Wednesday, February 03, 2010

What this blog needs is to put the "B" in Bots

I was reading a blog post a guy wrote about his custom Challenge of the GoBots shirt and he ends it with "Remember-Transformers are Gobots in disguise"! I thought that line was really funny, especially if you sing the Transformer song with those lyrics. One retailer who took that connection and ran with it was Thrifty, who in this November 1985 ad consistently capitalized the "b" in "Autobots" and "Dinobots". Maybe they got used to capitalizing the "b" in GoBots so they figured if there's "Bot" in the name of a toy robot title then that's how it's spelled. This is one of my favorite ads from Pasadena because of the choice of robots. It's notable for featuring photos of a boxed Skids and Swoop. It was rather rare for retailers to use pictures of boxed Transformers for their newspaper ads back then and modern roboplastic archaeologists believe Skids and Swoop to be the shortpacked figures from their respective case assortments. I also like this ad because I believe Grimlock to be awesome.

Thrifty 11/28/85


OWW! MY TAILFINS!

And although he's not a GoBot, Starscream here is facing some challenges of his own thanks to the guy who put his tail fins on backwards. I understand some people may have been burnt out on their jobs or didn't really know what these toys were supposed to look like transformed, but how in a million years does that resemble a real life F-15? What do planes look like in his world? Sometimes I see ads and I'm just happy the cars have their wheels touching the ground.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

This guy was a visionary, designing Starscream for Transformers: Animated twenty years in advance.

Weasel said...

Wasn't there an entire page of mis-transformed 'bots out there? I seem to recall seeing one.

(I do remember how Target was really bad for mis-transforming a lot of the BM figs. I actually said on the CybCon that I worked for freaking morons...)

Evil King Macrocranios said...

Hey Scott, would you happen to be in Antarctica right now?

Yeah, Lynn, there's a couple of pages with archives of mistransformations from newspaper circulars and online sources. One is at TFArchive and I think Ben Yee had or still has one.

 

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