Greetings once again! It's already the second 80's Cartoon Character Review and I've already, as per tradition, forgotten what I said I'd do and instead of focusing on one character, I'm doing a whole series...and the most craptacular of them all: The Gobots.
In the mid 80's, robots were big business...and Tonko wanted to cash in. Logically they figured if big metal robots with awesome transformations and good accessories sold big, crappy little plastic robots with no accesories and stupid transformations must do well too....and you know what?
FOR A WHILE THEY DID. Yes, for a long time the gobots were a major rival of transformers. I know I was too stupid to tell the difference and now own quite a few gobots, Hurray! The series revolved around the "evil" renegades and "heroic" guardians from Gobotron now on earth, battling it out. Cy-Kill, the renegade leader regularly came up with plans roughly as evil as putting your left shoe on your right foot...and Leader-1, the stupidly named leader of the guardians, managed to only scrape by because a few annoying humans always saved the day. The cartoon wasn't very exciting, but in one movie they meet the Rock Lords!

Each team only had three main characters...the Renegades were Cy-Kill, Cop-Tor, and Crasher. The Guardians were Leader-1, Turbo, and Scooter. Apparently Tonka hired the same naming people as Masters of the Universe. There were also roughly 874 other characters that were seen once in the series to promote their toy. The series somehow generated a LOT of toys, as you'll see at the bottom of the page, which came in two sections...first, the small stupid ones we all know, then second the "Super" Gobots, which were usually larger, more complex versions of the originals. Some of these were actually tolerable toys, but the line was already, rightfully, dead. Before it went though, it created one of several 80's toy horrors:

This thing upsets me. It's the same feeling I only get around clowns. I think perhaps I had one as a child and fell off, then blocked out the memory...or maybe I got one and thought it was neato, so I rode it to school and was pulvarized. Either way, this thing is no doubt the source of many hideous childhood traumatizings.
Gobot toys were on the whole not very good. I always had them as slaves of the Decepticons, until one time when they tried to break free and battle ensued. That's why I only have about half of my Gobots unbroken now. Hey, I didn't do it on purpose, the things just broke on any surface harder then water.
Oh, and Transformer fans for some reason HATE Gobots. It's instinctual or something...but for some silly reason Hasbro named a group of it's TF's "Gobots" anyway. These were small, simplistic robots that were cheap and unpopular...so perhaps that's why Hasbro named them as such, to simply say "Take that, gobots, you died in '88 and we're still doing so well that we can make a whole line that will suck and cost us millions just to make fun of you!" Sound illogical? Watch the old TF toy commercials sometimes, these guys were NOT playing with a full hand.
Any search on Google for Gobots will find piles of pages about guys with no lives "kitbashing" these toys into versions of more popular transformers. These are occasionally interesting but tend to look like someone smooshed a can of play-doh over a toy, then attacked it with a fork and stuck it in the micro. Yes, gobots were and are always dumb.

OK, I could have produced a superior article; but I didn't...and there will be MANY more articles, and I promise I'll come around to gobots again to touch on Turbos may/december romance with Crasher.

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