Friday, April 23, 2010

Revenge (of Nazgar) is a dish best served 26 years later


TV Guide 08 December 1984

It is a momentous day my fellow Robo Force-ians! I have uploaded the one shot Robo Force cartoon special "The Revenge of Nazgar" in three parts unto YouTube.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

YOUR HOMEWORK IS REVENGE

When the time comes for this week's Podcastalypse I would like for everyone to know what I'm talking about and get all the references so if you would watch it I'd appreciate it. Thanks!

5 comments:

Shawn Robare said...

This is just so damn cool of you Steve. Thank you for posting sharing this and I can't wait to listen to the next episode of the Podcast!

Evil King Macrocranios said...

Yeah, you're welcome. What was kind of cool was Flint Dille linked to my blog after I put T.R.o.N. up and even talked about it a little on his Facebook. He's a little reluctant to watch it because it was his first robot show so I guess he thinks it may suck. But like his Facebook friends are telling him, it holds up well over time.

I think a big reason it's good is because he must have been presented with the Robo Force book "Journey to Nazgar's Fortress" as source material. He wrote to me that he was given an "art book" before he began writing the show and although he doesn't remember which book it was I'm betting it was JtNF. It's the best Robo Force book and I can see a lot of JtNF influences in TRoN. From the big role Deena Strong plays to the idea of Hun-Dred kidnapping the elder Doctor Fury, I can see where Mr. Dille latched onto concepts in JtNF and expanded on them for the show. He did an incredible job of setting up the Robo Force mythology in just 22 minutes. It would have been fun to see a continuation.

I would like to extend a heartfelt 'you're welcome' to all 2 people who enjoyed the Robo Force stuff enough to actually leave a comment! Hopefully now that the show is a little more accessible there will be more conversation out there about it. I'll be watching to see if people start talking about it again. Even if they don't, I'd feel accomplished if someone updates Flint Dille's IMDB page and/or the Robo Force article at Wikipedia.

Captain Rufus said...

Thanks for putting it up! It was kind of amusing! Suprisingly decent video quality for how damned OLD it was. Art looked nice as well, especially given the time.

If you can find all this cool stuff on Robo Force, I can only guess what you could uncover for Starriors, the coolest mid 80s robots people forgot all about.

Though now I kinda want to buy a Robo Force toy even though I only owned one from that Alpha Bits cereal thing.

Your mention of it jogged my memory. Got it in the mail the same day as a hooded Cobra Commander.

I could swear it was one of the evil guys, but can't remember which one.

Evil King Macrocranios said...

Yes, Toei did an especially good job on this one. I wonder why it wasn't split up over a few episodes like the GI Joe or Transformer mini series. There's sure enough plot to do it with the search for the three stones and all. I wonder if that was the original intent but then they crammed it all into one show.

I think it's pretty incredible that it got shown in the late evening time slot and on some ABC affiliates. That might also have been Ideal's biggest mistake now that I think about it. They should have gone miniseries with syndication and got it aired over multiple weekends like the Transformers. Oh well, it's all Monday morning mecha piloting at this point.

Starriors has perhaps the best storyline but I'm certain no animated series ever aired or exists. Post apocalyptic toy robot war would have been awesome. My guess is they were waiting to see if the line would sell well but it was crushed by the competition and Tomy saw the writing on the wall. The line was canned shortly after its '84 debut and the proposed cartoon would have been aired around October of 85 so I'm thinking they had enough lead time to axe the project if the numbers weren't good. Toy manufacturers know way before Christmas if they've got a hit on their hands based on retailer orders months ahead of time. Tomy probably saw the line wasn't going to do that great in '84 and moved on, figuring not even a cartoon could save a line that didn't feature lots of transforming robots. But then again, it's all speculation on my part. The most I'd expect exists of a Starriors cartoon is maybe a few animation models from the animated segments of the commercials.

Captain Rufus said...

Yeah. No cartoon. Starriors STILL deserve a big old hunk of articles.

Id even be happy to contribute pictures of my still with box Battlestation. Too bad the still on sheet stickers fall off the sheet, their sticky done gone.

( I have the comic series someplace but can't remember where to the point I want to buy another set, just in case. I'd love to see scans of all the pack in comics too. The only Starriors site I really know of online only shows the covers.)

(Starriors Battlestation was so cool I grabbed one as an adult I loved it so much as a kid. Its no Greyskull, Boulder Hill, or Death Star, but for robot bases, it was king. Gobots Command Center just wasn't half as awesome. Even though I had both and have tried getting the GCC cheap when I was still heavily buying toys.)

 

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Evil King Macrocranios was voted king by the evil peoples of the Kingdom of Macrocrania. They listen to Iron Maiden all day and try to take pictures of ghosts with their webcams.