The Robotastic SuperConocalypse 2011!

The thirtieth seal of the Roboplastic Apocalypse KRA-KOOMS apart like an iPod being eaten by a talking robot Tyrannosaurus in this Florida Supercon 2011 edition of the Podcastalypse! Thrill to the adventures of the Nostrodomatron as I spend the entire convention wandering around talking to myself about toy robots and pictures of toy robots. Then as if that weren't mind-blowing enough, I talk with special guests Ken Lashley and Gregg Berger, two men who know a lot about cartoons of toy robots! That's pretty much the toy robot subject matter trifecta right there. It's all here and more in this "TRANS-TECHNOLOGICAL CYBERTRONIANS" IS HARDER TO SAY THAN IT LOOKS edition of the podcastalypse!


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HAY GUYS CHECK OUT my Facebook gallery of Supercon 2011 pictures.



Ken Lashley is the man behind Draxhall Jump, which is the company most famous for originating the concepts and designs of the Transformers Transtech line. He's been involved behind the scenes with Hasbro on a number of franchises including Star Wars, G.I Joe and Transformers for over a decade.



Gregg Berger is of course a renowned professional voice actor famous for many roles including The Transformers' Grimlock the Dinobot. I asked him a few questions about the work he did voicing super robot pilot Tommy Davis in Tranzor-Z, the US released English dub of the legendary Japanese anime Mazinger-Z.



Darth Vader is a fallen Jedi who punched his pregnant wife to death but still knows how to party at Supercon!

SHOW NOTES OF THE PODCASTALYPSE

• My job as a roboplastilogical archaeologist at Supercon 2011
• My generation's indebtedness to José Delbo
• Juan Antonio Fontanez met my Jetfire
• Luis Diaz drawing me a Mazinger
• Fending off armageddon in your spare time
• My golden questional nuggets of wisdom at Gregg Berger's panel
• Ken Lashley is living the dream
• Draxhall Jump's work on Transformers Transtech
• Interview with concept artist Ken Lashley of Draxhall Jump
• Ken's design work on Beast Machines
• Ken's love of the robot genre
• Love is owning and watching the same cartoons on different formats
• Design process of action figures as product vs as show characters
• Being immortalized in plastic as the G.I. Joe figure Burnout
• How much of this Armada toyline poster do you remember?
• How high end concept work works
• Drawing the brunt of concept work on Transtech
• The connection between Transtech designs and those in the new Transformer movies
• Ken's early concept work on the Driller.
• Doing tons of concept work from Transformers boardgames to Star Wars Transformers blister pack pencil art and other package illustration
• Who keeps the pencils?
• The Star Wars Celebration 5 Ken Lashley "Galactic Bad Boys" print
• Working 15 careers at once
• Post Ken Lashley thoughts
• Somebody bought the $75 AT-AT!
• Scoring me an Exo-Squad transforming E-Frame
• The train robot formerly known as Midnight Express
• Tranzor-Z break
• Interview with Gregg Berger
  
• The degree of awareness Gregg had of Tranzor-Z/Mazinger fandom
• Casting directors filling roles based on actors' talent versus their celebrity
• Exploring the allure of giant robot cartoons
• Bumping into everybody from everything
Gregg's CD Think Globally...Act Locally
• FamousFoneFriends.com
• Gregg on Facebook
• Gregg at Auto Assembly 2011
• Don't Rocket Punch your friends!

I'VE DIED AND GONE TO DEATH STAR!

I'm uploading pictures of this weekend's events at Florida Supercon 2011 over on my Facebook page.

To Hecht's with Darth Vader (and to Burger King with Darth Vader and to JC Penney and to a couple places in the mall with Darth Vader, too)

Well today was Fathers Day. Since my dad lives a couple thousand miles away I did stuff that reminds me of him like compiling all the newspaper ads I've collected for Darth Vader store appearances from 1977 through 1984. Yeah Darth Vader reminds me of my dad, but not in that "I killed them all, even the younglings!" kind of way. When I think of that first Star Wars movie I remember how my dad was the one who introduced our family to Star Wars by taking us to the drive in to watch it over and over. He gave me the Star Warses and a father can give a son no greater gift. So far all I've introduced my son to is Yo Gabba Gabba and some bootleg DVDs of Tranzor-Z. Based on those two shows I can't tell if he's going to grow up thinking I'm great or if he's gonna sue me for a refund on his childhood or demand some sort of inter-generational restitution like that.

Oct 08, 1977	Oct 13, 1978	Oct 28, 1979

THE SECRET TO ACHIEVING MASTERY OF SPACE AND TIME IS SELLING LOTS AND LOTS OF DARTH VADER ACTION FIGURES

Unlike the generations before him, my son will spend his childhood years in a world untouched by the direct hand of George Lucas. By the time my kid achieves sentience at around the age of nine or ten, Lucas will have retired and will no longer be making (or remaking) anything. It's a brave new world for him, one I can't imagine living in. My generation gave Lucas incredible power. He surrounded us and penetrated us and binded us all together. He became so powerful he even achieved the ability to erase millions of peoples' childhoods! Every time he created or messed with the old Star Wars movies he was in effect rewriting our lives as we remembered them. The millions of people who grew up in the late 70s reading the old Marvel Star Wars comics and believing Han shot first had large chunks of their childhood deemed non-canon or even erased by George Lucas. My son will never know the anxiousness and worry my generation felt each time we enjoyed something Star Wars under the looming threat that the whole experience would be nullified by the next official G Level canon Star Wars release. But we learned to cope with the anxiety, consoling ourselves with the thought that as long as that time we saw Darth Vader at Burger King in 1983 didn't directly contradict anything that happened in the movies we were probably okay.

May 16, 1980

THERE IS STILL GOOD IN HIM-AND HAMBURGERS

So in celebration of Fathers Day and all those possibly canonical times that the Galactic Empire included the shopping center a couple blocks down the street I have constructed this montage of classic Darth Vader store appearances culled from various blogposts and facebookings I have written in the past. The centerpiece is a really cool, never-before-seen-by-me-until-last-week newspaper ad from a store called Hecht's that just may be the nicest Darth Vader appearance promo I have ever found. And as an added bonus you should check out the interview at StarWars.com with Bryce Eller, the guy who used to dress up as Darth Vader for all the official appearances early on in Darth's galactic publicity tour of the late 70s/early 80s. I hope your Fathers Day (and childhood) was most impressive. No refunds!

Feb 17, 1982	Jul 08, 1983	Nov 09, 1984

28 years ago in a Sears far, far away...

Mills Drugstore 05 December 1978

The first celebrity I ever met in my life was Spider-Man, who did a signing at KMart in 1979 when I was five. I remember he signed a copy of the Amazing Spider-Man comic for me. In hindsight it's pretty stupid to have a copy of Amazing signed by Spider-Man because that devalues the book by about 5,000 percent. But as a kid I didn't think about it from that perspective. This is one of the reasons I cringe when I think about the fate of all the toys I had when I was a kid. Even when I thought I was taking care of my childhood possessions I was doing really really stupid things to them.

'79 was a celebrity studded extravaganza for me because I also got to meet Darth Vader that year. My parents took me and my sister to Sears for one of those in-store events where there was a "special appearance" by Darth Vader. At first I was all excited to meet him because Darth Vader was a couple steps up the celebrity ladder from Spider-Man. Hell, he was the top rung of awesome because although the Death Star was all blowed up in '79, he was technically still presiding evil king of the universe. When I got wind of what was going on I was sooo hyped up excited. So was my sister, who was a year younger than me but about 200 times more brave.

Midland Mercantile 05 December 1979

We got to Sears a little bit before Vader made his appearance and this gave us time to see that the employees totally pimped out the Sears toy section in grand Star Wars style. There were tons and tons of Star Wars figures and spaceships and crap. It was fantastic. The selection towered above me (which wasn't too hard to do because I wasn't much taller than the box the Millenium Falcon came in). I swear it seemed as if they had Star Wars toys for miles. In actuality it was probably just two four foot sections plus an endcap, but when I was five even that much was a vast endless supply of bounty stretching far beyond the limits of human comprehension.

Mills Drugstore 09 December 1979

So then it's Vader time and the other children and parents crowded around the small stage the Sears employees set up. There were smoke machines going off and then the guy dressed up as Vader came out and the kids got in line to meet him. I was so excited. I could not believe this was happening, me being all ate up about Star Wars as I was. Then it was my turn to shake hands with the galaxy's most twisted master of evil himself. I don't remember much about what happened because shortly after I came face to face with him I passed out from fright. There is a polaroid snapshot my mom took that shows the moment I began crying because I was so scared shitless. Also I peed myself. This was apparently amusing to all the other children and parents because everyone is laughing in the photo, including my four year old sister. I think this painful event in my life is why I am in Antarctica right now 27 years later, still trying to outrun the shame.

Sears 13 December 1979

Well once I regained consiousness and the bad Vader man was far far away, my dad tried to make me feel better and he told me I could pick any toy I wanted from the Star Wars aisle. He wasn't too happy when I picked the Millenium Falcon because it was like thirty bucks. But he got that for me and my sister got the 12 inch Princess Leia doll (which I secretly wanted too). I just wanted to grab my Millenium Falcon and get the hell out of there, away from the laughing employees and cruel other children and that bastard Darth Vader. But as we were driving home in the family van I opened the Falcon and discovered it was missing a piece, namely the little blue seat in the gunner's turret. My mom was insistent that we return to the store and exchange it for a complete Falcon but I didn't ever want to go back there and I think my pants were still wet. I guess me pleading "NO NO MOMMY" a billion times wasn't enough to get her to forgive crappy Kenner quality control. We went back to the store and got another Falcon. Or at least my mom and my sister did while I cowered in the back corner of the van and wept uncontrollably while I combed Princess Leia's beautiful Star Puffs hairdo.