ULTRA MAGNUS in: Trouble in Ohio!

It's March 31, 1986 and a couple lions and some kind of weird monkey are on the loose! Who will stop them? Yes! It's Ohio Magnus! KILL 'EM ALL, OHIO MAGNUS!

A couple days ago at a convention far, far away in Texas....

It's the 35th episode of the Roboplastic Podcastalypse and it's more fun than taking a Snowspeeder to the face! Yes it's a most Star Warsian adventure as the Nostrodomatron revenges returns to Texas for Fan Days IV with the new hope of talking to some people that know a thing or two about drawing robots. Are all Star Wars conventions really toy robots conventions in disguise? They are from a certain point of view! So join me for over an hour of shocking revelations like how they make those giant Transformer standees in the stores, who drew those lenticular cards they packed in with Transformers that one time and how much I paid for a potentially deadly Mattel Battlestar Galactica Colonial Viper in the dealer room! All this and more, much more in this "EVER SINCE THE OPERATION I'M YOUR MOM, TOO" edition of the podcastalypse!


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Luke there's something else you need to know about your dad.....

WEAR WHAT MUST BE WORN!

I put up a ton more pictures of just about everything I mentioned in the show (and more) over at Flickr in a set called crazysteve at Fan Days 2011. Check it out if you wanna see more Star Wars fans, collectors, toys, costumes, artists, celebrities and Transformer coloring books from 1985 than you can shake a gimmer stick at. For even more convention pictures check out Dallas ComicCon's Facebook page.

Illustrator Jamie Snell has worked on 5Finity's Voltron projects and IDW's Transformers comics	Artist Brian Rood has done numerous covers for IDW's Transformers comics and also packaging art for Hasbro

THEY COULD DRAW A MEAN R2 IF THEY HAD TO

Fan Days has a bit of a reputation as a Star Wars convention but the organizers mix it up enough that you can be comfortable as a fan of just about anything and find stuff to do and people to meet. Being a bit of a robot fan I was able to find quite a few artists who had done illustration in an official capacity on a lot of my favorites like Voltron and the Transformers. They were illustrators who worked on everything from Voltron cards and Transformer comics and packaging to the Dark of the Moon standees you see in stores wherever Transformer toys or movies are sold. It was awesome and I could tell they were happy to talk to me, which means I could also tell none of them have ever listened to the Roboplastic Podcastalypse.


Steve Sansweet, Gus Lopez and Duncan Jenkins teamed up for a panel on Star Wars collecting that blew my Ewok mind

THEY EVEN BOUGHT THE DROIDS THEY WEREN'T LOOKING FOR ANYWAYS

I've always felt like Star Wars collectors are the gold standard for the sharing and distribution of information among collecting communities. The panelists on the Star Wars collecting panel at Fan Days are a big reason for that. Steve Sansweet, Gus Lopez and Duncan Jenkins are so legendary that I'm a GoBots fan and I know who they are. So it was awesome to actually get to meet Gus and Duncan and pick up their book Gus and Duncan's Guide to Star Wars Prototypes. Star Wars is really lucky to have these guys and I even told them that. I said I wished GoBots had someone like them in its fandom. Then Duncan told me that I could be that person and after I did the work then I'd reap the benefits of having accomplished things for that fandom. I kind of laughed because while it would be cool to be the Duncan Jenkins of GoBots, I really want to be the Duncan Jenkins of the fandom where girls dress up in metal bikinis.

Illustrator Lawrence Reynolds has done freelance work for Hasbro including point of purchase displays for Dark of the Moon	Gus and Duncan were signing their books for free. This was great because the signed version is $20 more online.

Fans active in the Star Wars collecting community will look at this picture and recognize Brian and Karl from the upcoming Star Wars collecting documentary Plastic Galaxy. Then fans active in the Star Wars collecting community will look at this picture and wonder who the heck I am.

Double Steve autographs all the way across the page! They're so vivid!

SHOW NOTES OF THE PODCASTALYPSE



bodyguards
• Podcastalypse intro-Nick the Lounge Singer version
• Walking to Fan Days while talking toy robots
• break-C3PO pimps for Kenner
• Fan Days is a go!
• Live from the prototypes panel
• Gus and Duncan are cool
• Herb Trimpe cancellation announcement
• Hanging myself on the Tree of Life
• Interview with Jamie Snell
• Working with 5Finity on Voltron
• Voltron sketch cards on Ragelion.com
• Previous Voltron projects
• Working on IDW's Transformers
• Beast Wars Sourcebook art on Ragelion.com
• I find your lack of Nazgar disturbing
• Mr. Z is great
• Jason Adams interview
• break-legendary 12 inch Boba Fett commercial
• Interview with Bill Pulkovski
• Getting Jon Berg's autograph
• Classic images of Star Wars imagery
• It's all just stuff (but it's pretty cool stuff)
• Interview with Brian Rood
• Doing covers for IDW's Transformer movieverse
• Recent lenticular card art for Transformers packages
• Getting his Yoda art on the Empire Strikes Back Blu-Ray
• Interview with Lawrence Reynolds
• Doing point of purchase displays for Dark of the Moon
• Why retailers request unique display art
• Remembering Robotech
• Got caught talking Roboto to myself
• Halloween is for sexy Darth Vaders
• Closing thanks

You show me your 1979 and I'll show you my 1985

Watching my son color the old Transformer coloring books I got for him at Fan Days is the most insanely surreal experience I've had in a while. He's now as old as I was when I got my Shogun Warrior Dragun. It's like the Transformers stuff that came out when I was 11 are his Shoguns. I was thinking a modern four year old may be a bit too sophisticated for this old robot stuff but he told me he likes it. I half expected him to say it was too retro or something. It's weird how I can have childish interests but still have no idea what it's like to be a child.

Full On Triple Tronians All the Way Across the Page!

SNOOP AROUND Check out the line art of the thought-to-be-unreleased GoBot SR-71 Blackbird Snoop! She has appeared in ads from U.S. stores before.

I found this wonderful Bradlee's roboplastic smorgasbord buried in the back pages of a newspaper from December 23, 1985. It was rather impressive because it was so tall I think it took up three quarters the height of the page! It had all my favorite tronian lines of 1985-the Hasbronian Cybertronians, GoBotronians and Voltronians (sorry ChargerTronians)-and they were all at near clearance level discounts. A 25% off sale on the big three robot toylines of the 80s just before Christmas '85 is pretty crazy if you think about it. '85 was the year Transformers and GoBots peaked in terms of sales-what were they doing at near clearance markdowns before the hottest Christmas ever? Why did Bradlee want all them sold so badlee? This was 1985! Stores were supposed to be having hard times keeping robots in stock, not trying to clearance them out. What exactly was going on here?

IT'S SO BRIGHT AND VIVID

But before I ponder the pop cultural ramifications of the Christmas Eve toy robot pricing policies of extinct retail outlets I wanted to mention a few things about the ad itself. At first I thought the art was all new and original because the lines were so loose and the renderings lacking in detail in some places. There's lots of strange perspective shifts and scale inconsistencies, like Sunstreaker being smaller than Long Haul. It looked only slightly better than coloring books in some parts. After closer inspection I noticed the vast majority of these drawings were line art I'd seen before in other ads. Somehow Bradlee's managed to take existing line art and arrange it in a way that made it all look unfamiliar to me. That's when I realized line art in newspaper ads was traditionally used in a stand alone fashion where one drawing got one description and rarely did multiple drawings exist in the same ad overlapping each other. The majority of retailers avoided this sort of line art arrangement and that's what makes this ad so unique.

OH MY GOD WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

When I was a kid I became a little wary of sales like this after I saw Star Wars toys drown in a sea of red tag reduction stickers before they disappeared from toy shelves forever. Had I seen this ad when it came out in '85 I probably would have been a little freaked out because deep discounts usually meant either stores were going out of business or the toylines were running out of popularity. Now that I've found quite a few ads like this with stores liquidating more robots than a smelting pool I'm having to reevaluate just how big the toy robot craze really was back then. Case in point is the following BEST ad from December 18, 1985 where the discounts are super deep. Shockwave for $7, Robo Forcers for $1, GoBot Power Suits for 2 bucks. I get the impression that '85 didn't end on a high note for robots like I thought it had. It's just so hard for me to grasp the possibility that kids wanted to play with something other than cartoon robot Volkswagens and their transformable talking Tyrannosaurus cohorts. I know it seems like blasphemy to other toy robots historians but apparently there were more years in the 80s than just 1985 and I'm also starting to realize there may have been more aisles in a toy store than just the one with all the robots.

BEST 12/18/85


YOU'RE MAKING IT 1985 WRONG!

There are two articles available online that provide evidence of a huge slump in toy robot popularity during the 1985 Christmas season. The first is from the February 1986 edition of Discount Store News in an article titled "Toy retailers predict return to basic buys". One point that article makes is that toy fads were cyclical. It goes "The cycle is always the same. A year of innovative product entries followed by a year of oversaturation and eventual overkill." For toy robots, that initial year of innovation was 1984 and the oversaturation hit in '85. They quoted one buyer as saying Voltron started strong in the first half of the year and "was nothing at Christmas". An August 18, 1986 article from The Pittsburgh Press names names and takes no toy robot prisoners. It stated GoBots and Voltron were down sharply and Robotech was an outright flop. Only the Transformers were reported as still doing well after Christmas 1985. This all correlates completely with what I see play out in the newspaper ads but I still have a hard time accepting it. I guess my childhood memories are of a robot party that lasted forever, or at least a little bit longer than 1987.

HOT TOPIC IS THE VICTOR VON FRANKENSTEIN OF 80s TOY PROPERTIES

In the end it is better to have gone on clearance than to never have sold at all. It's kind of hard for me to accept that what I remember as an eternal golden age of childhood and toy robots prosperity was actually just a 2-3 year long fad during the 80s. What's really interesting is that something like Voltron which was a flash in the pan during the 80s still remains cultishly popular and even has a cartoon nowadays. It gives me hope. That's either proof of Voltron's enduring underground appeal or a testament to the power of having your robot on shirts at Hot Topic. Somewhere out there there's a pre-teen boy who's a big fan of Voltron and thinks that we're in the golden age of robot space lions. I'm glad for his sake that the newspapers nowadays aren't written by a bunch of Voltron haters like the Pittsburgh Press used to be when I was little. With Mattel's upcoming Voltron line hitting stores soon hopefully the dozens of other Voltron fans out there will get the chance to see their favorite robots on clearance in a newspaper ad one day. All fans of tronians non-Hasbronian should be so lucky.

The days of fans and robos

AND SO IT WAS FORETOLDETH that Robotastic Armageddon shall descendeth uponeth Irving, Texas this October 8th and 9theth via a thunderous sky shattering roar courtesy American Airlines. Henceforth I forehence accomplished various pre-registrations and securedeth hotellish dwellings in grateful anticipation of the coming of our droid, R2-D2. Yeah I registrated myself into Fan Days which is some kind of Star Warsian convention in disguise or something. And much like Jhiaxus tried to terraform every planetoid worth bombing into some sort of mini Cybertron, I continue on my quest to transformerate every convention I go to into a kinda sorta mini me of Botcon, except if Botcon was actually about Shogun Warriors and Voltron instead of just Hasbrotronians. Actually this is all about me getting the chance to meet the legendary Herb Trimpe, who penciled all of Marvels' Shogun Warriors comic and also some of my favorite Transformer covers of all time (like the ones for issues 12 and 18). Plus a there'll be artists who had work in Voltron United and Drawn like Mark McHaley and artists who have done recent Transformer work for Hasbro like Brian Rood. It should be a great show for podcastalypsing and interviewing and all sorts of robo techspec-spectating!

Rudolph was a Cylon!

THE PULSATING RED NOSE TOTALLY GIVES IT AWAY

Santa's piloting a Colonial Viper in this Hecht's ad from October 25, 1978. And what an ad it is. It's got a great riff on the Santa reindeer roll call and some great toys from Battlestar Galactica, Star Wars, Micronauts and they even threw in a StarBird. I think it's the only ad I've seen for the Star Wars three packs. Also cool is how they call a spade a spade and describe the Micronauts as "dolls".

ALL THE WAY TO WILDSVILLE!

The 33rd seal of the Roboplastic Apocalypse lay burnt and broken, as if mauled by great flocks of dragons and other vast predatory birds! Yes it 's the DragonCon 2011 edition of the Roboplastic Podcastalypse and this time the Nostrodomatron finds himself in Atlanta, Georgia amidst all manner of madmen, machines and mad machine men in a quest to find some dudes to talk some robots with. Have you ever wondered what inspired the look of the Transformers Generation 2 comic? Is our government working hard to keep us entertained? What size diaper did Darth Vader wear when he was a baby? Find out all this and more in this HERE THERE BE DRAGONCONONIANS edition of the podcastalypse!


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MOS EISLEY'S GOT NOTHING ON THIS PLACE

Okay let's get this out of the way first. No recollection of DragonCon would be complete without pictures of lots out of shape Darth Vaders and hot chicks in slutty cartoon costumes. I expected people to show up wearing (or barely wearing) stuff that was not at all appropriate in public or even appropriate at other weirdo conventions where people usually show up dressed like space hoochies and obese Darth Vaders. This was DragonCon-the most extreme, vile, wretched, scummy hive of vile wretched scummy hives and it did not disappoint. These people really kicked it up a notch and took it to eleven. This wasn't just sexy, obscene, bizarre and disgusting, this was DragonCon brand sexy, obscene, bizarre and disgusting and that meant nothing was sacred. Everything from sci-fi to PBS kids' cartoons to Nickelodeon game shows was fair game to be cosplayed and fetishized. It was awesome and beyond my ability to record all the wonderful debauchery so I highly recommend checking out rhysfunk's DragonCon 2011 photo collection on Flickr.


The unlikely combination of Pokemon and hookers. My deepest most heartfelt thanks to all the convention hoochies that make that possible.



THE WORLD OF DRAGONS AND ARTISTS IN DUNGEONS

I came to DragonCon with a single goal in mind-to hit artists' alley and meet as many people who have worked on licensed robot properties as I could. There were supposed to be a few there who worked on either Voltron or Transformers books and comics and I wanted to meet them all. I descended into the complicated labyrinth that was the deepest bowels of the Hyatt and found lots of incredible artists and writers from within and beyond the world of robots like Peter David and Bob Burdenall. It was overwhelming. Just the Artists Alley alone was enough of a convention to eat up all my time and it pretty much did. I want to thank the anonymous guy who took this picture of me outside the entrance because he really did a great job.



PIC OF THE DEVIL!

This is Mark Brooks, an artist who has done lots of robot work including drawing a ton of profiles for Dreamwave's More Than Meets the Eye Transformer character encyclopedia. He also did covers for Image's G.I. Joe vs. the Transformers and the Devil's Due Voltron from 2003. He was sort of a last minute addition to the show so I was unprepared to ask him for an interview but I got this great shot and he signed a couple comics. Check out his DeviantArt where he goes by Diablo2003.



BUZZIN'!

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't there just to meet Derek Yaniger. Getting to talk to and interview the man who established the gritty, gory look of The Transformers Generation 2 comic was the entire reason I flew out from Miami all the way to Atlanta. I will always remember how he was just one of the nicest, most patient people I have ever met. I can't thank him enough for agreeing to talk with me a few minutes for the Podcastalypse. I can't believe every artist I've ever asked has agreed to talk to me in the first place and then for them to be so cordial and gracious throughout always makes me feel like the luckiest obscure toy robots blogging guy in the universe. You can check Derek out at his site DerekArt.com and he's also got the DerekArt Facebook fan page (that I also happen to be a member of).


GENERATION WILDSVILLE!

One thing that really strikes me about Derek's booth at conventions is that you'll be hard pressed to find licensed characters of any sort throughout his displays. Were it not for the DragonCon 2010 prints he was selling I don't think he'd have any material that wasn't 100% totally original. He's really unique in this regard. A lot of other artists will have tons of established licensed characters dominating their tables but here's Derek doing his own thing and in a really wild way. That sign with his name was so gigantic it could be seen from nearly every part of the convention floor!


EVERY COVER A ROBOPLASTIC APOCALYPSE

This is why I loved Derek Yaniger on Generation 2. Every cover was a hellacious vision of robot armageddon. It was Transformers from hell and it was awesome. As you can tell by the signatures I love me them scribbles. Here's my G2 #1 and #7 signed by both Derek and Simon Furman. Talk about great convention memories.


Here's my Derek haul. I had to get the "Peepshow" print he made of the art he created for the DragonCon 2011 official hotel keycards and program covers, especially since my program got messed up and I didn't stay at the official hotels. I also wanted that "Throttlejockeys" poster for my wall and his book Wildsville: The Art of Derek Yaniger is something you can just stare at for hours.

Shawn Robare and me

Thank you, your government!

SHOW NOTES OF THE PODCASTALYPSE

• Everyone at DragonCon is looking at me!
• The allure of things DragonCononian
• Derek Yaniger bringing an extreme edge to Transformers comics in '93
• This line is really dragon!
• Even the cars and trucks are cosplaying
• RedNeckNoks
• DragonConfusing
• Dommo no got no Mister Roboto
• Thanks for the Pokemammaries
• It's like R-rated halloween for kids
• Break-Madame Kamay's Filipino Palace
• Pocket program protection problem
• Derek Yaniger's great taste in t-shirts
• Optimus Prime cosplayer avoiding me
• Break-DragonCon Commercial
• Vintage Space Toast Tour Atlanta!
• The 40 minute search for 40 year old Lionel Playworld ads
• Awesome 8 year old artist alley table hijacker
• Losing my DragonPass at DragonBreakfast
• The relative rarity of Estebans in Atlanta
• Almost losing my Voltron virginity in the DragonCon dealer room
• Kabillion dollar animation cells and other stuff in the dealer room
• Not a M.A.S.K. collector, a M.A.S.K. rememberer
• Interview with Derek Yaniger
• Where the Transformers Generation 2 style came from
• The influence of Simon Bisley's ABC warriors art
• Where Derek's original G2 art is now
• Derek's progression through comics, animation and then in the retro scene
• Derekart.com
• The DerekArt Facebook fan page
• Early art influences in Derek's life
• Derek's art in the Nickelodeon cartoon Good Vibes
• Whatever flips your switches!
• Closing thanks (including baby Darth Vader and Bender)
• Don't Rocket Punch Your Friends!

Also check out my Not Enough Pictures from DragonCon album over at Flickr!