All I am saying is give Force a chance!

If there was one section of the Vintage Space Toaster Palace that I'd be most guilty of being lackadaisical about maintaining, it would have to be the page I've made for Robo Force. I'm not a big Robo Force fan myself so it's hard for me to get enthusiastic when I feel like there's not a single other person out there who would appreciate a collection of old newspaper ads dedicated to Ideal's line of warrior robots with crusher arms and gripper bases. Unlike Voltron or Transformers or even GoBots there is no organized online Robo Force fandom with multiple webpages and message boards dedicated to these most unique and short lived toy robots from 1984. There is no shared enthusiasm to get a guy all hyped up about his Robo Force ads collection page, right? People aren't blogging about the awesome Robo Force figure they found the other day or talking about it on podcasts, right? You don't see Robo Force figures making cameos on Sesame Street, right? Nobody cares about Robo Force, right? Of course they do! You just have to know where to look. What I mean is you need a Robo Forced perspective!

YES I CAN TELL YOU HOW TO GET TO SENTINEL STREET

This all started a couple weeks ago when Robo Force began popping up in my life on a consistent basis in some of the wierdest places! First I was listening to the March 22nd episode of Art & Story Extreme when host Jerzy Drozd started going off about how he missed out on watching the the Robo Force cartoon special as a kid. This got me a little motivated to work on my site but the thought of dealing with writing all the code for adding over a hun-dred new ads was intimidating. Then not two days later I was watching Sesame Street with my son when all of a sudden there's a short sequence with a little boy dreaming about being in outer space between two robots and they used Sentinel and Vulgar from Robo Force in it! How weird and random was that? So I started halfheartedly working on getting the page updated while keeping my eyes open for another instance of Robo Force, because if things happen in threes I take it as an omen that I am supposed to be blogging about it, especially if it is toy robots. Sure enough, on March 29th, Shawn over at Branded in the 80s posted about a Robo Force figure he found at a flea market! The harbingers of the Robo ForceTastic Apocalypse were upon me! I had been shown the signs, I had been sucked in by the gripper base of fortune! I had been crushed in the crusher arms of destiny! My fate was Steeled!

WELCOME TO THE ROBO FORCETASTIC APOCALYPSE!

So with renewed vigor and enthusiasm I finished updating the Robo Force page at the Vintage Space Toaster Palace. Seeing so many ads for Robo Force made me want to learn more about this line I had totally overlooked when I was a kid. I pulled out an old hardcover Robo Force book I won in an eBay lot of Transformer stuff a couple years ago and read through it. I was amazed at how enjoyable it was even decades after it came out. So I was curious and I recently went back to eBay and other online venues and bought up every Robo Force book I could find. I looked all over the internet for anything that had to do with the fiction of the Robo Force universe. I wanted to explore its mythology and see what I missed out on when I was 10 in 1984. What was Robo Force really all about? What could be learned from its appearances in newspaper ads and other media? How different was Ideal's approach to marketing toy robots as compared to that of Hasbro and Tonka? How did those crusher arms work anyways? I hope to answer all those questions and more in this Robo Force themed week of the Roboplastic Apocalypse! If it all goes as planned I'll get a good five posts out and even do a Podcastalypse about Robo Force at the end of the week! Yup, it's all Robo Force all the time, all this week on the Robo-est, Force-iest, Robo Forceiest blogocalypse of all-The Robo ForceTastic Apocalypse!



Crush me in your crusher arms
Grip me in your gripper bases
Spin me with your 360 degree
spinning robot waistes...

The pieces of the Puzzler!

I've had GoBots in my head for days because I've been reformatting the GoBots section of the Vintage Space Toaster Palace! It's been a monsterous undertaking just getting all the ads already there put into tables so the information is more clearly understandable. This doesn't include adding the backlog of GoBots ads I've accumulated since Vintage Space Toast Tour Denverado so I'm sure getting those up is going to drive me buggy, man! It is all so very worthwhile because although the complete update is only halfway accomplished, just getting everything sorted out has given me lots of oddball observations about the marketing of the GoBots line and how radically different Tonka's approach was in many ways versus what Hasbro did with Transformers. It's like each ad is a piece to a much larger puzzle and when they're all arranged they become this overall picture of the line and how it was marketed. I don't have ads for every assortment yet-the Dread Launchers, Secret Riders, Power Launchers and Sky Hawk just to name a few are all absent from the newspaper ads I've seen. I don't know what I have in the backlog, though. Hopefully there'll be some surprises once I finish putting everything up sometime around next week. For now I'm gonna take a break from GoBots. You could say I'm in need of a Rest-Q!

THE CUCUMBERS WILL NEVER FORGIVE US

I was riding my bike and as I passed this really long row of perfectly square shrubs I thought to myself how much I am really grateful plants are a) immobile and therefore unable to seek revenge and b) not in charge. Because if they could fight back I'd probably be living in a world where plants would ride their bikes beside long rows of perfectly squared off human torsos. It got me thinking about the one cartoon where plants actually got their shot at creating human topiary-Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors. Thanks to a recent post Shawn did at Branded in the 80s about a website with old cartoons I watched some Wheeled Warriors episodes. It got me all fired up then one thing led to another and the next thing I knew I had updated and reformatted the Wheeled Warriors section of the Vintage Space Toaster Palace!

AM I GLAD TO SAW YOU!

Albertsons 11/07/85

Wheeled Warriors came out in '85 so that would make this year the 25th anniversary of the line. I felt like I was throwing my own Wheeled Warriors celebration as I spent the whole weekend immersed in it, doing internet research for the VSTP and watching the cartoons and working on the ads. It brought back a lot of memories. Back in '85 I was in 5th grade and our class got to go on a tour of the local UHF station. It was the channel that carried Wheeled Warriors and during some point of the tour a small group of us had to wait in the lobby. Wheeled Warriors came on and I will always remember being awestruck by Saw Boss's transformation in the opening sequence. Not because it was particularly dynamic or exciting, but because at home my dad didn't have a UHF antenna hooked up to the TV so our reception was always crappy. The signal was fantastic at the Channel 14 studios and I never realized UHF could look that great. This was the first time I ever saw the show all nice and clear and it really made an impression on me. Wheeled Warriors was one of those shows that you really needed a good signal to appreciate. I was happy to find the episodes really held up after all these years after watching some of them this weekend. I guess it figures I'd love it because it turns out the show was produced by J. Michael Straczynski with Larry DiTillio among the writers and Haim Saban wrote the theme song. Take those ingredients and add in some pissed off vegetable people that turn into armored Mad Max trucks and I'm sold.

Thrifty 11/14/85


YOU CAN'T GO WRONG WHEN YOUR BAD GUYS ARE THE VEGETABLE EQUIVALENT OF FURRIES

Wheeled Warriors does get compared a lot to Star Wars to the point of being called a rip off, but as a kid in 1985 I really wanted to see something Star Warsy in the post-original trilogy era when all we had on the air was Droids and Ewoks. Boy did Straczynski really deliver because Wheeled Warriors is essentially Star Wars where Darth Vader turns into a cucumber tank. Yet Star Wars wasn't the only parallel that could be made. I noticed Wheeled Warriors also had some of the technological sorcery society setting of He-Man plus many alien character designs reminiscent of Looney Tunes plus the transformation element of Turbo Teen. Also eggplants. Plus since the bad guys were motivated by their lust for the "magic root" (which was the most brazen marijuana metaphor in children's television ever) it also takes on a sort of intergalactic Miami Vice feel. It is essentially the further adventures of Luke and Han Solo as they travel the galaxy teaming up with furries from other planets to fight evil pimped out low riders with giant Venus flytraps on their hoods that want to steal Luke's stash of weed. It is no wonder the Star Wars prequels bombed! Straczynski raised the bar too high! Wheeled Warriors didn't rip off Star Wars, it destroyed it with stoned cucumbers.

ALL I KNOW IS THEY MAKE ME WANT TO PUT TOAST IN THEM

TG&Y 12/08/85

Unfortunately the toyline did not capitalize on the cartoon gold that was the Wheeled Warriors show. There were no figures of the cartoon characters and instead the drivers of the vehicles were necktie wearing dudes. (This would have been remedied in 1986 I think. I swear I saw pages online of unproduced prototype figures based on the show characters that would have been packed in with rereleased vehicles for the second year. They even meant to make the Zoggies.) Since the text in the newspaper ads was from Mattel promotional material not based on the cartoon it looks like the original story worked up for the toys was that the necktie dudes were fighting the evil plant tanks in a battle on Earth. That too sounds interesting but for some reason none of this really clicked with me enough as a kid to actually go out and get any of them. The ads tell the story of the line's release in 1985 and rapid demise until they were all being clearanced out by holiday season 1986. I can't say I found the vehicle designs all that interesting. They were kind of small and I couldn't figure out if the good guys were coming or going half the time (I am the same way with Volkswagens). Sometimes even the retailers selling the toys couldn't figure out which side of the good guy cars was the front as evidenced by this TG&Y ad from December of '85. I guess the front was whichever way the big drill or arm or gun was pointing. Actually the idea of space cars with laser beams AND giant melee weapons is pretty dumb if you think about it. But Wheeled Warriors was all about making dumb ideas look great by putting big chromed rims on them.

SOMEBODY'S SMOKIN' THE MAGIC ROOT

Man, being so drenched in the Wheeled WarryWorld as I've been over the last few days sure makes me sad the line died before I could get a figure of Jayce or Oon or Not Han Solo. Knowing those didn't get made eases the pain of not being able to afford the Wheeled Warriors I do see on ebay nowadays. It's kind of ridiculous but eBay sellers expect hundreds of dollars for these toys that were being clearanced at two bucks a pop in 1987. What would be really great is if Mattel would come out with a 25th anniversary Wheeled Warriors line with transforming Monster Minds. I'd love a cucumber tank that turned into a robot with a giant rubber brain. Considering some of the crazy crap Hasbro's been putting out lately Mattel needs to hurry up before they get beaten to it.

The Zoids are back in Town! OR: Different Strux for different Folx

I started getting some hits from a Phillipines based Zoids site back in late 2008 when the Zoids section of the Vintage Space Toaster Palace was nothing more than a handful of blurry, grainy Zoids ads dumped together with no real organization. It was really embarrassing that I hadn't gotten my act together and formatted that page into something useful before people knew about it, but to my surprise those dudes still liked what was there. Well it only took a little over a year but this week I did get around to reformatting the NEW Zoids section of the Vintage Space Toaster Palace so that the information is more understandable plus I got all my Zoids ad backlog worked out. I'm really happy about getting it done, in fact you could say I'm overzoyed.

ZOIDS WILL BE ZOIDS (EVEN THE ONES THAT AREN'T)

Walgreens 12/09/84

I was a little worried that my decision to lump ads for both Zoids and Robo Strux together would cause a roboplastic apocalypse because technically they're two different lines separated by a couple of years. Aside from being motorized prehistoric model kits by Tomy, Zoids and Robo Strux share little else in common design-wise. As I was doing my research into whether or not it was kosher to combine them I realized that even Tomy's been a little confused as to what to call these things, initially releasing them as Mechabonica in Japan, then Zoids in the US before the name change to Robo Strux in 1985, which never happened in Europe and Japan where they just kept calling these things Zoids. I'm still a little unsure after reading the Zoids wiki and other Zoids websites how the line unfolded over time, specifically how long the original American release stayed on the shelves and whether or not it stayed in production through 1984 during the time of Tomy's other motorized figure line Starriors. The only Zoids ad I've ever found in 1984 is actually a mistake where Walgreens used Zoid line art in an ad that was really meant to be for transforming cars from the Convertors line. If I were to come up with a chronology of U.S. Zoid releases based on the line's frequency of appearance in newspaper ads I'd say the originals came out in '83, went on hiatus in '84 and came back as Robo Strux in '85. There is one exception in the Mammoth, a Radio Shack exclusive Zoid that I've so far only found one ad for from 1985. Some Zoid fans say they got their Mammoth in 1984 so either I've missed seeing that one or Radio Shack may not have advertised it back then. It bugs me because they only pushed their other famous exclusive robot, Galactic Man, for one year (coincidentally also 1985). For me to miss an earlier Mammoth ad means either it doesn't exist or I'm shacking off.

BAD ZOIDS RUNNING WILD

One notable ad on the Robo Strux side of things has especially crappy line art from a store called Zody's. It is intriguing to me since I know official line art existed for Robo Strux because I've seen it used in ads from Playworld and other places. The Zody's ad is so awful I'll bet it was made internally by the Zody's advertising people because I cannot imagine Tomy would officially approve this monstrosity. Terox looks like a poorly drawn Grimlock with toilet paper rolls stuck to the side of his neck. I'll bet whoever drew it discovered the only thing harder than putting Zoids together is drawing them. It reminded me of another example of strange and awful line art that appeared in an ad for Ninja action figures from Longs Drug. That one too looked little better than what a 10 year old could come up with. I don't know why stores would occasionally run bad line art like this but it is fun to see. Thankfully the rest of the couple dozen new* ads in the updated VSTP Zoids section are nowhere near as crappy. Though they're still kind of blurry and grainy the big improvement now is that there's lots more of them and they're organized so you can more easily find that crappy, blurry, grainy drawing of Terox you've always wanted to see. Go tell all your Filipino Zoids friends!

Zodys 12/20/85	Longs Drug 11/16/86

*25 years old

TRANSIST AND SURVIVE! TRANSIST AND SURVIVE!

I'm doing my updates to the Vintage Space Toaster Palace where I put up a bunch of new* ads at the rate of one toyline a week. The year started off with Micronauts and last week I did GoDaiKin and this week was supposed to be Zoids. But then I started noticing some hits to the blog coming from a post Th0r4z1n3 did about the Four Star Phantom jets, which are some of the most infamous knockoffs of Starscream ever made. That got me thinking a little about my Four Star section at the VSTP and how it was in need of some big time updating. Then I got a shoutout on the latest episode of the Radio Free Cybertron podcast where the guys asked me about that time Hasbro pursued legal action against K-Mart for selling the Four Star Transistor Robots line. It always trips me out when podcasters mention me. I was listening to that show when I was at Wal-Mart opening the refrigerated door where they keep the milk and then BAM! I got mentioned, and not just mentioned but Rob the co-host was breaking the fourth wall and talking directly to me like Raphael from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Suddenly I felt as if Jesus was tapping me on the shoulder and whispering in my ear, "Hey dumbass, people really are reading your blog!" Or maybe it wasn't Jesus but just the guy stocking the milk on the other side of the shelf inside the refrigerator.

TRI-SPY WITH MY LITTLE EYE

TG&Y 11/10/85

Even more mysterious to me than secret whisperings from the milk man is how Four Star's Transistor Robots line continues to fascinate and terrify people all these years later. I was so inspired by the recent interest shown by the various bloggers and podcasters that I updated the Four Star Transistor Robots section of the Vintage Space Toaster Palace. Instead of just replacing some grainy ads and throwing up some new* ones I reformatted the whole page to make the information more understandable and useful. As it happens I got really immersed in the Transistor Robots universe and came away with a little bit of an understanding of the makeup of the line. Before this I was only vaguely aware of the more infamous figures like the knockoff Devastator, the jets and the Dinobots. Then after reorganizing my Transistor Robots page into the various sizes and prices I got an appreciation for the other figures in the line like the Jumpstarter knockoffs they named "Flip-Flops" and the weird one off robots I'd never seen before that had no recognizable parallels, like the remote controlled "Mastermind". So I've done my part to demystify the legend of the Transistor Robots a bit but there's still much unknown about this line. It's a freaky and crazy and wonderful selection of toy robots and it's no wonder that although it died off 25 years ago we're still talking about it today. If you want to marvel at some of the weirdest interpretations/improvements/molestations ever done to Transformers I'd also suggest Super Toy Archive's Four Star Transistor Robots page. They turned Kickback into a praying mantis! Holy crap what more could you ask for.

*25 years old

Monday Morning Mecha Pilot: The Godaikin, the badakin and the uglyaikin

One of the most important jobs of a toy robots archaeologist is doing what I call Monday morning mecha piloting. A Monday morning mecha pilot looks back with 25 years of hindsight and tries to analyze why a given line of toy robots died out before Michael Bay could make a movie of it. It's based on the assumption that all toy robots are so awesome that every 1980s toy robot franchise had the potential to last longer than they did or 500 years (whichever came first) even the robots that turned into ladybugs, slot machines and McDonald's Big Macs. While everyone else nowadays goes about their lives in a daze driving their Transformers edition 2010 Camaros and not questioning their homogenized Hasbro childhoods, the Monday morning mecha pilot is asking, hey, why aren't we riding Cy-Kill edition Harley Davidsons? Why were dorks my age dressing up like giant penises from Star Wars instead of Tranzor-Z for Halloween last year? When I'm driving my car why can't I ram it into the butt end of a dump truck and then we jump in the air, combine with a jet and make a giant robot? Why hasn't Ford (the car company, not the Han Solo) invented that yet? WHERE IS MY VOLTRON MOVIE? If there's one thing I've learned from spending hours at the library in front of microfilm machines looking for old toy robots newspaper ads it's that the non-passage of all of these events and technologies is a direct result of the degree of success Bandai had marketing their toy robots in the 1980s. Show me a man who doesn't know what a Daltanias is and I'll show you why Michael Bay has a career. Let's look at where mankind went so terribly wrong.

GO-DIED-IN TRANSLATION

Whistle Stop 05 Dec 1983

As I roam the country's libraries riding in the jaws of the time traveling Tyrannosauruses known as the Canon 300 series microfilm scanners looking for old toy robots newspaper ads, one line's ads remain extremely elusive. Of all the toy robots franchises from the late 70s/early 80s that lasted more than two years, it is the ads from GoDaiKin-Bandai's line of giant Japanese die cast robots-that are the rarest. Why was it that other lines from that era that Bandai made toys for like Shogun Warriors (in conjunction with Mattel) and GoBots (in conjunction with Tonka) were the ones that got lots of retailer support while GoDaiKin hardly ever showed up in newspapers? I think it was because GoDaiKin was the first line Bandai tried to distribute without the help of an American toy company acting as the marketing middleman, as was the case with those other lines. It was their inexperience with the way advertising worked in America that crippled GoDaiKin from the start. Bandai learned nothing from their previous joint venture with Mattel and in disregarding lessons that could be gleaned from the successes of Micronauts and Shogun Warriors, they set back toy robots marketing to the stone age.

RICH PEOPLE WILL BUY ANY TOY ROBOT AS LONG AS IT'S EXPENSIVE

Karls Toys&Hobbies 12/08/83

The vast majority of toy advertising done during the late seventies/early eighties in the US was by major retail chains like Zayre, Target and K-Mart and the big box toy supermarkets like Toys R Us, Lionel Playworld and Children's Palace. Yet these were not the places carrying and advertising GoDaiKin from the line's introduction. Early GoDaiKin ads came from mall department stores and independent Mom&Pop toy importers-places that didn't run weekly toy circulars in Sunday papers during the holiday season. I once spoke with the co-owner of one such independent toy store in Rapid City, South Dakota who told me they carried GoDaiKin because they wanted to carry high quality, larger ticket toys that were an alternative to what was being offered in the mainstream. They felt Bandai's robots were in the same class as toy train sets they imported from Europe and finely crafted wooden building blocks from Germany. It was these smaller stores and department store chains like Foley's and May Company who were willing to carry toys like GoDaiKins, which sold at price ranges higher than what major retail and toy supermarkets were comfortable with. My fellow Monday morning mecha pilots across the internet believe that the higher cost of GoDaiKin robots in relation to other toys of the day was one of the line's biggest faults. If the market was Joe average Toys R Us customer looking to save a few bucks then that'd be true, but the GoDaiKin target market was the more discerning upper middle class toy buyer who was more likely to shop at toy importers and department stores like Foley's or May Company than toy discount chains.

May Company 11/23/84


GOD, AI KIN'T REMEMBER THE NAME OF THIS ROBOT

Yet it's evident from the kind of ads I do find for GoDaiKins that Bandai was not supporting these stores with the kind of promotional materials they needed to advertise the line. Since the small Mom&Pop stores didn't run full color weekly circulars what they needed were simplified line art and bullet point style product descriptions for use in their newspaper toy ads, which were black and white copy that ran in the body of the newspaper.

Land of Oz 12/15/85

Bandai provided text descriptions that were overly wordy and they left the toy stores to come up with their own product art which oftentimes resulted in grainy black and white photos of one toy alongside generic descriptions of the whole line, if they even ran pictures of the robots at all. During the height of GoDaiKin advertising in 1984 it was most common to see them lumped in with robots from other competing toylines in one big generic robot sale. Getting lost in these smorgasbord robot buffet ads was somewhat appropriate since the GoDaiKin line itself was a hodgepodge of various robots from differing Japanese franchises with very little in common aesthetically to tie them together. They may have been superstar robots with TV shows in Japan at one point but with no strong marketing push to differentiate them from the crowd and absolutely no brand recognition in the US, the line was dying on the shelves in '85 at the height of the toy robots craze.

THE ONLY SACRIFICE A SUCCESSFUL TOY ROBOTS LINE REQUIRES IS THE IMAGINATIONS OF CHILDREN

Perhaps the biggest nail in the GoDaiKin coffin was the lack of media-tie ins for the line. Comics or television shows that raised awareness and promoted the toys were the most basic of ingredients for a successful toy line back then. This I feel is embarrassing because it raises the question was the problem GoDaiKin or was the problem us? These were some great toys. The failure of this line was more an indictment of our lack of imaginations as children. Were we just not able to appreciate robot lions that combined with space Winnebagos to make giant robots? One great example of the marketing opportunity being missed here (and how brain dead my generation of 10 year olds was) arose when Matchbox in 1985 licensed and rebranded the 1983 GoDaiKin GoLion as a toy tie-in with the enormously popular Voltron TV show.

Robinsons 11/30/84

If kids had to be shown Voltron so they'd get how GoLion was cool then maybe kids were stupid. Maybe consumer advocate groups who felt toy cartoons were the equivalent of mind control were overestimating the imaginative genius of kids. Maybe we needed our lame imaginations kick started and force fed a specific play pattern down all our throats. Maybe Jabba the Hutt costume is karmic restitution for our not knowing a great robot lion if it bit us in the butt when we were kids.

PONTIAC YOU ARE DEAD BECAUSE YOU DID NOT INVENT WHEELED WARRIOR STACK AND ATTACK TECHNOLOGY

In the end, who's to say what failure is anyways? Just because a toy robots line didn't last 25 years or long enough to have awful movies made about it doesn't mean it failed. Without an insider's perspective of why business decisions are made, any assumption of failure is just uninformed speculation on the part of Monday morning mecha pilots. So I am not going to claim I know why Bandai's GoDaiKin line of giant robometallicos had such a brief life in the early 1980s, but it seems to me they could have done a better job of getting the word out. This became apparent as I updated the GoDaiKin section of the Vintage Space Toaster Palace with a measly six new* ads. Seeing how few ads I've accumulated for this line when I've found hundreds of Transformers ads in each of its first three years had me putting myself in the position of retro-Bandai marketing executive wondering what went wrong. I ended up with the conclusion that there are no solid definitive conclusions that can be made from my second hand observations and 25 years of retrospective. Even I with my thousands of 1980s toy robots ads and several years worth of Hobby Japan magazines can't begin to put the pieces together. All I know now is it is foolish for me to think I could understand consumer market economics and the mystifying motivations behind Bandai, Ford, Hasbro or any other companies that used to make shiny metal things with lots of chrome and rubber tires. I've learned it is best to leave the Monday morning mecha piloting to the professionals...but wait there's more! I'll be damned if while researching this thesis on failed Bandai robot toylines I haven't uncovered the real reason the Shogun Warriors was canceled! Stay tuned next time my fellow Macrocranians as I definitively blow the lid off the biggest scandal in toy robots history!

NEXT TIME ON ROBOTASTIC ARCHAEOLOGIST: THE FALL OF THE SHOGUN EMPIRE!

Naut a VSTP Update! OR: IT'S MISS JACKSON IF YOU'RE NAUGHTY

Merry Karza and Happy New Acroyear, my fellow Micronautians. With 2010 upon me I resolved this would be the year I stop complaining about being behind with updating the Vintage Space Toaster Palace and finally do something about it. The problem is that doing so takes a lot of work and it is much easier to write GoBots jokes on my blog than do something worthwhile like working on my site. Hopefully this year I will find the balance between the fun of building the only website that contains thousands of ads but generates absolutely no revenue and chronicling the soul crushing adventures of a man who has distilled the fun of toy robots into the world's most boring hobby involving hours upon hours of library visits staring at microfilm machines.

BEING THE BIGGEST "MICRO" ANYTHING IS A BIT OF AN OXYMORON

Best 11/18/79

The one area of the VSTP that was really bugging me was how I left the reformatting of my Micronauts page unfinished, so that became my first priority this week. In addition to having several dozen ads worth of Micro backlog I also didn't know what to write for those brief introductory paragraphs on my Micronauts page that encapsulate the history of the line in newspaper ads. Those three paragraphs were the most daunting task. It was scary because on one hand I'm the guy amassing this collection of Micronauts material but on the other I really don't know much about them beyond what little experience I had playing with them when I was four years old. How could I possibly write anything authoritative on a subject I'm pretty ignorant about? Then I thought, hey I've been doing that for years on this blog and I never let that stop me. So I stuck with what little I knew and my historical retrospective on late 1970s Micronauts newsprint advertising ended up being more about Star Wars and Shogun Warriors but who cares anyways. It matters not that the biggest collection of Micronauts ads on the internet is run by the biggest Micro-poser ever, all that's important is people know 11 bucks was what it cost to buy something called a Hornetroid in 1979.

Lionel Playworld 12/09/79

MICROFANS AND MICRONUTS SOUND LIKE PARTS FOR REALLY TINY COMPUTERS

Getting my Micro-act together is important because J.J. Abrams is supposed to be doing a Micronauts movie and Hasbro's acquired the toy license (which probably means a relaunching of this brand), all of which are signs of the Roboplastic Apocalypse. So I want to not embarrass myself by having a half-assed Micronaut page in case any real fans come by to check it out. More importantly I want to not mislead anyone jumping on the Micronaut bandwagon in the future in case the movie really takes off and wearing shirts of robot horses, space winnebagos, alien lobsters and Hornetroids becomes the cool thing to do among the Hot Topic crowd. People will have a tough enough time already trying to figure out what Micronauts is about without me confusing them. Hell, I call the Micronauts line a "vanguard of the modern toy robot age" and I'm naut even sure it's about robots. It's not possible to work so closely with the ads and not learn some things about the line but Micronauts still kind of confuses me. Like if you have a rocket car why do you need a robot horse? Here's hoping J.J. Abrams can do as great a job explaining Micronauts as he did with that Cloverfield backstory.

LIBRARIANS DON'T LOVE BOOKS THEY LOVE THE DEWEY DECIMAL SYSTEM

In a nautshell what I wanted to do with this post was let the world know that the Micronauts page of the Vintage Space Toaster Palace has been updated with a ton of new* entries including many nice ads I've blogged about within the past six months plus some other stuff. Although oftentimes I find Micronauts a disconnected uncohesive mess of varying action figure concepts, arranging all the ads in a way that makes sense of the assortments is challenging and fun. Therein lies the appeal and motivation in maintaining a page for a toyline I know very little about and have no real nostalgic connection to. I did wonder a couple of times why I was doing this as I was writing up the thousands of lines of Micronauts HTML for the page and it came down to the reason being more than recognizing the importance of this line's place in the history of the modern Roboplastic Age. Micronauts ads just look awesome! Like I've hypothesized before, toy robots fans are actually more fans of pictures of toy robots than the robots themselves and I may not know what a Hornetroid is but man it sure is pretty.

*30 years old

SHOCK-ISH TO ME!

Toys&Gifts Outlet 11/01/84

Well my truck is breaking down again and I need to go get groceries because my dog Scrounge is out of food so I thought it would be a good time to do the responsible adult thing and write a retrospective on 25 year old newspaper ads for toy robot laser guns. Specifically the greatest transforming toy robot laser gun ever, the toy that would eventually go on to be most prominently recognized as the Transformer Shockwave. As it turns out Shockwave was only one of many different versions of this same basic toy. I've written about ads I've found for some of these other alternate Shockwaves separately but I thought it would be a good idea to bring together a lot of them all in one post because doing so gives a nice overview of the toy's many incarnations. And besides, half the time Scrounge never eats her food when I put her bowl down anyways.

TG&Y 11/11/84	Playland 12/09/84

A VULCAN BASE DESTROYER BY ANY OTHER NAME IS JUST AS BRUTAL

ToyCity 11/22/84

Why this guy appears in so many different packages from so many different companies is beyond me. I do know the officially licensed versions came from a South Korean toymaker named ToyCo and they were pretty generous with the license, allowing multiple companies to distribute it. ToyCo's own "Astro Magnum", Radio Shack's "Galactic Man" and Hasbro's "Shockwave" versions are all legitimately licensed versions of the same toy. Some of the others could be knockoffs or they could be lesser known licesnsees. Whatever the reason, this toy has the distinction of being advertised with more different names than any other robot I've seen. It was not entirely unheard of for a robot to appear in different toylines over a span of years back in the 70s and 80s, like what happened with the GoDaiKin GoLion eventually becoming Lion Voltron or the Shogun Warrior Combattra becoming the GoDaiKin Combattler-V, etc. What's incredible about this robot is it got advertised as Robo Gun, Tobot Laser Blaster, Robot Pistol, Astro Magnum, Galactic Man and of course, the Decepticon Military Operations Commander Shockwave all within the span of one year. I've written before about the Tobot Laser Blaster and how it may actually be an alternate name for the Convert-A-Bots N-4-SR, which is yet another clone of the mold. This begs the question-what is a Tobot anyways? Does it turn into a Robor or a Roy Tobot Gaser Lun? WHAT IS A ROBOR? Who is Roy Tobot and why is he selling Gaser Luns?

SHOCK AND LAW

Eckerd Drug 12/02/84

What is so cool about this guy and the whole toy robot scene in 1984 was that these multiple versions were being advertised all over the place and were in stores simultaneously, the only exception being the Radio Shack version which debuted in 1985. Every other toy company had their Shockwaves in stores by Christmas of '84. In '85 the various incarnations dwindled off and the only ads I've seen for this toy from that year and beyond are the Hasbro and Radio Shack versions. This may be due to Hasbro locking up the license as their former vice president of Boys Toys Bob Prupis explained was standard procedure once Hasbro found a toymaker making a robot they liked. But back in '84 many different versions of this laser pistol got their equal time in the pages of newspapers across the country, most likely because Hasbro got to ToyCo after they'd already begun distributing Astro Magnum and had entered into their contract with Radio Shack. What was also notable about this toy's marketing was that the multiple license holders and bootleggers actually tried to differentiate their laser pistol cyclopses with unique plastic colors and packaging, unlike today when the most predominate Shockwave knockoffs emulate the original Hasbro release down to the boxes. I guess there's just no market for reproduction knockoff reissue Tobot Laser Blasters these days.

Radio Shack 11/24/85	Karls Toys 12/12/85

IN THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND, THE ONE EYED MAN IS GALACTIC

This is really just the tip of the iceberg and there are many many more Shockwave clones out there. ToyCo must have simultaneously made and lost a fortune off the popularity of this mold with all the official and bootleg versions. I will eventually get all these ads and a couple other Shackwave ones up in the Miscellaneous Robots section of the Vintage Space Toaster Palace. Although I already have a section devoted to Galactic Man I need to figure out how exactly I'm going to arrange all the Astro Magnums and Tobots, Tobors and Robors amongst all the other toy robot Gaser Luns. But before I do that I have a tog that needs fixing and a druck that needs feeding.

VSTP UPDATE: I think for me nostalgia don't apply, but if I'm not nostalgic what then am I? (This is the part where the audience yells "ROBOTARDED!")

Ever since we moved to Miami I've been living the life of a rock star, except without the music, fame, money or the groupies. I guess all I really have in common with rock stars is I'm staying in Florida hotels and I'm playing video games all day and when I wake up I don't know where I am. Actually that sounds less like a rock star and more like a lost Japanese tourist.

THE SHOGUN WARRIORS FAMILY TREE DON'T BRANCH MUCH IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN

Bumblebee's uncle

I am in good company because "lost Japanese tourists" describes the three toy robots lines whose pages I'm updating over at the Vintage Space Toaster Palace. I'm talking about Mego's Micronauts, Mattel's Shogun Warriors and Hasbro's Transformers from 1984. It's been a challenging update because Transformers 1984 is the only one of these three old toy robot families that I know anything about. Shogun Warriors and Micronauts are still largely outside of my area of expertise, which makes sorting and arranging their ads like constructing a detailed family tree for lost Japanese tourists I've never met. For Shogun Warriors this was pretty easy because there weren't that many different figure assortments but holy hell Micronauts had me hating my hobby, my life and everybody who has ever worked at Mego.

THIS PAST IS YOUR PAST THIS PAST IS MY PAST

I was wondering why I was going through all this trouble for the Micronauts because like I say, I don't even know those people. Sorting Transformers is several orders of magnitude more complicated than Micronauts but I deal with them just fine because that was an obsession born of childhood. I thought this newspaper ad project was motivated by nostalgia but that can't explain my current devotion to chronicling toys I only had a tangential interest in 30 years ago. This had me questioning the nature of nostalgia and wondering if I'm as stuck in the past as I initially thought I was. What can explain now my fascination with ads for 30 year old Micronauts I never owned or cared much for as a kid? Is a 10 year old boy of today who likes 80s Transformers a nostalgic? You can't exactly go up to a kid like that and rant about how he needs to grow up and stop living in the past (although it would be kind of funny). I have always wanted to be in a situation where I could tell a little kid, "You need to let go of the 80s, Charlie Brown". I think now I understand young people who like 80s Transformers even though they weren't even born yet, or anybody my age who likes Led Zeppelin. This new insight makes it okay for me to like Micronauts and not be saddled with the "nostalgic" label. It also makes Baron Karza the Robert Plant of toy robots rock and roll.

THEY'RE NAUT THE SAME

What started all this roboplastic introspection was how I've totally overhauled the Shogun Warriors and Micronauts sections over at the Vintage Space Toaster Palace. Previously they were just chronologically listed dumps of ads with no real arrangement, but I figured they were getting too big so I gave them table formatting so the information would be more understandable. Now they're broken up into assortments by size or type so that figures and vehicles are separate from playsets and licensed merchandise. Plus I have attempted to write a few paragraphs long introductions for each of these series as I have done for the various Transformers sections of the VSTP. Except you might notice that the paragraphs I've got for the Micronauts section are actually Lorem Ipsum text (I learned this from Nala). This is because I'm waiting for my next trip to the library to get more Micronauts ads. As it stands now I can't really do a good overview of the line's history in newspaper ads because most of what I've got is from '77. I also wanted a break because sorting through all the Micronauts made my brain melt as I tried to figure out whether some toys in that line were action figures or vehicles (or both) and where to put them. Classifying robots that had "tron" in their name like Biotron and Microtron and other toys based on them but not having "tron" names was also a nightmare. Determining what exactly a "tron" was and which characters qualified as "trons" was equally confusing but hey it's not like I'm working at the Micronaut social security administration figuring out benefits for retiring trons so it's no big deal if I get it wrong.

"IT'S HARD FOR ME TO BELIEVE THAT HASBRO CAN SHIP MORE THAN WE CAN SHIP"

K-Mart 12/12/84

That's a quote from Raymond E. McDonald, Tonka's director of marketing in 1984¹. He was talking about how he felt GoBots would outpace Transformers in sales in '84 because Tonka's supplier Bandai was a larger company than Takara who was producing Transformers for Hasbro. Although Transformers ended up edging out the GoBots in sales I think Mr. McDonald was right about the supply issues. It became very evident to me as I was uploading a dozen new* ads to the Transformers 1984 section of the Vintage Space Toaster Palace. I've become aware of patterns in how retailers advertised action figure lines in newspapers during the holiday shopping seasons of the early eighties. Usually what would happen is stores would start their toy advertising during the latter half of October and most toylines' ad volume would peak right after Thanksgiving and stay very strong through the first two weeks of December. But Transformers peaks after Thanksgiving and then virtually disappears while GoBots maintain their ad frequency through Christmas. This is because stores would completely sell out of Transformers and Hasbro had already set allocations on wholesale orders for the '84 assortments so retailers knew they couldn't get anymore. All but a handful of retailers stopped advertising Transformers figures in December but ads for licensed Transformer tie-in merchandise continued strong through the Christmas season. This is why the majority of the dozen new Transformer '84 ads I've found are not for Transformer figures but Transfomrer Halloween costumes, coloring books, radios and velcro ball darts. I'm glad I've gotten these Florida ads up anyways because we're approaching the 25th anniversary of the first Transformers ads I've found. Just like I had KRON-DAY to celebrate my earliest Diakron ad, I guess it's time to get ready for TRAN-DAY!?!

WE WILL ROCK YOU (AND THEN GO TO YOUR LIBRARY)

That about does it for this VSTP Update. To see the new ads just go to the Micronauts, Shogun Warriors and Transformers 1984 sections and do a CTRL+F search for "Miami" and "Tampa" and you'll find them. There should be about two dozen new Shoguns, and a dozen each of Micronauts and Transformers for anyone keeping count. My next few library visits will concentrate on '78 and '79 unless I get all excited about Tran-Day and want to do something special for that. We'll see how it goes. The one thing I've learned is that lost Japanese tourist rock stars don't have a plan, they just rock on wherever they are. I wonder if anybody ever started a band so they could have an excuse to visit libraries in different cities, secretly working on amassing a toy robots newspaper ad collection. IF YOU MEET THAT GUY ASK HIM WHAT A TRON IS.

¹Sari Horwitz (1984, September 2). TOYS WITH DOUBLE THE FUN. The Washington Post (DC).

*25 years old

Goodbye, land of ads and snow

After three years of living here I'll be leaving Rapid City, South Dakota soon. It may not have been toy robot convention central but Rapid City had it where it counted-the library was awesome for old toy robots ad looking. Every city has its own unique strengths when it comes to their library's microfilm archive of old newspapers, and Rapid City had the most beautiful quality microfilm transfers of anywhere I've ever seen. The only downside was that it had the clunkiest, most broken down microfilm readers I've ever used. During the time I was here the zoom lenses on both machines completely broke and they were both stuck on mega zoom and one machine's display slowly degraded to the point that half of the screen was permanently blurry (I called that one R5-D4). I understand how Luke Skywalker felt in that scene where R2-D2 wouldn't play back the Princess Leia message. It's hard being the internet jedi super hero of old toy robots newspaper ads when you have to work with shitty droids.

MICROMASTER MICRO BASE ADS FROM THE MOST INCREDIBLE PLACES

(a better) K-Mart 11/26/89

I've noticed that there are people who never truly take advantage of living where they live. I know natives of Rapid that have never been to Mount Rushmore. Even worse, I know people living here who have never searched through the library microfilm archives for toy robots newspaper ads from 1987 through 1990. I didn't want to be one of those so recently I went back to the library for one last Rapid City gig on the Vintage Space Toast Tour. Another great thing about this place is Rapid City has Target, K-Mart and ShopKo ads going further back than anywhere else I've ever been. I was able to reshoot better pictures of Target and K-Mart ads I'd already found in other cities in nicer Rapid City quality. While Target and K-Mart were strong with Transformers ads from '84 to '87, from '88 to '90 their circulars usually just ran a single combo ad for a line-wide Transformers clearance. On the other hand, ShopKo didn't jump on the Transformers bandwagon until late in the 80s and they kept advertising individual assortments all the way until the end of the road in '90. So while Transformer ads did get increasingly rarer towards the end of the line, at least ShopKo was hanging in there and thanks to them I was able to add one new ad to the Transformers 1990 section of the Vintage Space Toaster Palace. I was so glad I got that one because there's never any guarantee that 1990 will have anything and I spend so much precious time looking that coming away empty handed would have been nothing short of a roboplastic apocalypse. I would have beaten R5-D4's ass.

ShopKo 12/18/88	ShopKo 11/04/89	ShopKo 12/05/90

REALLY RAPID RAPID REELING

I only spent six hours at the Rapid City library but I ended up finding a total of about two dozen new* ads for the Transformers 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989 and 1990 sections of the Vintage Space Toaster Palace. A couple of those were for assortments that I've never found before like the Monster Pretenders from '89. I'm happy with what I came away with because I usually do not have time to search through the later years of the 80s during my short vacations to other cities. Speaking of which, I feel like it was good practice for the upcoming Vintage Space Toast Tour Pasadena where I'll probably spend six hours each in 1984 and 1985 and not get to visit the eras after 1986. I know I will leave Pasadena wishing I had a little more time because like South Dakotans who have never seen Mount Rushmore, Pasadenans disappoint me by not internetting their library microfilm archives of old toy robots newspaper ads. What could there possibly be to do in California that's funner than microfilm looking?!

IT WAS WOOLWORTH IT

Woolworth 11/26/89

It was kind of sad sitting down for the last time at the library here but it also reminded me of how much fun I had here. Although I started doing this ad collecting seriously in Tucson, Arizona almost ten years ago, it was here in Rapid City, South Dakota that the VSTP was born and really grew. When we first moved here I thought I wouldn't find much by way of old ads because there was no Toys R Us, Children's Palace or Lionel Playworld here in the 80s, but Rapid City ended up being one of the best sources of material because of what it did have. It had small retail chain stores and independent mom and pop retailers that ran some of the most memorable toy robots ads I've ever seen. In a short three years Rapid City and I robotted enough to last a lifetime. Now like Luke Skywalker leaving Tattoinee I leave Rapid for Miami where there will be warmer weather and hopefully more agreeable microfilm droids. DEATH STAR DO NOT BLOW UP MY LIBRARIES BEFORE I GET THERE!

BILLION DOLLAR BUMBLEBEES-The price of love, silence and my adult sanity (after mail-in rebate)

Although I am Nostrodomatron of the Roboplastic Apocalypse I was unprepared for the hilarity of Chicken Pop Pod episode #37. Even I could not have prognosticated the impending LOLpocalypse I had while listening to a bunch of normal guys talking about the old days of Transformers and the Great Toy Robots Wars of the 1980s. Hot damn I think I've listened to that podcast at least four times. I know the question on everyone's mind is, "But as this dimension's Nostrodomatron how is it that you did not see this podcast coming, as clearly it is a sign of the Roboplastic Apocalypse?" And well the answer is that despite its name, a Nostrodomatron is only good for looking into the past-specifically 1985.

AHHH, I FRIGGIN' REMEMBER COOLGUNMASTER HOT ROD! (JUST DON'T ASK ME HOW MUCH HE COST)

It is because of Chicken Pop Pod 37 that I've been working on an overhaul of the Transfomers sections of the Vintage Space Toaster Palace. The Chicken Pop Podpeople ignited within me untold passions when they kicked off their old school Transfromer discussion with the age old question that has plagued philosophers and toy robots archaeologists since time immemorial-"So how much did Optimus Prime cost back in 1984?" Man, if I were to count all the times I've heard that question pop up in podcasts it would be twice. Still, it bothers me because I of all people should be able to answer it by now. I of all people should be able to come up with a simple comment on their site like, "Dear Chicken Pop Podpeople, HAY GUYS I GO TO LIBRARIES PLUS MICROFILMS. $19.99!" But I couldn't. Why is it that after collecting the retail price data for over 700 Transformers items I couldn't contribute the answer to even the simplest price-related Transfromrer question? Why after spending a little over 10 years at this ad collecting hobby couldn't I definitively say that the answer is Optimus Prime cost X amount of 1984 dollars? You know why I couldn't simply do that? Because for all the data I've collected, the Vintage Space Toaster Palace Transformer sections WERE ALL FUCKY AND HORRIBLE.

THE K-MARTIAN CHRONICLES (OR: FIREFLIGHT $4.51)

K-Mart 10/10/84

When I first got the idea to take a bunch of 25 year old toy robots newspaper ads and put them on the internet it wasn't because I wanted the only website comprised entirely of advertising that generates absolutely no revenue, it was something profoundly more idiotic. It was driven by an appreciation for the ads themselves and their little line art pictures with badly worded descriptions written by K-Mart employees and grocery store cashiers. But all these years later I've realized that this amassed canon of K-Mart Transformers continuity needed organization. I couldn't keep throwing ad upon ad in there in a pile and expect anyone to get anything out of it. In their previous state, the disheveled garbage dumps of randomly arranged hyperlinks that comprised the VSTP's Transformers sections meant nothing to anyone and they could not be easily used in a way that was meaningful without spending hours trying to sift through all the unorganized lists. There was great knowledge buried in those lists, and by extension, great power. But someone had to go in there and make that great knowledge and power meaningful. The task of arranging the information had to become my great responsibility. This was my Uncle Ben moment. Not the Spider-Man Uncle Ben guy who said that with great power comes great responsibility, I mean the rice. It was time to eat rice. Rice with raisins. Looking at all those unorganized toy robots ads made me hungry.

RUBBER LITTLE TIRES I GOT YOU IN THE DIMESTORE FOR $2.99

I sat down in the dark of my son's room last Thursday night after I put him to bed. I sat there and I knew what I had to do but just thinking about the enormity of the task of rewriting and rearranging hundreds upon hundreds of ads and links and lines of HTML was overwhelming. Sure, Transformers 1987 through 1990 would be easy enough to reformat and write tables for because there were only a couple dozen ads each in those sections. But '86 and '84? They had over a hundred ads each that would have to be sorted and rearranged. And 1985? I remember being in the dark and thinking to myself, "I'm really not looking forward to 1985". (In this house such a thought is sacrilegious.) That's when I was inspired by a voice from beyond, or at least from the radio next to me. It was Alice Cooper. My 2 year old son and I had been listening to the "Nights with Alice Cooper" radio show as we are known to do at bedtime. While I was sitting there going through my latest roboplastico apocalypse because I couldn't leave a simple comment on someone's podcast, Alice was talking about the dedication it takes being in a band. His words were something like, "You just gotta love what you're doing so much that you don't care how much of a hellish wreck it makes your life". That would be my inspiration as I powered through the hellish wreck my life became over the next week spending all my free time working on the site. Actually my real inspiration was his words and the knowledge that my wife had ordered me a robot tyrannosaurus and it was coming in the mail any day.

Was this one ad with three robots or three robots with one ad? I would have to decide.

I DON'T BELIEVE IN LIFE IS FAIR OR YOU GET WHAT YOU DESERVE BUT I DO BELIEVE IN MY DESERVED SHARE OF ROBOT TYRANNOSAURUS

So there I was pounding away at the keyboard for at least 3 hours a night for a week, really pushing my sanity and Microsoft Notepad (the program I use to write my HTMLs) to the limits. At my lowest point I hated it so much I couldn't keep going, but I would remember the wisdom imparted upon me by Alice Cooper and I wanted to keep going exactly because I hated it so much. When I went to bed I didn't just have carpal tunnels, I had carpal space bridges. But how could I ever speak with any authority on the revered subject of what Optimus Prime cost at K-Mart 25 years ago if nobody could see the research and make sense of it? More importantly, how could I open and enjoy Masterpiece Grimlock with the guilty conscience that comes from having bad HTMLs and a belly full of Uncle Ben rice? I had to keep going. I felt like if I got through all this I would absolutely deserve my robot tyrannosaurus, but I started to wonder if after all these trials I would even want a robot tyrannosaurus (again, quite a sacrilegious thought here in the Kingdom of Macrocrania).

MY HTMLS ARE EASIER TO READ BUT PLEASE NOBODY ASK ME HOW MUCH OPTIMUS PRIME COST BECAUSE I STILL HAVE NO FRIGGIN' CLUE

After seven nights of Notepad busting, carpal tunneling, mind melting, toy robot ad rearranging insanity I made it through. I friggin' reorganized the Transformers 1984, Transformers 1985, Transformers 1986, Transformers 1987, Transformers 1988, Transformers 1989 and Transformers 1990 pages of the Vintage Space Toaster Palace to be more readable and user friendly. And as I looked upon the information finally in its most understandable form I realized that this whole entire quest for the Unified Field Theory of Optimus Prime prices is the biggest, most pointless waste of time I have ever partaken. The truth is that stores back then charged whatever the hell they felt like with no rhyme or reason. Although I have amassed quite a bit of data, unless you live in the towns these ads came from they can't really tell you how much your mom or grandma or whoever bankrolled your toy robots addiction paid for these things. There are fluctuations in price differences from chain to chain and even within the same chain in different cities! Optimus Prime at K-Mart in Denver most likely was cheaper than Optimus Prime at K-Mart in Hockawattamie or wherever you lived. Nothing less than a complete set of all newspaper ads from every city for every day of the year could even begin to hope to answer the question of what Optimus Prime cost in 1984. In the end the only real answer is that it depended. It depended on how much your mom was desperate enough to pay to get you to shut up that day.

IF ONLY THEY HAD ASKED ABOUT ROBOTECHS!

I live now with a new burning question that will plague toy robots archaeologists and philosophers-what good is collecting all those ads if I can't give anyone even a ballpark answer to any old Transformers price question? THE ANSWER IS WHO CARES? What deeply rooted truth about humanity or insight into the human soul are we expecting to get from knowing the regular K-Mart price of 25 year old toy robot Volkswagens and their transforming dinosaur cohorts? The only real value is in the "How sick is he, nurse? Well there's this list of 700 toy robots ads prices from libraries across the United States he made complete with descriptions and notes and links to blog posts and all cross referenced against each other but that ultimately mean nothing, doctor" kind of way. Of course I don't think it's totally pointless or I wouldn't be paying 80 bucks a year for webhosting this crap. For me these ads will always be cherished souvenirs for no other reason than they are Transformer mementos from ages ago dug up like fossils in strata from the microfilm archives of the libraries in the cities I've visited. I also come away with a slightly better webpage, plus I made a VSTP t-shirt for my son and after all the work I did rearranging the Transfromer sections I'm proud to make him wear it. NOW NOBODY ASK ME ABOUT VOLTRONS!

I'm Not O.K., I'm ELEGANTLY WASTOR'D

This guy named Gerard who sings and writes songs in a band I like just happens to be a big comic book fan. Back in January he did a guest stint on an internet comic book review show and he recommended an obscure 1994 comic called "The Biologic Show". I was getting ready to order some Starriors comics because I had to do background research before I added a couple dozen new* ads to the Starriors section of the Vintage Space Toaster Palace, so I figured okay, Gerard, I'll order an issue of "The Biologic Show" but it better be goood. (And then I thought, FUKC YEAH! I'm having imaginary conversations with rock stars who are giving me comic book recommendations and I'm not even smashed or anything!)

DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME ALWAYS SEARCHING FOR THOSE WASTOR'D YEARS

Children's Palace 10/28/84

Starriors and "The Biologic Show" were two comics I missed out on when they debuted because I was so consumed with my primary obsessions (The Transformers in the 80s and and Iron Maiden in the 90s) that I simply did not have any time, money or energy to spend on anything else. And as I cracked open each Starriors comic I was dreading not that they'd be terrible but that they'd be totally fantastic and my blind devotion to more commercially successful toy robots and European metal bands cost me the enjoyment of being in on these more obscure recreations when they first came out. I'm a total sheep for mainstream entertainment but I'm a wishy-washy one, so much so that at any given moment I am always wondering if I've missed out on something that would connect with me deeper than the adventures of Hasbro's 25 year old toy robot Volkswagens and their transforming dinosaur cohorts. Although I never paid any attention to them, Starriors had toys and commercials and comic books in 1984. What if Starriors was really great and because of millions of 10 year old Transfridiots like me it died through lack of support? Before I read the comics I wondered if I would regret that I hadn't Wastor-ed my childhood.

I CAN HANDLE ROBOTS IN LOVE BUT BLIND ROBOT POET TYRANNOSAURUSES IS PUSHING IT A LITTLE

Wal-Mart 11/27/84

I read one issue of Starriors each night just before I went to bed and just after working on the ads for the site so I was really Starrior'd this week. The comics had a lot of the basic elements I demand of great entertainment-a bleak post apocalyptic setting, conflicted machines going against their programming in a race to revive or destroy mankind, and giant talking robot Tyrannosauruses. In an interesting character quirk, the Starriors Tyrannosaurus was blind and he depended on his robot pterodactyl friend to tell him where to go. (Why is it that robot Tyrannosauruses in the 80s always had speech impediments or other handicaps?) This is actually an ingenious incorporation/characterization of the toy's relationship with its radio control remote. Deadeye the blind Tyrannosaurus robot was also quite eloquent and had a great vocabulary, and oftentimes was described as a poet. But Tomy misjudged the market here because what kids really wanted in the 80s was RETARDED robot tyrannosauruses. The newspaper ads for Deadeye are my favorite in the Starriors line and I can't believe a radio controlled, plastic disc shooting robot Tyrannosaurus retailed for only 20 bucks. I think Deadeye is the best figure in the whole Starriors line but unfortunately he goes down like a total bitch in the opening animation of his commercial. There's this other Starrior half his size that just pushes Deadeye right off the screen. Physically assaulting a blind robot cartoon Tyrannosaurus is very rude but I guess that's how they roll in Starrior World. After seeing that commercial I got the feeling that other Starriors probably don't respect handicapped Tyrannosaurus parking spaces.

Toys R Us 11/22/84	Lionel Playworld 12/06/84

"-OR" IS THE NEW "-TICON"

Shillito-Rikes 11/11/84

Deadeye's commercial highlights a lot of things I felt were confusing about the way the Starriors line was marketed. The biggest problem I have understanding any of Starrior world is that names of the individual robots are rarely ever used in the newspaper ads or TV commercials. Instead they call them by a different sort of designation each robot has depending on their size (I think). Starriors can be Wastors, Strazors, Vultors, Stalkors, Cosmittors or a lot of other things that end in "or". Then on top of that you have the good guy and bad guy designations, "Protectors" and "Destructors". So while Wastors and Strazors could be Protectors or Destructors there couldn't be a Wastor Protector that was also a Strazor, but Strazors could be Protectors. I think. Some newspaper ads would just forgo the Starrio-logical technobabble and just call them robots. Maybe I'm too old for all of this and when I was younger I could sort it all out, but right now Starrior designations seem like quantum mechanical string theory. But ask me to explain the relationship between a Megatron, Constructicon and Decepticon and I'm all over that.

Lionel Playworld 12/01/85	Revco 12/18/86

IN THE POST APOCALYPSE TWO OUT OF THREE IS ACTUALLY BETTER

After reading the whole four issue Starriors comic miniseries I slept soundly at night, knowing that if I couldn't understand these toys at 34 I probably wouldn't have as a ten year old, mostly because I am dumb. A lot of other kids probably figured that out, too because by 1985 the Starriors were hitting the clearance shelves. '85 saw Tomy abandon the Starrior concept in favor of the more traditionally Zoidy approach with their RoboStrux line of model dinosaurs (that could presumably see but not write poems). I think Starriors proved that sometimes complicated mythical backstories and angsty conflicted personalities could hurt the marketing of a toy robots line more than help them. Although Starriors didn't click with me, Tomy has done a lot of other robot stuff I liked. I kept that in mind when I ended up not liking The Biologic Show that Gerard recommended. After thinking about Starriors I figured that The Biologic Show's author might be the Tomy of alternative comics so I dug around a little and sure enough I found a different story by him that I absolutely loved and consider greatly entertaining. It is a bleak story in an apocalyptic setting about the destruction of mankind. It doesn't have giant talking robot Tyrannosauruses, but I think after all of this I'll just let that go.

*25 years old