YOU KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS

There's a paranormal blog I like called "From the Shadows". Recently the author asked what aspect of the paranormal is the most retarded. It's a good question because the whole field of paranormality gets constantly goofed on by science, skeptics and society as a whole. But for there to be one aspect within the paranormal that has even people who believe in the Loch Ness Monster rolling their eyes shows that there is a limit to how much outrageous stupidity even the most crazy idiot is willing to believe. Note my personal favorite conspiracy-that Trix is processed rabbit turds-is nowhere on the list of unbelievability.

TRANSFORMING ROBOT WATCH NEVER TOLD ME IT WAS TIME TO GROW UP

As a crazy idiot from a different field, I too am constantly goofed on by science, skeptics and society as a whole. And just as mankind going to the moon allowed people to make total morons of themselves by denying it happened, the invention of transforming robot watches allowed me to embarrass myself in ways never before possible to man. To understand this phenomenon we must turn to the writings of Douglas Rushkoff. He believes that anything that gets people to interact with each other whether it be jokes, pictures, baseball cards or songs has social value, like a sort of social currency. Obviously he meant to include wearing robot watches and telling everyone that you see dead people.


In 1984 when I was ten one of the most valuable forms of social currency was the transforming robot watch. In fourth grade a robot watch could make you a social currency millionaire. When I was twenty in 1994 I tried to relive the magic by wearing a robot watch to work but instead it left me socially bankrupt and my robot watch based social economy went into recession. I found that transforming robot watch was the bouncing check of social currency. Apparently the modern legal tender social currency value of wearing a robot watch ranks somewhere around telling people reptilians from zeta reticuli are molesting me with butt probes.

WHO WATCHES THE WATCHROBOTS ROBOTRONS?

In addition to putting up some new* Kronoform watch ads I've started a section at the Vintage Space Toaster Palace called Unlicensed Robot Watches. This section is not for ads of watches from popular toylines like Gobots, Transformers, and Voltron or even the grandfather (clock) of them all, the Kronoform Time Machine. No, the Unlicensed Robot Watch section is a tribute to the crappy knockoff watches that usually cost under five bucks and fell apart the first time they were transformed. They didn't have a flashy licensed brand name to help them out and most didn't even have names at all. When they did have names they were awful. One of the robot watch manufacturers decided to take the two most corny and overused word modifiers in the roboplastic vocabulary, "robo-" and "-tron", and combine them into a name so awful that it makes GoBots sound like The League of Extraordinary Omega Supremes. It didn't matter that the names were bad and the watches were crappy, they sold like crazy because they were cheap! They were cheap because these guys took whatever development budget they had and put it where it counted-into terrible art for their packaging and newspaper ads. Holy crap some of these unlicensed watch ads have art on par with the robotic meth demons thousands of kids drew on their school notebook paper in fourth grade. Okay, well maybe not thousands. Okay, just me.

DREAM OF TAKARA-TIZATION DREAM OF TAKARA-TIZATION

It is difficult to explain or recreate the feeling of overwhelming awe the first time I saw Takara's Kronoform robot watch. When I was five I had a normal Star Wars wristwatch with a picture of R2D2 and C3P0 on the face. It was robots on a watch, like snakes on a plane. But the idea that the watch could be a robot! That was snakes that were planes. Just the concept of a robot watch was gold, but Takara went totally overboard with their execution and marketing. They had to chrome it, call it a 'time machine', tell people it had countless different modes and they even released a version that was also a radio. While they Takaratized the hell out of their robot watch, bootleggers distilled the concept to its essence without chrome or radios or commercials and sold assloads of robot watches in the $5 price range. Takara's super glitzy approach came at a cost and the average retail price of a two inch tall Kronoform Time Machine was $12.99. For thirteen bucks in '84 you could buy a deluxe Autobot car AND an Autobot minicar! I can't imagine anybody bought these on purpose unless they were the procrastinating dad type who did last minute Christmas shopping after all the other toy robots were gone, or they were Mr. T. I guess that makes me a robot watch denier. I know we went to the moon but I doubt anybody bought Kronoform Time Machines.

QUALITY CRAZY IS CHROME ON A ROBOT WATCH

I think Takara did such a good job getting the idea of robot watches out there that their commercials helped the bootleggers undermine the sales of their own product. What backfired hardest was these robot watches all looked the same, despite Takara's being chromed. But as I learned from the paranormal pecking order poll, not all weird beliefs (or watches) are the created equal. You have to dig a little deeper to get to the real quality crazy but it is totally worth it. Being in a line at a robot convention talking to a robot watch wearing, moon landing denying crazy person is like winning the social currency lottery. Everybody and their mom that goes to those robot shows would give their firstborn to rub up against Peter Cullen's red flannel wearing ass in an elevator, but to me the true celebrities are eating Trix and wearing something else.

*24 year old

VSTP could stand for many things-Very Soft Toilet Paper is one

Personal free time is getting more and more scarce around here in the Kingdom of Macrocrania-or more accurately-personal time to do bloggy reminiscing about old toy robots ads is getting more and more scarce around here. I still have a lot of ads to put up at the Toaster Vintage Space Palace but between watching GoLion volume 2, downloading episodes of Macross Frontier, playing the demo for Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and complaining all day about the VSTP ad backlog, I hardly have time to do actual updating. I swear though, this week I will at least get some Very Soft Toilet Papering done and the following four ads are highlights from the batch I'm working on.

EVERYTHING CRAP IS CRAP AGAIN

This Ace Hardware ad from 1978 features The Star Team, which at first glance seems like a cheap knockoff of Star Wars. It actually was but when a lawsuit was filed against Ideal (the makers of Star Team) they won because Star Team was based on toy designs originally released up to a decade earlier. Star Team is actually the final mutation of a line of toy robots called Zeroids that were originally introduced in '67 or '68 depending on who you believe. Zeroids were definitely a product of their time and the robots had a charming sixties sci-fi look. "Charming sixties sci-fi look" is my polite way of saying they looked like a vacuum cleaner fucked a Christmas tree.

Zeroids is the toy robots equivalent of Freddy Kreuger or Jason. It's a novel idea that was cool maybe once but it keeps coming back. After Zeroids died its natural death the first time, Ideal repackaged some of the figures in a Star Warsy way and called it Star Team, hence the lawsuit. Then years after that horrid bastardization, Ideal came up with RoboForce in 1984, which featured pretty much the same outdated Zeroids robot styling just recycled for the eighties. RoboForce robots had many of the same design characteristics like vacuum hose arms and lack of discernible heads and legs. Unbelievably a company called Captain Action Enterprises is bringing back the original Zeroids again this year! Don't they know that rereleasing antiquated toy robot designs that have outworn their welcome is just embarrassing to themselves and their customers?

FROM THE LAW OFFICES OF UNFROZEN CYLON LAWYER

Ads for the original Battlestar Galactica ships always creep me out when I come across them. This Joske's ad from December of '78 is really cool though because it's for the Cylon Raider, which I had when I was a kid. Recently I came across some lawyer blog where they wrote a snarky post about what they consider the ten most dangerous recalled toys of all time. A guy claiming to be the brother of the most famous choking victim in action figure history responded with a comment on the lawyer blog. In the list was a mention of the 1979 Battlestar Galactica missile fiasco, which I thought was pretty interesting because I know the internet is full of crazies but who's going to spend time impersonating Jay Warren?

Those lawyers did a good job writing about the recall. Except they got the year that the kid died wrong. And he didn't choke on the missile launcher itself as they state, but the missile that got lodged in his throat. And they incorrectly stated that the recall was for "all BSG models" when it was actually just the missiles that got recalled. And the part where they state that production was suspended was incorrect because Mattel continued manufacturing the toys, just with modified missiles. Overall it was a decent effort, but please, if you're an unfrozen Cylon lawyer leave the toyblogging to the professionals.

IT TURNS OUT 90 PERCENT OF THE COST WAS FOR ENGINEERING THEIR COMPLICATED ROBOT HATS

What can I say? This is the most fantastic toy robot newspaper ad I have ever seen. It's not just because it's a full page in the Los Angeles Times from November of 1984. It's not just because it features wonderful lineart of some of the greatest toy robots from the 1980s. It's not just because it features classic GoDaiKins like Goggle V, Voltes V and Daltanias. It's all those things plus I finally get to see retail prices for many of these legendarily expensive toy robots. I've run across a handful of GoDaiKin ads before but they've always been in the $35-$40 range. Finally I get to see that Robinson's was charging $85 for the 13 inch tall Voltes V. By comparison the Transformers' Fortress Maximus was a two foot tall robot that sold for $89.99 at Toys R Us. Voltes V may seem expensive until you realize he's wearing a cowboy hat with bananas coming out of it.

IN THIS WORLD NOTHING IS CERTAIN BUT DEATH AND I HATE ROBOT WATCH ADS

Sometimes I'm spending hours looking through miles of microfilm for old toy robots ads (and praying for death) when I come across one that makes it all worthwhile. Such was the case when I found this Ben Franklin ad from December of 1984. It's an ad for a nameless, brandless five dollar robot watch (on sale for $3.44). Normally I HATE HATE HATE toy robot watch ads. They're always the same dumb robot watch in the same dumb pose because it can't do any poses except Frankenstein arms. But check this out-Ben Franklin decided to draw up some killer art that looks like it could have been drawn by the Japanese artists who did the robot drawings on the Transformer boxes (if they were drunk and in third grade).



ALL THIS AND MORE IN THE NEXT EXCITING EPISODE OF VINTAGE TOASTER WATCH PALACE!