AN INTENSE EXPERIENCE!

The breaking of the 87th seal of the Roboplastic Apocalypse is the voice of the man who made Cybertron! Join the Nostrodomatron as I brave the Bigfoot infested forest of the Pacific Northwest to talk to Jim Shooter at Washington State Summer Con 2019! Yes it's the father of the Transformers mythos and me in Puyallup, Washington talking about toy robot line treatments, Star Comics, and other Mysterianian shenanigans. Plus a lightning round of HOW MUCH ROBOTS YA GOT? with action figure collector/author/living 80s encyclopedia Mark Bellomo! Who is the salt in my convention salad? What's it gonna take to get the world to admit Jetfire and Shockwave came out in '84? Why was the Beyonder not a figure in the Secret Wars line by Mattel? WHO WOULD WIN STARRIORS vs. CARE BEARS? All this and a sighting of the paranormal forest entity known as Yoshi in this WE ARE ALL STANISLAS PIOTR'S UNWANTED CHILDREN episode of the podcastalypse!

DOWNLOAD IT HERE



I presented to Mark the greatest award I can give to a person for Exceptional Service to the Kingdom Roboplastico, and that is my GoBackatization of the cover to K-Mart's 23 September 1984 Sunday newspaper ad.



Starriors is absent on purpose!

Making comics good since October 1984


SHOW NOTES OF THE PODCASTALYPSE
COMING SOON!

Fred's Robot Convention!

I went on an adventure on April 1st drove to Wisconsin to go to Fred's Robot Convention Rolled out to Cow Palace...for DairyCon
There's a robot con in the land of dairy It's called DairyCon but it's not about cheese When the Hasbro cons are all wack, these dairy boys go to Fond Du Lac
Let's all go to DairyCon Cows and GoBots and your mom wish they were at Dairycon Its moo than meets the eye there-MOO MOO POWER
Dairylanders love jumpstarter racing They like those robots that turn into machines And if you pick the mystery box, you just might get a bunch of broken GoBots
Hello my fellow Macrocranians and robots lovers from Dairyland Welcome to episode 86 of the ROBOPLASTIC PODCASTALYPSE

---> DOWNLOAD IT HERE <---



BUT FIRST THE USUAL ROBOTARDATIONS
F.I.S.H.B.O.T of the episode is this Snaptrap box complete with inner bubble and other inserts that sold for only 47 bucks! Fuck I Should Have Bid On That!



OH HOW IT PAINS ME TO READ THIS AD

K-Mart's September 17, 1986 'World's Greatest Toy Sale' circular was a nice showcase of 1986 action figures. Robots from Transformers The Movie were particularly well represented and the ad even included a rare appearance by a 5784 Decepticon Jets case Starscream. Unfortunately the ad used a very dark colored background that did not contrast well against the dark typeface used for the ad text, so prices and descriptions are hard to make out from the microfilm transfer.

AND NOW-DAIRYCON!

You can see my entire photo album of Dairycon 2017 on Flickr


FRANKatello, The FREDDER, STEVEonardo, and MIKEnorthernangelo

The Cow Palace was nice, big and roomy. It was well lit and smelled great.

$2 ANYTHING box after the beat up Kup was bought.

There was just tons of robot stuff and I put more pics of it all on Flickr


IT'S FULL OF STARterS!

 

The Custom Jumpstarter Rally Race! This round was for modified motorized Transformers including Jumpstarters, Battlechargers, Happy Meal Starscreams or whatever homemade robot the racers brought.

The Unmodified Jumpstarter Rally Race! This footage is from the preliminary and semi final rounds of the most legendary Transformer races in all of Transfandom.

I wanted that Snaptrap box so bad! But what were the chances that my raffle ticket number would be called at the right time?
Turned out they were pretty good!	Four Star wings on a Kingdam body

Mike about to open his fantastic Mystery Box prize


The art show included Jetfire encased in Jell-O and a truck monkey


I liked this guy's fashion sense!


SHOW NOTES OF THE PODCASTALYPSE

• Rob Thomas ate my Metallica
• Me and Rob driving 1,000 miles from Georgia to the Fond Du Lac County Fairgrounds
• BREAK-K-Mart Christmas
• The Cow Palace was a fitting location for...
• DairyCon 2017!
• My homemade DairyCon shirt got run over by semi trucks
• BREAK-Wisconsin cheese festival
• My photo album of Dairycon 2017 on Flickr
• Dairyland Transfans on Facebook
• Don't rocket punch your friends!

A MAN, A PLAN, A PANEL-BOTLANTA!

The breaking of the 85th seal of the Roboplastic Apocalypse is the sound of Larry Hama playing guitar at Toylanta 2017! Yes it's the post TOY/JOE/BOT-lanta episode and it's packed with all sorts of stories about toys, joes, bots, and lantas. Join the Nostrodomatron as he realizes that after this convention, he's a lanta, she's a lanta, and you probably would like to be a lanta, too. How did my very first ever successful awesome wonderful toy robots ad panel go? Did Derek Yaniger finally bring comic pages to a convention? How much for that Zartan crotch in the window? And would I rather ride a strong donkey or hump an old unicorn? Hear these and other horrible revelations in this MAMA WE'RE ALL LANTA NOW edition of the podcastalypse!

DOWNLOAD / DOWNLANTA IT HERE


BUY LIKE YOU FIGHT!

The Combaterwars Combinecons popped up at military bases during the holidays. I noticed the shelf warmers at the nearby Army PX were the flying Combaticons and the shelfwarmers at the Air Force BX were the ground based Combaticons.




THE DESOLATION OF KAYCEE

No trip to Atlanta is complete without a quick swing by the old abandoned Lionel building. This visit ended up a little more exciting than the last time I was here.




REAL TOYLANTEAN HEROES
Marten Jallad (left) Toylanta organizer, Derek Yaniger (center) artist illustrator, and Rob Springer (right) Botlanta track organizer




IMPERIAL CHUTES HAVE ENTERED THE FALLING

The Saturday night parachute drop was as surreal as ever, with 12 inch Joes and other figures plummeting 14 stories to the waiting attendees, elevators, and carpet.




ROB HAS SUMMONED ME HERE FOR A PURPOSE

I got to kickoff BOTLANTA with my overhead projector, showing and telling the Toylanteans about Jetfire mockups, Lionel Playworld, red cab Ultra Magnus, and unused Micromaster card art all from old toy robots newspaper ads.




ONE PAGE IS ALL HIAXUS FOR
FINALLY, after chasing Derek Yaniger all over Florida and Georgia, finally he brought comic pages to a con. I was so happy. I got to man his table while he was in his panel, AND I bought page 27 from G2 #1. I dug it the most, to say the least!




HEARD THE NOISE/ SAW THE TOYS/ GOT SOME CROTCHES
It was a weekend of toylantastic overload that will live forever so long as freedom exists. Legends of panelanta were born, a new convention experience was forged from the united titans of Joe and robot fandoms, and I almost got arrested. Plus I got some crotches for my Snake Eyes and Zartan. What more can a man ask for than Larry Hama guitar solos and a dependable 50 year old overhead projector. We shall remember you, Toylanta 2017, we shall remember.





SHOW NOTES OF THE PODCASTALYPSE

• Encounter with one of the rarest store flyers of all
• BREAK-AAFES commercial
• That famous old abandoned Lionel photo
• Interview with the first post Lionel owners of the old Buford Highway building
• BREAK-Kiddie City commercial
• Post Botlanta panel thoughts
• Putting my horrible first panel attempt behind me
• Being recognized by the guys from Radio Free Cybertron and others
• BREAK-Derek Yaniger at La Fiambrera Art Gallery
• Derek Yaniger stories
• Audience members tweeted and tweeted from my panels
• I gave away a slide or five
• Vintage TF vendor Galaxie OfJunk had a nice Omega Supreme
• Don't rocket punch your friends!

FAKE IT'S '84 'TILL YOU MAKE IT '84!

The breaking of the 84th seal of the Roboplastic Apocalypse is the sound of the clock tick, tick, ticking down the seconds until JOELANTA 2017! Listen 'n fun as the Nostrodomatron rushes to get a bunch of broken toys in beat up boxes all dressed up like it's 1985 again! Thrill 'n anxiety as I prepare for my Joelanta panel that's more than meets the price in hopefully enough time to more than beat the clock! Will I peel the stickers off 33 year old Transformers so they'll look new again? Will I open brand new reissued Transformers so they'll look old again? How tough is it to match the photography of toy ads from 1984? Am I committing time crimes against nostalgia when my ad recolorizations show up in google search results for old store circulars? AND IS THIS THE END OF THE PODCASTALYPSE? ONLY SHIA NO-NO-NO-NO-NOs!

download it here


THE SECRET FORMULA REVEALED



IT TAKES A LOT OF PAYING ATTENTION TO SCREW THINGS UP THIS BADLY

This paragraph was supposed to be a deeply insightful, behind-the-scenes exploration of how I take pictures of toys and turn them into pictures of toys with little prices and Hasbro logos on top of them. And also how I learned that it's pretty hard to take pictures of toy robots as halfassedly as most product photographers did back in 1984, but there's no time! I need to go finish my JoeLanta panel so you can see my naked seeker jets and hear how thirty three year old Dinobot ads confuse me! Or actually I think that's what this episode is about. So listen and find out how getting bitten by radioactive Google search results gave me the proportionate strength and speed of a time travelling K-Mart ad.


OW! OW! OW! OW! OW! OW!



SHOW NOTES OF THE PODCASTALYPSE

Eckerd 12/09/84

• JOELANTA IN 2 WEEKS OR ELSE!
• My panel is MORE THAN MET THE PRICE!
• Microfilm is grainy
• Contaminating the past with fake history
• Frank Nora talks about changing the past
• A Stickery Situation
• The Naked Planes of Campbells Supply
• BREAK-KayBee commercial
• Reconnecting with my junk
• the terrible things I do for (and to) toy robots
• $3500 Grimlock on eBay
• You either rewrite history or sleep good at night
• Being first on the TF track at Joelanta!

LOOK WHAT I DID TO THE LAST UNICORN OF DINOBOTS

Fantastic TransFormers ads and Zayre to find them

The breaking of the 83rd seal of the Roboplastic Apocalypse is the sound of a time machine set for a collision course over Zayre! Yes about the worst, most wonderful terrible thing that can happen to a Monochromatic AdstroNaut like myself is to find the long buried mircofilm remains of now extinct retail store chains I never got to

visit when I was a kid. And it is doubly fantastic awful when I find out a certain store I never knew existed regularly ran amazing Sunday circular ads during the Toy Robots Wars of the 1980s. Well that's exactly the case with the long gone retail chain Zayre-a store whose ads were wonderlands of MotoBots, Diakrons, TransMobots, RoboForce, GoBots, and of course TransFormers. In fact, Zayre's TransFormer ads are legendary (to me) for many reasons, all of which will take a good forty five minutes of me driving back and forth to the library while recording in my van to explain. What is the secret source of the Zayre toy photographer's prototype action figures? What does a time machine set for April 29, 1984 sound like? How much spaghetti did you have to eat before Devastator had lunch with you? I don't know the answers but I got some ideas in this THE NEXT BEST THING TO BEING ZAYRE episode of the podcastalypse!

download it zhere

Zayre April 29, 1984

Colorized Zayre April 29, 1984

DIACLONE, IS THAT YOU?

Zayre may be gone but it left behind a treasure trove of TransFormer ad mysteries. One of the things I like about trying to colorize the old ads I collect is that I find out new things about them I'd previously overlooked. It happened with a Target Devastator giftset ad and it happened again here with Zayre. A problem arose when I was trying to get the proportions of my Starscream photograph to line up with the one in the legendary April 29, 1984 Zayre ad that I first talked at length about in episode 50. For some reason, no matter what angle I took Starscream's picture from, the right wing wouldn't line up correctly to match the proportions of the one in the ad!

HERE'S A HINT

That's when I noticed the tip portion of the wing forward of the arm joint in the ad photoshoot Starscream extended just a little bit longer than the same part on my childhood Starscream. From what I understand this variation is a vestige of the ad toy's origins as an actual Diaclone F-15 Jetrobo. That mold had these elongated wings and a few other differences from the actual production toy. They really aren't the mass retail versions at all, but Japanese release toys with Transformer stickers on them Hasbro slapped together for promotional photography. These Diaclones with Transformer stickers were used in early catalogs including Hasbro's '84 Toy Fair book and the pack in toy checklist that came with the original first few waves of Transformers. To realize I was seeing a dressed up Diaclone in a Zayre Sunday circular surprised me. But I guess the ad was prepared so relatively early in the line's release that Zayre may not have had any retail samples available to photograph so they had to arrange something with Hasbro I guess. That's just speculation on my part. I don't know how they ended up with these particular toys in their ad.

SpaghettiOs May 11, 1986

Victor Caroli narrated Zayre commercial

Here's the May 11, 1986 SpaghettiOs ad I was talking about. I never heard of those cups before so I was excited. Equally exciting was finding out that Zayre once got Victor Caroli to do a voiceover in their commercials!

Zayre November 25, 1984

Zayre March 10, 1985

The November 15, 1984 ad up left is one of the few times robots (TransFormers in particular) dominated the front page of Zayre's circular. Note the yellow Cliffjumpers. The March 10, 1985 page up right shows how Zayre would give equal time to robot lines in their ads, even if some of the also rans weren't as popular as the big lines.

Zayre November 30, 1985

Zayre February 16, 1986

November 30 1985 up left was the only other time Transformers got on the front page of the Zayre circular. The February 16, 1986 ad up right features a rarity in TransFormers ads-Special Team leaders not wearing their super robot helmets!


Zayre June 8, 1986


The Ultra Magnus cab in this June 8, 1986 ad confounds me so! It's obviously not white as a normal production version Magnus' would be. Is it just a red Optimus Prime cab? Is it a blue Powered Convoy cab? How did Zayre even get this particular trailer/cab combination in their photoshoot?

Zayre June 29, 1986

Zayre June 29, 1986 colorized

Sky Lynx is sad he was mistransformed so badly in his Zayre ad debut. This ad also marks the end of Zayre spelling 'TransFormers' with a capital F, which they had done from the beginning.


Zayre July 20, 1986

I like to call this one 'Wreck-Gar's Bad Day'. It has the highest Decepticon-to-Autobot ratio of any ad I've ever seen!


Zayre August 31, 1986


It's the return of Ultra Magnus to Zayre ads and this time he's got the correct color cab. This begs the question of what happened the first time and where does Zayre get the toys for their photoshoots if they're not the same ones every time?


Zayre October 12, 1986


Zayre's record of correctly transforming the Scramble City leaders goes out the window with Silverbolt wearing Superion's head here. Speaking of transforms. Metroplex and Ultra Magnus never appeared as robots in Zayre ads, despite the photographer trying to represent both modes for every other assortment. Trypticon is mentioned in this one but not shown.


Zayre November 9, 1986


These '86 Zayre ads were marvels of composition considering how many elements the photographer had to cram in to each shot. What at first seems like a mistransformation is probably just the photographer trying to keep the toys representative while still not blocking out or getting in the way of anything near or behind them. Sky Lynx's alternate mode is correctly transformed here but offset in a separate graphic. I am noticing a trend where they didn't include doubles of the higher price point toys alongside themselves for display in both modes in the same physical space. It may have been a cost issue, who knows?


Zayre December 7, 1986


Background stars are appropriate as this is the last of the great Zayre Transformer smorgasbords. After 1986 Zayre just did not devote as much space or background rocks to their Transformer ads. At least in the end Metroplex did finally get to have his tallest tower attached in a Zayre ad after having to have them all removed or repositioned to get everything to fit during the previous photoshoots.



SHOW NOTES OF THE PODCASTALYPSE

• The Chicago Tribune archives are now online and free
• Recoloring old ads starting with Devastator giftsets
• The Zayre88 site for extinct retail aficionados
• We Care A Lot about TransFormers because you know why!
• The latest round of K-Mart store closures
• My record of hosting well attended panels ain't that good
• ..but I'll be trying paneling again at JoeLanta
• ..thanks to Rob of ZoneBase

BEHOLD THE MONOCHROMATIC GOBACKATRON 1986THOUSAND