What this blog needs is some REAL top guns...literally...I'm talking F-14s that turn into guns

I love, love, love me some toy robot airplanes. In fact I love transforming fighter jets so much that they don't even have to turn into robots for me to love them. That's why I was overjoyed to find this ad for "F-14 Tomcat Laser Fighter"-a realistic looking toy airplane that transformed into a laser pistol! At first jet-to-gun transformation may seem dumb or impractical even as a cartoon fantasy but it's actually brilliant concept that points out a logical fallacy in transforming robot war shows like Macross or Transformers.

Toys&Gifts Outlet 12/15/85

If a society has transformation technology and they're at war and the whole point is to blow up the other guys as fast and as big as possible, then why would they waste their time engineering fighter jets that turn into humanoid robots? What they really needed to do was make fighter jets that turned into gigantic laser guns! DUUUUUUUUH!

WE COULD ALL LEARN A LOT ABOUT KILLING FROM ORVILLE REDENBACHER

Ultimately the jet's robot mode is just an intermediary between getting to the bad guy as fast as possible and delivering the boomstick, so why not just get straight to business and turn into a giant friggin' cannon once you get there? Were the VF-1's humanoid robot forms supposed to work against the Zentradi on some sort of psychological level? Were the giant aliens supposed to feel bad or intimidated when they saw a valkyrie turn into a robot that had a body similar in size and shape to their own? Screw that, I say nothing intimidates like a giant screaming F-14 gun breaking the sound barrier to come blow up your alien ass. This is why Shockwave is the smartest guy. He didn't mess around with extra crap like turning into a dog or a dump truck or a cassette player like everybody else did. Shockwave understood the logic in Orville Redenbacher's whole "Do one thing and do it better than anyone" idea. Just get straight to the ass kicking! (But also remember to bring plenty of the 9 volt batteries.)

THE BIG GAY toys inc. LEADER-1

Also from December 1985 we have this TG&Y ad for Gay Toys Inc.'s F15 Eagle Fighter Plane, perhaps the greatest transforming robot jet ever! It was every kid's dream come true-a giant 19 inch long F-15 fighter jet that was in scale with 3 3/4 inch action figures and that could also turn into a robot!

Toys&Gifts Outlet 12/15/85

Plus it was on sale for 4 bucks! Now Gay Toys Inc. weren't exactly known for their incredible craftsmanship so it's no big surprise that the transformation is pretty sucky, essentially consisting of standing the jet up and tilting the nosecone back to reveal the head. But it's a 19 inch tall transforming robot jet that can hold your Darth Vader! If I had even the slightest clue that one of these existed when I was a kid I would have died. I wish I could find pictures of one of these online but the curse of Gay Toys, Inc. is doing a google image search for any toy from this company only leads to horror and suffering. I tried googling "Gay Toys Inc. F15" and "Gay Toys Jet" and "Gay Robot Jet" and "Gay transforming F15" but amongst all the schlongs and porn the only remotely related results I got were pictures of those two combining jet robots from that last transformer cartoon and a couple of images from my own site, the Vintage Space Toaster Palace. I guess Google is trying to tell me something. I still wish I could find a picture, though, because this toy is incredibly awesome. Despite the simplistic transformation it still manages to resemble the GoBots' Leader-1, with the large flat legs, fuselage chest and what looks like a round bald head. I can't tell too good because the picture's so bad. I wouldn't be surprised if Leader-1 served as their "inspiration" because Gay Toys Inc. would occasionally get sued for ripping off other companies' designs. I read in the details of one case that the Gay Toys Inc. design process involved putting a bunch of other toys of the kind they were shooting for on a table and then coming up with something similar. Until the day I track down one of these giant, figure carrying fighter jet robots I will just have to settle for the next best thing-Hasbro's Masterpiece Starscream and Skywarp. While not as big, the Masterpiece Transformer jets are to scale with the little Micro Machines minifigures that used to come with the old Star Wars Action Fleet vehicles. DARTH VADER WILL FINALLY GET TO BOMB THE LIBYANS!

Nothing says Merry Christmas from 1985 like a battery operated transforming toy robot Uzi

About the only thing more wonderful, iconic and fun than a toy robot in 1985 was an Uzi. Kids of all ages thrilled to the television adventures of their favorite Uzi toting heroes like Snake Eyes, Rico Tubbs from Miami Vice and future president of Texas Chuck Norris. Hell, when I was a kid I even had a battery operated Uzi water pistol that I totally rocked out with as I pretended to be every bad guy ever on the A-Team. The children of the 80's love affair with uzis and toy robots were two great tastes that were destined to go great together like stalled school buses and railroad tracks.

Toys and Gifts Outlet 12/15/85

So after my initial reactions of shock, horror, dismay and denial at finding this Christmas season 1985 ad from a store called Toys and Gifts Outlet from Tampa, Florida, I was not at all surprised that somebody actually made a battery operated toy robot that turned into an Uzi. Part of me wonders if this was all a big misprint or other sort of mistake and there wasn't actually a toy robot Uzi but when I think about it, toy robot Uzi totally falls within what I call the Evil King Macrocranios Intergalactic Governing Rule of Inevitable Fuckuppedness. I came up with it after watching the news and just generally being alive for the past 35 years. The Intergalactic Governing Rule of Inevitable Fuckuppedness states that over the course of the thousands of years of human existence and the infinite number of human interactions every person who has ever lived has had with every other person who has ever lived, every good wonderful positive thing you could possibly imagine has probably not happened, but every horrible fucked up thing you could possibly imagine definitely has. So I can guarantee for example that in the entire history of humanity nobody has ever invented a teddy bear that could make me a sandwich, but convertible Uzi robots? Oh hell yeah. So although I have never seen an "Uzi convertible robot" I am sure they exist or at least existed at one point but probably don't exist now because they were all destroyed in a hail of gunfire when the little boys who had them were all shot by the cops.

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.

25 Years ago in Transfromers PART 6: HASBEENS-A toy robots convention panel transcript about second chances, marketing, and good ties with Bandai

This is the month that Hasbro broke the seventh seal of the Roboplastic Apocalypse 25 years ago by unleashing their onslaught of transforming toy robot Volkswagen action figures and associated tie-in merchandise. Today in particular marks an extra special occasion as it is the date most agreed upon by toy robots archaeologists as the day the very first Transformer comic was released 25 years ago. So to celebrate the arrival of the GoBots' worst nightmare, a bunch of bloggers united, taking some time to write posts specifically about Hasbro's transforming toy robot Datsuns and police cars and Datsun police cars from 25 years ago.

HOLD ON IS THIS THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY OR THE 5TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY?

Running the topic of toy robot dinosaurs and their transforming Volkswagen counterparts into the ground is somewhat of a specialty of mine, so I knew exactly what I wanted to do for this robobloggery memories collaboration.

Some of my fondest memories of this hobby have been born of the Transformers conventions I've attended. One convention in particular, Botcon 2004, was especially super retrorobo fantastic because of a panel that featured Bob Prupis and Alison Segebarth, two ex-Hasbro marketing executives who worked on the Transformers brand during the early days of the line. They had so many interesting things to say about the behind the scenes birth of the Transformers and the thinking that went into many major decisions when they created the line. Going in I knew it would be a fantastic panel so I took my microcassette recorder to the show and recorded it. But a panel recording not shared is about as useless as a microcassette recorder that can't record (unless it can turn into a robot).

MY EARS TRANSFORMED THE PHRASE "GOOD GUYS AND BAD GUYS" INTO "GOOD TIES WITH BANDAI" AND BACK!

So I tried transcribing the recording and I uploaded that transcription to Usenet to share with the internet, but honestly my transcription was awful! I did the best I could but the recording was really bad and I got a lot of key statements incorrect. I spelled people's names wrong and even left out a whole paragraph because I couldn't make out what was said. In retrospect, if I could go back I would never have uploaded that transcription. But the past is done and like a broken GoBot, it cannot be changed. All is not lost, though, and on this momentous day I want to make right a great wrong-I want to figuratively buy myself a shiny new GoBot the same as the broken, unchangeable one (although still just as sucky). Thanks to 2009 technology I can be a microcassette George Lucas and fix my transcription errors or at least make new errors I can live with. And so my fellow Macrocranians, on this momentous day of uniting robobloggers I replace the existing crappy, incorrect version of the Botcon 2004 marketers panel transcript I did and I present to you my new definitive, crappy, incorrect version of the Botcon 2004 marketers panel. As a bonus I sprinkled in topically relevant ads from the Vintage Space Toaster Palace and I've included an MP3 version of the recording that will melt your brain and fry your ears as you read along because I'm dumb about internet audio engineering. Hey I never said the Roboplastic Apocalypse was going to be painless.



Bob Prupis:
[Bob started off with something like "We're all here today to..."]

I have collecting problems because I'm collecting problems or: Take me away Tom Brokaw

After living here for just under two years amazingly I have begun to make friends with local people despite my best attempts to live a hermit-like existence as the Obi-Wan Kenobi of South Dakota. So far I only know these people from internet communications so there is still a chance I am being lured into the 'To Catch a Predator' house. If however these are real people and not Tom Brokaw messing with me, it would be nice if I could get the damn robot room in order in case I might invite them over. The problem with having robot-centric friends visit is that the laundry room where I keep the roboplasticos is such a mess that the Death Star trash compactor is a sterile environment by comparison. However there are similarities between my robot room and the Death Star trash compactor, most notably the colossal piles of floating garbage that threaten to crush me when I walk in there and the one-eyed trash monster living somewhere under the boxes of Macross model kits. Also I prefer guests in my house to dress like Princess Leia.

I am the Luke Skywalker in Stormtrooper disguise of toy robots collecting

This weekend I did make some headway in cleaning it all organized. I really needed to make room for the new hotness, which is the Wal-Mart exclusive Masterpiece Starscream toy robot. I don't have it yet but hopefully through my elaborate network of robot friends that work at Wal-Mart I may just get one. I don't really need another Starscream because I've already bought like ten tryptzillion different Starscreams over the last twenty years. But apparently no collection of toy robots from twenty years ago is complete without this one that came out last week. Wal-Mart Starscream is supposed to be the cream of the cream, the Omega Supreme of Starscreams. It's supposed to be the best Starscream ever made blah blah blah and of course it is super rare HTF, which means your local Wal-Mart will probably only get the extremely limited quantity of three hundred of them.

I found my childhood Megatron when I was digging through all my crap trying to make room for that new life affirming Starscream. I am very proud of this, as I am of all my beat to hell toys from when I was a kid. Nowadays he's held together with twist ties and those little clear rubber bands that they use to package today's toy robots. There's a lot of missing pieces so all he does is transform from Megatron to a pile of Megatron parts. Ah, the memories. They say little Japanese boys in Japan had more fun because Megatrons over there came with little plastic bullets they could shoot. I say I still had some good times with that little robot gun, pretending I was a soldier in the Wehrmacht and pistol whipping stray puppies that looked like Snoopy with Megatron's die cast metal grip base. Too bad kids today can't get a realistic Walther P-38 gun Megatron from Wal-Mart like back in the good old days. OR MAYBE THEY CAN.

A couple of preguntas hit me as I was in my robot room, looking upon the vast piles of broken and decaying toy robots parts that used to be my childhood. I wondered why exactly I still buy these things and when it's going to stop. Taking an assessment of how much this robot hobby has enriched/destroyed my life, I wondered about three things. 1) Could the new super duper Starscream with extra cheese ever be as much fun as 1984 Megatron? 2) How much has toy robots restored my faith in humanity? and 3) What are the ultimate consequences of having spent countless tryptzillions of dollars on roboplasticos? The answers are 1) no, 2)not much and 3) now my shelves look crowded and ugly.

It has dawned on me that I could always stop and just be happy with what I have. But what of my theoretical robot friend guests and my potentially embarrassing lack of Masterpiece Starscream? Let's face it, I will never have visitors over so there's no point in trying to impress people that don't exist with robots I don't have yet. If anything, a room full of robots is more embarrassing than something to be proud of. But at the very least I should try to get it all organized so that I enjoy it. One thing I admired about Ben Kenobi was that although he was a hermit, he kept a clean house even though he had no possibility of guests. It would have been really embarrassing if Luke came over and his place was a mess and Anakin's lightsaber was in the bathroom because he'd been using it to unclog the toilet.

Dude, what's mom for Soundwave?

If you were a kid in 1985 you understood that parents spoke a different language when it came to toys and they couldn't be trusted to buy the right ones if you simply asked for character names. So what kids would do is learn to translate robot names into words their parents could understand. Being able to translate from mom to robot was a necessary and valuable skill. I couldn't just say 'Soundwave' or 'Megatron' because that would be confusing to a mom level person. Thankfully in 1984 there were only like 28 Transformers and if I asked my mom for 'the gun' or 'the radio' there was a 100 percent probability that she would know which one that was.

Since there were no toy robot internet sites telling me what robots were being made in Japan that week I had no idea what to expect when we went to the store. I thought I was pretty on top of things in '85 when I scored the individually packaged Constructicons, but they didn't come with a catalog. They were the first new Transformers I'd found that weren't in the 1984 catalog, which was my only source of information. Until I got my first boxed 1985 TF I was living day to day in terms of toy robot knowledge and let me tell you, that was scary times. It was also full of potentially fantastic surprises because you'd go to school and a kid would bring Shockwave, explaining how all he asked for was 'the gun' and he got a kick ass robot laser pistol with lights and sounds when all he expected was Megatron. Spotting new stuff like that was exciting but also sort of unsettling because it meant your mom/robot vocabulary had to be updated and you didn't know if asking for the same old things applied anymore.

Back then shipping and distribution was pretty crappy so there was no guarentee you'd ever see all the toys from any line in your lifetime. Like when Star Wars would put those pictures of all the figures on the backs of the cards I would kind of laugh and say whatever. Like I'll ever see a 4-Lom or 2-1B. Because catalog reality was way way different from in the store reality. I don't care how cool IG-88 looked, as far as I was concerned the whole Empire Strikes Back line may as well have consisted of 200 ATAT Drivers judging by what I actually saw on the pegs when I was 8. And so it was with Transformers. It was scary and exciting not knowing what TFs were out or if the line even existed at all past whatever I already had. If Star Wars could die as a toyline then I had to accept that other equally horrible things could happen to the toy robots.

But then the 1985 Transformers assortments happened and the many different new toy robots came out. While that was cool because it meant more robots, it also kind of complicated everything. If you didn't have Soundwave by 1985 your chances of mom getting it right when you asked for 'the radio' were halved because of the introduction of Blaster. Blaster was the 'other' Transfomer cassette deck. I guess Blaster was cool enough in his own right but his toy always lived in the shadow of the infinitely cooler Soundwave and his cartoon character played a sort of second fiddle to Jazz, the previous pop culture obsessed, super cool urban stylin' robot. Oh who am I kidding Blaster sucked. He was horribly out of scale with the other TFs, towering over the guys like Superion who were supposed to be giants. That alone was total imagination rape right there. It was hard to pretend Devastator was all tough shit when the Autobot's little red radio was bigger than him in robo mode. Plus his tape door got stuck all the time and that pissed me off.

So I had Blaster which meant my mom couldn't find Soundwave but I survived. In the comics around issue 18 Bob Budiansky started developing Blaster into an interesting character so that helped. But man, there was a time when having a Blaster pegged you as a kid who didn't know he was supposed to ask for 'the BLUE radio'.

NAUT cool

Since this post will be full of robot nerd geeky talk, let me use this disclaimer as a preemptive F.U. to those who are not comfortable reading my thoughts about twenty year old newspaper ads for the shittiest robot toyline ever made.

Micronauts was what your grandparents bought you in 1978 because they thought it was Star Wars. Oh they were awful. I knew better than to show up at recess in kindergarten with Micronauts toys. All the other five year old kids would be like, "Oh, we'll be playing over here in this corner with actual Star Wars toys our smart grandmas gave us, recreating actual movie scenes that can only be recreated with official Star Wars figures while you can go over there and fuck yourself with Micronauts that are not based on a fantastic space opera movie." To celebrate the suck of this horrible toyline I have an ad featuring two Micronauts toys. It was from the store Lewis Osco and it ran on December 6th, 1978.



Although this ad describes the toy illustrated as the Micronaut Biotron, what's actually illustrated is the Giant Acroyear. Giant Acroyear was a Micronauts combiner robot whose combined form was made up of two smaller Micromen, a mobile cannon platform and a jet. At first a combining jet/cannon/robot team sounds cool but in reality it pretty much sucks ass like all the other Micronauts toys. Micronauts had a lot of cool ideas but they physically looked so not like what a robot should look like. Micronauts were spindly and anemic. They were the nerd robots who got beat up by the jock robots in junior high. So while the cool robots like the Shogun Warriors were out there getting laid and fighting Godzilla, Micronauts was getting its glasses broken and its underwear pulled up in gym class.

As a kid I had the Micronauts Gammatron and god it was so friggin retarded. It was sort of motorized-I can't really explain what was supposed to happen when the Gammatron worked. The only way I can describe the Gammatron is that it looked like a dildo with wheels and skinny robotic arms that flailed about wildly. It was like if Gumby ate a toilet and started moshing. Toys like that didn't stimulate my imagination-they kind of sat my imagination down and then had seizures in front of it.



There was one absolutely decent Micronauts toy and it was the Battle Cruiser. The Battle Cruiser was a bunch of smaller misshapen Micronaut hubris that when combined sort of looked like a space ship made of junk with laser guns for wings. The laser gun wings were the only thing that made this toy almost cool, because if your Grandma got you the Micronauts Battle Cruiser for Christmas thinking it was the Millenium Falcon, you could bust out the laser guns and pistol whip her then pretend to kill yourself in front of the Christmas tree.