Uzi robots? Oh hell yeah. So although I have never seen an "Uzi convertible robot" I am sure they exist or at least existed at one point but probably don't exist now because they were all destroyed in a hail of gunfire when the little boys who had them were all shot by the cops.

HOUSE OF UNPACKED HORRORS III: Roll with the Punch-Outs

I do a lot of walking and biking and I always keep my eyes peeled for loose change on the ground. I'm usually able to collect abandoned pennies, nickels and dimes at a rate of about 7 cents a week. This is in addition to the naturally accumulated pocket change that piles up around the house. Once I get about fifty bucks worth of change in the piggy bank I go to the corner grocery store where they have a machine that converts loose change into real money-paper money. The drawback is that this change machine charges eight cents for every dollar of paper money it gives me. It sucks and it makes no sense because the machine does the same amount of work whether I'm cashing in one dollar or a hundred dollars. It's a total ripoff, which is where the pennies come in. I love the sense of accomplishment when I cash in my piggy bank at the change machines and the extra pennies I've found on the floor everywhere partially pay for the change machine commission. Well the other day my son and I are driving around in Optimus Lime and he throws a quarter out the window, effectively undoing 25 days of abandoned penny collecting. I was like DAMNIT!



THE HIGHEST ENDING BID PRICE IS A TESTAMENT TO THE INTELLIGENCE OF ALL BUT ONE PERSON

The only thing that kept me from spazzing out and doing a u-turn on the highway to get that one quarter back was remembering how I screwed up and lost 300 quarters earlier in the year, which brings me to this week's entry in the House of Unpacked Horrors. I was on ebay back in June when I found an auction for what the seller called a "Hasbro Takara G1 TRANSFORMERS Display Set 1985 MINT". [He's been selling more of them lately with the exact same description.] It looked to me like some fantastic SUPER RARE VHTF Transformers store display with all sorts of Transformers standing around looking Transformery. I didn't know what the heck the thing was because the description was rather vague but he used a lot of different sized bolded fonts and many of the words were in bright colors. If there's one thing that I can't resist it's an auction with bright colors and crazy fonts. So I stuck to my rare store display theory and I got in a bid war with another bidder and when all was said and done it ended at 73 bucks! What a steal! NO, MORE LIKE WHAT AN IDIOT!

OH HOW IT PAINS ME TO WRITE THIS

So then the thing comes in the mail unassembled on sheets of cardstock with a sheet of photocopied instructions and as I'm putting it together I see "ISBN 0-087135-077-7" on the instructions. I thought, Hey! What kind of SUPER RARE VHTF store display has an ISBN? And then I look it up and to my horror I realize what exactly this thing I paid 73 bucks for really was. It was a Transformers punch out book from 1985, just missing the cover. This guy scammed me to the tune of 290 quarters with something that sells on ebay and Amazon for usually under 20 bucks! It's really embarrassing and I feel totally stupid for not being able to recognize every piece of licensed Transformer merchandise from 1985 off the top of my head. I'm trying to come to terms with being duped so I figured I'd trade in my 73 bucks and the shame for some stories to tell and a blog post.

Nothing says advanced alien robot technology like a 70 inch plasma TV and giant chrome knobs

And so my fellow Macrocranians I present to you the fully assembled contents of the 1985 Transformers Punch Out book as the latest entry in FlickrMacrocrania's House of Unpacked Horrors photo set. It's not a horrible thing, but seeing it brings to mind horrible memories. It's actually a pretty cool little stand up diorama with all sorts of quirky details. There are jets with strangely colored wings and strange off model renderings of Bumblebee and Ravage that are kind of crazy. Optimus Prime's trailer has a fold up panel so you can see inside of it and marvel at the awesome home theater on wheels he keeps in there. Once I get my robots collection up how I want it I'll put this little diorama on top of one of the robots cabinets. Maybe one day it will stop reminding me of how with one bid I undid 25 years of being smart about toy robots like a quarter flying out the window of my truck.

GOOD BYE PS3 CONCLUSION: Welcome home old...stranger?

Well I got the Playstation Sony sent me yesterday and just as I feared it was not my original one but a new (to me) and most likely refurbished 60 gig launch SKU console. I was happy to get all the same features like the extra USB ports and multiple card slots and my son's DVD back. I'll be checking the backwards compatibility tomorrow but it looks like they did just as they said so there were no surprises, just disappointment that they couldn't (or didn't even try to) save my old machine and all the data on my hard drive. But it is holiday season and I would really like to play The Force Unleashed and the Revenge of the Fallen games so having a rePlacedStation is better than no 'station at all.

THE LONG AND WAITING LOAD

So then resumed the long and arduous process of getting everything back to how I had it on my old machine, from retyping all my favorite internet bookmarks to redownloading all the games I had and most importantly-reloading the Peter Porker wallpaper. Starting all over from ground zero took a lot of time. This machine was outfitted with Firmware 3.0 so I had to start by reactivating my account and downloading firmware 3.1. Firmware always takes a while so that wasn't fun. Then the nightmare of reloading all my stuff and realizing I didn't have copies of game save data made for a bad day. I think I did copy a game save for the first Transformer movie game but if I don't find it I'm back to square one with nothing unlocked on any of my games. No way am I going to replay all the hundreds of hours it took to get as far as I did in those games. Boy does that suck. I feel like a douche for complaining about stuff like this when there are probably people out there that just found out today they have cancer, but those cancer dudes at least have the slightest infinitesimally small chance they can beat it whereas I am not so sure I can beat Megatron again in the last level of Transformers:The Game.

THE DRAMA ON FOLDING

And speaking of cancer, boy do I feel dumb for ever contributing computing time on my PS3 to that Folding@Home project. I know the idea was that Playstations could harness massive amounts of computational power to help Stanford cure cancer but as it turns out I was only killing my Playstation leaving it on like that. Maybe if Sony could guarantee their products won't self destruct after two years I would feel comfortable leaving a Playstation 3 on for more than 30 minutes at a time now. As it is I feel like an idiot for wasting away my $600 machine thinking an already super rich college couldn't afford their own calculators.

WE ALL MUST FRY SOMETIME

As soon as I turned on the new (to me) PS3 that fan kicked in and started roaring. I am not surprised. Other gamers have said their PS3s are whisper quiet but every console I've had roared like a lion. It doesn't matter. I will do things differently from here on out now knowing this Playstation will eventually self destruct like the first one. I won't stand it up on its side so the chips won't slide off the motherboard like lava down the side of a volcano when their solder melts from the heat. I will save every game data file from here on out and no way will I ever do any folding again. Folding is like duct taping a lit stick of dynamite to your PS3 and using the lit fuse to light cigarettes for cancer doctors on their smoke breaks. BUT NO MORE! If my next PS3 is going to die, it's going to die benefiting me and my terminal medical conditions-chronic robotardation and addiction to topless Disney actresses pictures. EXCUSE ME I THINK IT IS TIME TO UNLEASH THE FORCE NOW IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN.

GOODBYE PS3 part 2: I guess I'll know if they checked my hard drive if Stone Philips is the UPS guy

Four days ago I got an email from Sony that started like this:

"Dear PlayStation® Owner,
On 12/02/09 we shipped a PLAYSTATION 3 - CECHA01 and if applicable, peripheral(s) and/or accessories, to you."

I'm glad they didn't decide I hacked my unit or did anything else on my end to void the already expired warranty. I'm a little uncomfortable with their wording. Telling me they shipped "a" Playstation to me instead of definitively saying it was my repaired Playstation being returned has me worried. I guess there's enough wiggle room to interpret it either way. I would love to just have my old system and data back but from how fast it took them to do the turnaround I doubt it's the same one. I sent it to them November 25th, exactly a week and a half ago. A week after I dropped it off at the UPS store they sent me something back? Factor in the delivery time and that's only one or two days to fix a system. I think they just opened mine up, said screw it and sent me a refurbished one.

THEY GET NEW BRAINS SCREWED IN THEM AND ACT CONTRARILY TO WHAT THEY'VE BEEN

I'll find out what they did soon. Tonight I got a call from UPS telling me I have a delivery coming tomorrow. Once it gets here a quick check of the serial numbers will tell me if this is my old friend back from the dead or a new old friend of someone else's recently reanimated. I'm pretty sure my hard drive is gone and with it all my torrented Shin Mazinger Z cartoons and my secret wife-proof hidden folder of topless Disney actresses pictures. Damnit, I hope those chicks were legal when they took those. On the bright side, the Sony rep I called when this whole fiasco began said my son's DVD that was stuck in it would be removed and sent back to me. I can't wait to get back to watching that cartoon about the kid and his friend the duck named Pato a tryptzillion times everyday. OH WAIT YES I CAN.

If I don't have any hobbies then where did all this crap come from?

I was doing a lot of thinking about the nature of hobbies and if I really have any when I recently lost all interest in toy robots during the time I was sick. It was kind of liberating but also scary. If I wasn't sick and suddenly didn't care anymore about my hobbies I would be worried because loss of interest like that is usually associated with early stages of dementia, or suicide. You always hear about the guy who sold off his collection of super rare NASCAR calendars or Franklin Mint Simpsons Collector Plates or Farrah Fawcett posters before he offed himself and really, who wants to be that guy? But the only alternatives according to mental health professionals are you're either a) demented, b) dead or c) the owner of a vast second hand collection of Farah Fawcett posters you got from some demented dead guy. I guess I just stuck with the toy robots thing after 1985 out of inertia because you have to have hobbies, but then try doing that well past adulthood and BAM! It turns out that in the land of NASCAR calendars, somehow grown men buying toy robots is only sligtly more preferable than dementia.

IF I AM NOT COLLECTING WHAT ARE ALL THESE WAL-MART BAGS?

So there's societal pressure on one hand to have hobbies but on the other they have to meet some sort of criteria I've never really understood but I have figured it's not just about being age appropriate. After much pondering it dawned on me that "real" hobbies require some sort of skill like playing a guitar or painting or even at the very least, making those latch hook Care Bear rug kits. It is the constant refining of skills through practice that makes for a rewarding "real" hobby. But I look at this toy robots thing and the only skill it seems to require is finding a good parking spot at Wal-Mart. That's actually harder than it sounds because although the garden center is closest to the toys, sometimes they close while you're in there and you have to go out through the front registers and walk all the hell the way back to your car on the far side of the parking lot. Hey I can say whatever I want about action figure collectors because I used to roll like that when I was in my twenties. I was every horrible thing you could imagine on both sides of the stockroom. I was the corrupt stockboy stashing cases of Star Wars in '95 and I would scalp Treasure Hunt Hot Wheels with the worst of 'em and crap like that. But now that I'm old and senile in my thirties what I call a hobby is even more super pointless than hoarding little plastic people because I never even buy anything. I'm like a birdwatcher but of toy robots. I don't know why I bother wandering down the toy aisles looking at stuff I don't buy-I guess it's just so I can complain that everything sucks compared to 1985. I'm better off being a curmudgeony old robotard because I've see some people's action figure collections and they make me wonder if dementia is actually a better alternative instead of turning your house into a Smithsonian-ish tribute to the last 25 years of the Wal-Mart toy aisle.

IF I DON'T LIKE THESE MOVIES WHERE DID ALL THIS SHIA LEBOUF COME FROM?

I end up in a situation where I feel alienated from the people within my hobby who are really good at toy robots but also from the people outside of it who I imagine are really good at something else. Everyone has to be good at something and the greatest thing I can imagine being good at is having huge pectoral muscles (as Ren Hoek would say). Living here in the Miami area I see lots of incredibly fit beautiful people at the malls. I wonder if aside from being in the same approximate space with them at that moment if we have anything else in common at all. These are no doubt the people with real mature adult hobbies that my stunted man boy mind can't even begin to comprehend, like they probably enjoy watersports and watching Dawson's Creek and sexy fucking. I'll see the occasional incredibly good looking young teenage tan guy who works at Abercrombie & Fitch as a door greeter or whatever he does and I'll think to myself-that guy doesn't check out the toy robots when he's at Toys R Us. That is the defining difference between him and me. Hell, that guy probably never even goes to Toys R Us. We live in entirely different worlds. I know he's probably seen the Transformers movies but that's the one brief point where our intersecting lives meet. Were it not for Michael Bay I wouldn't have anything in common with people I have nothing in common with. It really boggles my mind that there are a whole bunch of people who were born after 1989.

IF I AM NOT CRAZY WHY DO I FEAR MENTAL HEALTH PROFESSIONALS?

My point is I was trying to figure out if what I do in relation to toy robots can really be classified as a hobby and if I exhibit traditional fan behavors or if what I have defined as a hobby is something more like alcoholism. Under close examination there are parallels, like I only buy toy robots mostly in a social setting. I wonder if the friends I've made at Botcon are people I really like or if anyone looks good after I've had a couple Zybots. Hell I wonder if I even like Zybots. I wonder if throughout my whole life I've never really been interested in anything so I continued to feign interest in childhood interests so that mental health professionals wouldn't think I was crazy. Well touche', mental health professionals. You got me acting crazy for fear of thinking that if I didn't, people would think I was. But the joke is on you, mental health professionals because I am not going to pay you to cure me. I see now that all I really need is to stop worrying about this insanity and get myself a good hobby.

NEXT TIME ON ROBOPLASTIC DEMENTIOCALYPSE: Latch hook Farrah Fawcett rug calendars!

GOODBYE PS3 Unlike some of my other consoles, you fail me

A couple weeks ago I got the yellow death and I don't mean macaroni and cheese. My PS3 refused to start up, exhibiting the dreaded green/yellow/red flashing dance of the dead light sequence. This sucks because my Turbografx-16 is old enough to buy beer and it still works.

There's a new photo set at FlickrMacrocrania called "R.i.P. PS3" with pictures of me trying not to cry as I pack up my Playstation and send it away to get fixed.

One time the Post Exchange made a mistake and sold me Beast Wars Megatron the big purple Tyrannosaurus for $9.99 (and other stories from Fort Hood)

I was 21 when I joined the Air Force in late 1995 and right after basic training my first duty station was Fort Hood, Texas. I was there from mid 1996 to mid 1998. It was my first real job, my first experience living away from home and my first real time on my own as an adult. It was at Fort Hood that I first learned how to use a computer and I'd spend hours at the post library internet room going to sites like ActionFigureTimes and BeastWars.net with Netscape Navigator. I remember hitting up the local Blockbuster in Killeen and ordering the first eight volumes of Streamline Pictures' VHS "Robotech Perfect Collection:Macross" one at a time. I never saw the Japanese versions of Robotech before so those tapes were a big event in my history of robotardation. Since I didn't have a VCR it was in the Fort Hood library VCR room where I first saw The Super Dimension Fortress Macross uncut, subtitled and in glorious Japanese (or at least the first 16 episodes of it). I went to my first anime convention at the Fort Hood Sportsdome-I think it was called DefCon II in '97 or '98-and I remember seeing one table with the most awesome Robotech poster I'd ever seen. Antarctic Press was doing their Robotech Comics around that time and I remember going comics shops just outside the post in Killeen to pick those up. There was one comic shop in nearby Copperas Cove where I would buy loose Transformers and talk about toys with the store owner who was an ex-Army warrant officer that got medically discharged when his helicopter crashed. I thought hell, Rick Hunter crashed his spacerobot jetfighter all the time even starting in the first episode and he never got hurt bad enough to be discharged. But that's the difference between reality and Robotech. If Robotech was real it would be the story of Rick Hunter jumping into a spacerobot jetfighter in the first 10 minutes, crashing, then running a comic shop on the SDF-1 for the next 35 episodes.

Most of all I remember that early morning in '96 when I was at the post hospital waiting for the bus to San Antonio. On my days off I would hitch a ride on these buses that left at like 6 in the morning from Fort Hood to the hospital at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. They were supposed to be the shuttles used to transfer patients to Lackland but if they had room they'd take anyone else, and they always had room. I remember that day I was in the lobby and half awake on the couch waiting for the bus when I turned on the television in the waiting area. It was during a commercial break but when the show that was ending got back the credits began to roll and this crazy bongo music was playing and the screen had wild animals turning into robots and some guys growling "BEAST WARS" and at the very end the Transformers logo flashed. I couldn't believe they brought back Transformers. I knew the toys were in the stores because I was a Target stockboy before I joined the military but I wasn't at all into them. But seeing Transformers had a new show with original episodes that were not a rehashing of G1 was incredible to me. Just before I got orders to Korea I remember watching the cliffhanger ending to Beast Wars Season 2 on my birthday in 1998 in my apartment in Killeen. Man I was pissed off about going to Korea-not because the little army camp I was going to was a speed bump on Kim Jong-il's South Korean invasion route and I'd be dead in minutes if the north attacked-but mostly because I wouldn't get to see the start of Beast Wars season 3.

So Fort Hood has a lot of memories for me. I'm thinking about them now as I read about the young men and women stationed there about the same age as I was back in 1996 but whose lives were cut short last week. My thoughts are with the families.

The Mighty Morphy Toy Robot Orgy

On top of a backlog of things I want to blog about I've also got a billion other projects I'm working on all designed to establish a larger physical and political presence for the Kingdom of Macrocrania on the internet. I noticed from my blog statisticals that using the Blogger search box at the top of the page isn't as useful as I thought it was. I always thought it was at least good enough that people looking for important things like Voltron and Wheelie and the Chopper Bunch could find all the incredibly useful insights, analysis and conspiracy theories I've written on such subjects. But it turns out that search box is total crap so I'm working on tagging every post I've ever written with useful topic titles like "Life is like a furricane" and "We are all Peter Cullen's unwanted children". I'm also working on writing a Transformers podcast about toy robots that are not Transformers because somehow for some reason podcasters are ignoring the incredibly tiny and practically non-existent non-vocal minority audience of people wanting to hear somebody talk about Mighty Orbots and Tranzor-Z. And of course in addition to these things I'm also working on a gigantic backlog of toy robots ads from Rapid City, Pasadena and Miami for the Vintage Space Toaster Palace. But when I say I'm working on all these things I really mean I'm thinking about doing them but instead when I sit down at the computer I end up looking at pictures of Japanese toy robots auctions all day.


If I won the lottery I would buy a 2010 Bumblebee Camaro and paint it like this

There is a public auction about to be held in Pennsylvania where they are going to sell off one of the single most concentrated masses of Japanese toy robots in all creation. The tale of cataloging, identifying and processing the hundreds of individual roboplasticos and robometallicos is being told by the men called to do it at their blog. I do not envy their job but it must be really cool to know so much about robots that people would come to you in situations like that. Once an old lady in Tucson asked me to identify some robots so she could sell them at garage sales and I ended up misidentifying some and I think I told her some of her GoDaiKins were from She-Ra. Being the low class bourgeois Transformer trash fan I am most all of that Philadelphia collection is stuff way beyond my level of knowledge and appreciation. But hot damn there's some crap there that's so incredible I recognize I'm not worthy to even be looking at the jpegs. First you've got the things that joe average neurotypical toy robots fans people like me know about. There's your lots with GoBots, the SDF-1 Macross, some Shogun Warriors, a couple Joons Valkyries, every Soul of Chogokin Mazinger in one shot, and throw in some Masterpiece Transformers and any one of those is like a good day searching on ebay. But then you know you're not in Kansas anymore when you start seeing things like an original GA-01 gold thigh Mazinger or an authentic all gold GA-01 or holy hell a non-GoDaiKin Combattra! Then after you've seen every rare incredible Japanese robot thing ever made you get to what looks like a convertible '72 Ford Fairlane painted in the colors of the Mexican flag and customized in the most awesome Great Mazinger deco ever. Then you realize no matter how many women you lay, no matter how many toy robots you own, no matter how many powerballs you win, you will never truly be a man until you drive something that looks like that in real life.

HASBRO MAKE THIS TOY

Then it all just starts going Twilight Zone and after a while you stop asking why is Great Mazinger flying a boat or driving a race car and the existence of such toys not only stops being weird it all makes perfect sense. Then you realize that no matter how cool it was to have a Transformer power cycle when you were a kid, your childhood pales in comparison to some four year old Japanese guy who grew up riding the Dol Giran robot dragon wagon. Then finally everything you thought you knew about life, love, god and toy robots crumbles with your sanity when you see a toy of Mazinger-Z driving a rocket launcher equipped convertible red Volkswagen that looks like Wheelie and the Chopper Bunch. Suddenly blog tags, podcasts and websites of old toy robots ads lose all significance in light of this new goal that becomes the overriding focus in your life-leaving your family and everything else behind to illegally break in to Mexico to learn how to paint giant robots on cars.

Crashing into the volcano is easy-it's the unpacking that takes 4 million years

IS THIS:


a) A listing of wireless networks available in my neighborhood

b) Evidence that I have successfully set up and secured my internet router

c) Evidence to the neighborhood that the new guy down the street has internet and is a colossal robotard



IS THIS:


a) Proof my washer and dryer survived the 2,000 mile trip and the past three months in storage

b) Alpha Dry-on vs Washor "Rumble in the Tumble Cycle" Sears exclusive giftset

c) THEIR WAR MY SHORTS




IS THIS:


a) A scene from the first episode of the Transfromers cartoon

b) What my bedroom looked like in 1989 when I was 15 after 5 years of playing with Transformers

c) What my bedroom looks like now in 2009 when I'm 35 after 5 days of unpacking my collection of toy robots I broke all to hell by 1989

The Rocketfistoral College! (asking not what Godzilla can do for me, but what I can do for Godzilla)

There is a looming crisis on the American political horizon and it affects anyone like me who has ever written crappy Shogun Warriors blog entries on the internet. I first became aware of it as I was comparing my age with how old other people were when they accomplished great things like setting the record for winning money on Cash Cab or creating Star Wars or becoming President of the United States. Someone's already beat me to the first two but I just noticed our current president is 48 years old and the youngest (Roosevelt) was 42 when he took over. So it is very possible that within the next decade we will elect someone of my generation who grew up playing with Micronauts, Shogun Warriors, GoBots and/or Transformers. Hell, knowing my generation we might actually elect a Micronaut, Shogun Warrior, GoBot and/or Transformer. Even scarier is I fall into the age window and meet the minimum toy robots collection requirements necessary to become the future roboplastic president. I realize there are people with lots better roboplastic collections than me (and better grasp of English) but I think what it's going to come down to is how good a presidential candidate's toy robots blog is. I tell you this now-if I get beat out by some robotard who writes shitty blogs about Shogun Warriors then America gets what it deserves, but if I win I'm sending that dude and all his blog followers to Guantanamo.

YOU CAN BE MY SECRETARY OF ROCKET FISTING

A realize a president of the United States has a lot more serious stuff to worry about like health care reform, overthrowing the alien bases on the moon and building a fleet of spaceships so we can conquer the universe but I swear the first thing I'm taking on as president is really trying to sort out the history of the Shogun Warriors. Have you noticed what a mess online Shogun Warriors information is? Trying to find out even simple stuff like what year they first came out can yield different answers depending on the site visited. If you google for behind the scenes, investigative reporting style Shogun Warriors info it's actually very difficult. I think it's because in the decades after the Shogun Warriors toyline died its fans became fickle widowers, either forgetting it existed at all or elevating its faults and weaknesses to legendary extremes with their fuzzy memories. (Those who forgot it went on to become Star Wars fans, but instead of "fickle widowers" I'd call those guys cheap slutty fan whores.) So what I am currently doing is amassing a list of people on the internet who know what they're talking about when it comes to Shogun Warriors. It is a short list but when I am president those people will comprise my full cabinet of toy robots coaches. This is not unlike my collection, which is comprised of cabinets and couches full of toy robots.

YOURZINGA IS PROBABLY BIGGER THAN MAZINGA

I am entering a new era in my blogging where I want to be taken more seriously and not just because I might be appointed some future president's Secretary of Rocket Punching or whatever the joke was last paragraph. I have a post coming up where I'm going to be taking a hard look at some of these mysteries surrounding the Shogun Warriors line and I don't want dumb jokes and snark to ruin it. Shogun Warriors deserves better because so few people write about it that anything written carries lots of weight. My post needs to read like it was written by the Tom Brokaw of toy robots journalism. I am feeling a bit self conscious because I lack the credibility that comes from having a big collection-the entirety of my shrine to Shogun Warriors is one Godzilla and a three inch Dragun with a broken head spike. If some guy who owns a 23 1/2" inch Dragun swears Shogun Warriors came out just last year I'd run away and hide and never respond to his comment like someone with a really small Dragun. Yet these mysteries must be confronted! Mysteries like what year did they really come out? How much did they cost? How tall were they? Why were they canceled? Is Dragun a cross-dresser? I will very soon examine and attempt to answer these questions with well referenced, irrefutable proofs like old newspaper ads, links to Plaid Stallions and even shocking eyewitness accounts. To give you a tantalizing taste of the incredible informations I've uncovered I'll answer the Dragun one right now! YES HE IS.