VSTPs3 talky talky

It barely now occurs to me that I can use the Playstation for something other than watching porn in high definitions. If anyone out there has a PS Eye and wants to do video conferencing my PSN id is KingMacrocranios. I'm usually free after 8 pm mountain time and I can discuss a myriad of topics so long as they are all toy robots ads from 1984.

More than meets the price!

Many specific details of the period I call "The Toy Robots Wars of the 1980s" have been lost over time. This is partly because many toy robots historians of the present were mere children during that era and their half-remembered recollections are little better than speculation and conjecture. Of course the Transformers with its legion of present day fans has had a wealth of research done on its history but there is still much unknown about it and some fans can't even agree on what an Autobot car cost in 1985. It also doesn't help matters when Hasbro, the victor of the 80s Toy Robots Wars, rewrites history on their website to make it seem as if they singlehandedly invented the very concept of transforming toy robot vehicles. Why would they do this? Well mostly because a) nobody gives a shit and b) Hasbro is a bunch of fuckers.

YOU CAN SIT NEXT TO OMEGA SUPREME

Hell, Hasbro isn't the first or only player in the toy robots wars to put their spin on how things went down. I found one ad from 1984 where one store claims Bandai invented Transformers. Yeah I know I'm making it seem like this is the biggest geopolitical scandal of the 20th century and these marketing people are committing war crimes but believe me, I'm not crazy. Nor am I afraid of exposing the conspiracy to cover up the truth about what happened during the Toy Robots Wars of the 80s. God gives me secret information when I listen to my Soundwave and he says if the bad men from Hasbro come he'll send an Autobot space shuttle full of Leader-1 and the rest of the good Go-Bots to take me away to moon base two. Tell me where you live and I'll see if he can send one for you, too.



TACKLING ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT MYSTERIES THAT NOBODY CARES ABOUT

Now I can't do anything about the propaganda meted out by the corporate overlords of Optimus Prime, but I can at least shed some light on the cost of toy robot cars in 1985. A while ago I wrote about an argument two internet professors of toy robots were having about whether or not Autobot cars ever cost $15 back in the day. Basically one guy thought they were ten bucks and the other guy said Jazz cost fifteen, but nobody had any proof of either claim. I seriously doubted the $15 Jazz claim because based on my experience with toy robots ads a $15 Autobot car was unheard of. I considered the possibility but I put $15 Jazz up there with chupacabras and missile launching Boba Fetts-I know they exist but I ain't never seen one. Since that webpage's comments section has been locked by the site administrators I couldn't go back and ask each of the arguers for more details on their claims. In order to finally resolve this debate I will have to proceed on two key assumptions: a) that the debaters were talking about the price of Transformers in the United States and b) that anyone gives a crap.

MSRP-MANIPULATIVE SEARS RETAIL PRACTICES

Oftentimes when I'm collecting ads for the Vintage Space Toaster Palace I'll find that some libraries have better quality microfilm than others. If I find an ad that's too dark or blurry sometimes I can find it again in another city and they'll have a better copy of it. This was the case with one Sears ad that ran 01 December of '85. The first few times I found it in Pittsburgh and Houston I couldn't get a good copy of it. I kept trying in other cities and eventually I did get a decent enough picture. While I was collecting this same ad over and over I was also inadvertently collecting a record of the differences that Sears charged from region to region. Talk about Mighty Shifty Robot Prices!

CINCINNATI	FORT LAUDERDALE	ANCHORAGE

Cincinnati's Sears prices were the same as other Sears in cities like Houston, Pittsburgh and El Paso. The Autobot cars were in the $10 range in those places and even Fort Lauderdale stayed in line although their prices on minicars, Dinobots and Decepticon planes were $1 to $1.50 higher. But then we have Sears in Alaska going $2 over the Cincinnati prices on minicars and Dinobots and $4 higher on Decepticon planes and Autobot cars! I had finally found the elusive $15 Jazz. It kind of ticks me off because I had to go all the way to Alaska to do it when a simple bibliography at the end of that Jazz article would have worked.

I HEAR MICK ALOHA SAYS THERE ARE GALVATRON ADS FROM 1983

So after much congratulating myself on solving the greatest internet debate of our time (or at least the greatest debate of my living room in the last few months) I am free to pursue the truth behind many other untold mysteries of the Toy Robots Wars of the 1980s. Did the GoBotron Fortress playset ever get released? Was there ever a yellow Diakron DK-1? HOW MUCH ROBOTECHS CAN I BUY FOR TEN BUCKS? I am sure that the answers to these mysteries and more await me, buried in the microfilm reels of some run down library in the ghetto of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. It is not easy being the seeker of such arcane knowledges of roboplasticos but I do it because it must be done (also because God in the Soundwave tells me to).

DO NOT PASS GO(LION)!

It is not possible to spend countless hours at a library in front of a microfilm reader watching dozens of 23 year old newspaper ads for Voltron toys going by without suffering some sort of brain damage side effect. That was the situation I found myself in one day last month in the Anchorage library. As I saw ads for everything from remote controlled Voltron to Voltron ViewMaster reels to Voltron underwear and Voltron dress up sets I started wondering, "Who was Voltron anyways? What do I remember about him?" And most importantly, "How can I have a personal relationship with Voltron so that I may spread the word to others about how he is defending the universe?"

It was weird but the more I thought about it, the more I could not recall the specifics of the Voltron story as I experienced it during my childhood. I didn't remember a single plotline or ongoing story arc. All I remembered was Voltron had about ten thousand episodes and they all went something like a) a robeast showed up, b) the lions got their asses totally handed to them by said robeast and then c) in a brilliant show of strategy they decide to form Voltron and they slice the robeast in half with the Blazing Sword (which is what they should have done in the first place). Somewhere in the english lexicon there should be a catchphrase like "Fucking form Voltron already!" It seems dumb now but when I was a kid that robeast/lions/Voltron formula must have been storytelling gold because I kept watching all ten thousand episodes.

Voltron was one of those Japanese robot casserole shows where they took a couple of unrelated existing cartoons and mashed them together to make enough episodes for a US syndication run. This method of creating a show requires lots of editing to make the individual source cartoons gel together and also to appease the US censors. Consequently Voltron suffered from some odd pacing and strange character dialogue. Even when Media Blasters began releasing the original Voltron on DVD back in August of '06 I was reluctant to pick it up because that cartoon has problems. But back in May of this year Media Blasters began releasing on DVD the uncut original show from which Voltron was made-Beastly Beast King GoLion the King of Beasties. I got volume 1 at Best Buy last month and it was definitely worth the 20 bucks. I dare say, It is GoLicious.

I will admit that at first watching GoLion was shocking to me. Not just because all the characters have funny Japanese names with twice as many syllables, but it's pretty much gratuitously violent. They really go overboard in trying to paint the character formerly known as King Zarkon as a terrible space bastard doing awful things. In Voltron they never show how the parents of the character formerly known as Princess Allura died, but in GoGo Beasty GoLion that camera is all up in their faces as Zarkon cuts their heads off. Maybe that's why Princess Allura has such a friggin' potty mouth in Battle Beasty Go Lion King.

One thing that took some getting used to is how Zarkon's henchmen are constantly whipping the alien slaves in Zarkon's slave camps. At first it seemed extremely brutal and sadistic how they'd whip out the lashings at any moment, but after a while I kind of got tired of those slaves doing things to piss off their captors and I stopped feeling sorry for them. I mean, seriously mister alien slave guy, if you know that talking about Voltron will piss off the guy with the whip, why do you keep doing it? The beatings kept coming so often that not only did I become desensitized to them, I began looking forward to seeing those dumbass aliens get the beat down. The whippings eventually became comedy relief and it seemed like the more the aliens screamed the more I laughed. I thought it was funny how my reaction to the beatings went from "Holy crap how can they show this in a kids' cartoon!" to "Oooh that's gonna hurt tomorrow, ain't it, Mork?"

The DVD packaging for King Beast GoLion of the Beasty Boys totally sucks. There's no booklet or liner notes or any extras. Each volume is just three discs in a fold out cardboard case with some of the worst cover art I have ever seen for a robot show. But what you're paying for here is content. Sweet, sweet, head rolling, slave whipping, robeast slicing content. I'm sure that if Voltron aired unedited back in '85 when I was eleven years old I would have remembered more about it today. I also would probably have grown up to be a serial killing cannibal cat rapist. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

From old newspapers of long ago, from uncharted libraries of the universe, comes a legend

I just finished putting up around ninety new ads over at the Vintage Space Toaster Palace and I'm still not even halfway through the backlog. That's a whole lot of toy robot Volkswagens let me tell you. The breakdown is approximately seven new Zoids ads, seven new Shogun Warriors, twenty five new Transformers 1985 and fifty five new Voltron ads. And by new of course I mean over twenty years old.

COLLECTING PICTURES OF TOY ROBOTS IS THE NEW NOT COLLECTING TOY ROBOTS

Part of the fun of collecting old ads for me is trying to find one ad for every toy from a given toyline. For example, the original American release (OAR) of Zoids was seven toys. There were five little ones, plus the Giant Zrk and the Mammoth. I got the Zrk ad in Cincinnati. In Alaska I found a really nice ad with lineart of the duck, elephant and Tyrannosaurus and in El Paso I found a December '85 Radio Shack ad for the Mammoth. The Mammoth is considered by some to be the tail end of the OAR. Design wise it marks the transition where Zoids went from skeletal looking animal robots to armored exo-skeletal looking robots. When they changed the look like that they renamed the line Robo Strux and to me they jumped the roboshark. I found lineart of the spider in a Robo Strux ad so now that leaves me with only the frog to complete my OAR ad collection. This is how burnt out you get after 30 years of being into toy robots-my holy grail is a grainy line drawing of a plastic robot frog.

MY WATCH IS LION TO ME

A toy robots line is just not legitimate until it has its own transforming watch. Transformers and GoBots had a watch and even the third rate Zybots had a watch (although I'm still not sure how the fuck that happened). In what I was hoping would be a toy robot archaeological find of the century I uncovered a Wal-Mart ad from December '85 for a Voltron watch. Unfortunately it turns out Voltron watch is rather well documented in the annals of toy robots history. Also it is nowhere near as cool as South Korean Voltron .45 BB gun. Nothing really beats the idea of Voltron capping some robeast from 200 yards with his .45.

Vintage Space Toast Tour ALASKA-Strange Ads in a Strange Land

Last month the Vintage Space Toast Tour took me to the Z. J. Loussac Public Library in Anchorage, Alaska. When I was there Anchorage was getting nearly 22 hours of sunlight a day (and those other two hours weren't all that dark, either). Mostly I felt like I was at a Martian Barnes & Noble. I could be leaving the library at 9 p.m. and there would be just as much daylight outside as there was when the library opened at 10 a.m. It was a surreal and otherworldly place, and I'm not just saying that because the library architecture looks like it was designed by drunken Micronauts.

IT'S A SERIES OF TUBES. FILLED WITH HAN SOLO.

The small room with the microfilm readers was in a wing of the library only accessible by navigating a complicated maze of hallways and elevators much like the Micronauts Rocket Tubes. Speaking of which, whoever put together this Rocket Tubes ad for JC Penny in 1979 wasn't paying attention because they used a line art drawing of the Millennium Falcon. Yeah I totally remember that Death Star trench scene in Star Wars when Vader was about to blow up Luke's X-Wing and Han saved the day flying in on his Rocket Tubes. But were these JC Penny ad guys morons or brilliant marketers? Was this a simple mistake or something far more sinister? I needed more data.

USE THE SHIGCON TANK, LUKE!

It turns out these Alaskan newspaper guys had been preying on the public's love of Star Wars to sell all sorts of other toy robots stuff for a while. Check out this Shogun Warriors ad from November of '79 that tells people to buy Shogun Warriors to complete their Star Wars collection. Kirk Demarais the Secret Fun Guy coined this tactic "StarWarsploitation". Remember that weird Alaskan transfer kid in kindergarten everyone laughed at when he said the Jawa Sandcrawler was all gigantic huge because it was piloted by 80 foot tall Shogun Warriors robots? That kid was merely a misunderstood victim of StarWarsploitation.

DEEP DOWN WE ARE MORE LIKE THAN UNLIKE GUMMI BEARS

But that wasn't the only 'sploitation conspiracy I was able to uncover in Alaska. I also found that in the eighties there was much 'sploitating of gummi candy. You're probably already familiar with gummi bears, worms, butterflies and other gummi roadkill, but this ain't no outdoor wildlife blog I'm running so you know what kind of gummisploitation I was excited to see. This Safeway ad from October of '85 features gummi Transformers . For me much of the allure of old ads is the lineart and I was really excited to see art for the Autobot guy that turns into a Honda City Turbo. I guess gummi candy really hit the Skids.

I BOP, YOU BOP, A GO-BOP

Skids wasn't the only thing being hit in Alaska-so was Leader-1. I was bowled over when I saw a store called Pay 'n Save ran this ad for an inflatable GoBots bop bag back in November of '85. I rarely come across ads for GoBots novelty items beyond the Power Cycle so when I find ads for somewhat obscure stuff like the GoBots watch or model kits I get excited. I was looking for any mention of this particular artifact on the internet and I couldn't find a single webpage with any info about GoBots bop bag. (Actually all I did was look for it on the GoBots novelty items page at SuperToyArchive.com.) Is this proof of the existence of one of the rarest GoBots artifacts in the history of mankind? When I first saw this ad I felt chills and I heard the Indiana Jones theme song go off in my head. I expect to be knighted by the GoBots archaeological society for this.

HOW MUCH ROBOTECHS CAN I BUY FOR TEN BUCKS?

Look at all those Robotechs! Alaska continually surprised me with ads that had new lineart I'd never seen before. I was pretty excited about this ad featuring the Excite Cyclones and Alphas from Robotech. The story behind the large Alpha is pretty interesting. The Japanese company Gakken got the license to make and release the larger transforming Alpha under the Robotech brand name in the US. They did so and their boxes have the Excite logo on them. The Alphas were made in three different colors. Matchbox also had US distribution rights for the Robotech brand name since they were the master license holder and they took the same Gakken Alphas and put them in their boxes. Matchbox Alphas have totally different boxes that say "Collector's Series" on them. So in this case you have the exact same toys made by the same manufacturer but in two different boxes. The Matchbox box versions are stupid rare and coincidentally there's one on eBay right now. I expect it to go for no less than $200. There's also an online store with a Gakken/Excite Alpha and they want $155 for it. I think that's a bit high but here's the link just so you can see the different box.

GOODBYE, LAND OF ADS AND SNOW

I ended up finding a great deal more than I expected in Anchorage-the final total was somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 new ads. That's a pretty good roundup for a place that I wasn't even sure had retail stores in the 80s. I hope I can get it all up at the Vintage Space Toaster Palace within a month or so. I had fun. I will certainly not forget the Z. J. Loussac Public Library / Rocket Tubes Complex (mostly since I tried to keep my eyes on the microfilm reader screen the whole time because I was afraid if I looked at the other people in the room I would see them taking off their fake rubber human masks and revealing their leathery reptilian faces with big lizard eyes and long flicking tongues.)

Coo-Coo for Coco-Bots

TransformersA

I had this idea for a post where I would put up some interesting old newspaper ads I've found that weren't related to toy robots. When I'm looking at the old newspapers I see a lot of ads for 80s toys that don't fit into my criteria for the Vintage Space Toaster Palace but if I like them I grab them anyways. I was going to do a sort of "Top Ten Non-Robot Ads I Like Even Though They Don't Have Robots" countdown bit here and number ten was going to be an ad I found for G.I Joe cereal. But I'm looking at this ad that shows some kid and his mom at the table eating G.I. Joe cereal and I'm wondering what could I write about it to make it interesting. So after writing down dumb ideas like "BREAKFAST IS HELL", I thought screw this crap I wonder if they ever made Transformers cereal. (Actually, wondering if they ever made Transformers cereal is the default thought in my head all the time anyways no matter what I'm doing.)

TASTES LIKE CULLEN

TransformersB

I did some internet searching and I found a thread on a cereal box collector message board where a guy is letting people know that he's put up for sale a rare prototype Transformers cereal box on eBay. The thread was from March of this year and as I read through the two pages of posts I found out that back in 198X, Ralston (the makers of G.I. Joe cereal) decided not to go through with Transformers cereal because they felt the fad was dying. So the box is a prototype of a cereal that never hit the grocery store shelves. The seller put up pictures of the front and back of the box on his Flickr and I'm surprised there aren't already ten Tryptzillion hits to them by all my fellow Transformers historians. It ended up selling on eBay for $349!! For that price I could pay Peter Cullen to come to my house and make me breakfast, while doing his Optimus Prime voice as he asks, "Now what kind of cheese do you want in your omelette? I've got cheddar and mozarella here so you're gonna have to make up your mind."

THE WAR WITH INK

As I was digging up old toy robots ads I ran across a newspaper article from December of 1986 about an anti-war toys protest organized by a freelance artist named Bob Staake. Staake had a very ambitious idea in that he tried to get a bunch of cartoonists to wage war on war toys in the comics sections and editorial pages of newspapers across the country. (His assembling of specifically talented individuals to wage battle is not unlike what the Beyonder did in the first Secret Wars, which was one of my favorite war toy lines.) Usually I wouldn't give a crap, but one cartoonist mentioned Voltron in his strip and when you mess with imaginary robot lions from 1985 you're messing with me.

THANKS TO THE COMICS CODE WE LIVE IN A UTOPIA FREE OF JUVENILE DELINQUENCY

I found the idea of political cartoonists uniting against the evils of plastic toy Rambos fascinating, but why exactly were they doing this? Weren't there better things to political cartoon about in '86? The reasons for the protest are not explained beyond some vague speculation about "damaging effects" Staake thought these war toys would have on children. Staake asked "What's going to happen to these kids?", which reminded me of the arguments that brought about censorship of comic books in the 1950s in the name of preventing juvenile delinquency. We all know how that turned out. Since I was 12 years old in '86 I think I'm qualified to answer Staake's question now almost 25 years later. And the answer is-thanks to Voltron war toys I am better prepared to defend the Earth from King Zarkon's impending robeast invasion.

CHRISTMAS IS NOT ACTUALLY ABOUT CELEBRATING PEACE, IT'S ABOUT BABY JESUS COMING TO EARTH TO KICK THEOLOGICAL ASS

I did a little internet digging and found a Time magazine article mentioning Staake's boycott where he explains a bit more about his underlying motivations. "Our art asks America to put Gumby, not Rambo, under the Christmas tree. At a time when we are supposed to be celebrating peace, it seems insane to turn war into a Christmas present." I'd empathize with his fight if Staake had made his arguments more about the overt commercialization of Christmas instead of Plastic Rambo=Satan. He kind of lost me when he made his battle against Voltron a big Gumby commercial.

IN THE FUTURE, WAR TOYS WILL PROTEST YOU

So was it successful? Did the artists bring about any sort of social change? Was the cartoonist war on war toys even necessary? All these years later it seems rather pointless and silly to me. I will say now that I'm a dad I'm really sick of not being able to find a children's book that isn't officially licensed propaganda advertising for the latest computer animated movie featuring talking teddy bears. One thing that came out of me reading about Staake's crusade is my discovery of his website and his line of children's books. I think I really like the kid's book he did about robots and I will definitely be buying it. I'm a little unnerved by how he portrays robots as indentured servants of mankind, relegated to lowly maintenance and service jobs. But hey, it's not like robot cartoonists are going to be rising up against Bob Staake anytime soon.