I was catching up on recent Cracked.com articles when I noticed a familiar photo on their front page:

The right half of this picture looks awfully familiar. I looked back in the archives, and sure enough:

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Eh, it doesn’t bother me. If a site is going to rip off one of my photos, I guess I prefer that it be one of my favorite sites. So it’s all good. They also cleaned up the photo nicely; no shadows or anything. I imagine they found it since that picture is one of the top Google image search hits for “gobots”. And at least they didn’t hotlink the photo, as many sites (and particularly forum posters) are wont to do. Chalk it up to my mad metadata skillz, which simply entails clearly titling image files and giving them proper ALT text.

It’s weird to think that that might be the most famous photo I will ever take.

This is the final entry in my Robots of the 80s series so it’s fitting that these are probably the crowning pieces in my soon-to-be-dispersed collection. At the very least, my enduring favorites.

There was a trend in the Transformers toy line to have a team of several robots that combined to form a larger and more powerful robot. In retrospect, this was quite a brilliant marketing strategy. The first such group of robots were the Constructicons — 6 green construction vehicles that all transformed into robots and then combined into — I think — Destructor. Afterwards, there was a team of jet craft Autobots and automobile Decepticons (turning the usual Autobot/Decepticon forms on their ear) which refined the combination model so that it now involved a larger Transformer which formed the mega-robot’s torso and 4 smaller Transformers as the limbs.

My favorites were always the Technobots and the Terrorcons:

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Hang in there! Only one more part in the series after this one!

Now we come to the “Masters” series. I’m impressed that these Transformers remained in such good condition. That simply means that they were purchased when my interest in the toy line was waning but when I still wanted to collect a representative sample of each type of Transformer.

The Transformers toy line had Targetmasters, Headmasters, and Powermasters. The concept behind this was that the larger, more capable Transformers had little robot assistants who were humans who had undergone special operations to become special-purpose Transformers.

The first example of this is the Targetmaster. I think this one was named Slapdash. I have no idea what his gun was named.

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Here is a grab bag of miscellaneous Transformers. First is a group of Autobots:

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The 3 rightmost Transformers fit better into my discretionary toy budget which is why I tended to accumulate more of them. The 2 of the left (one of which I couldn’t figure out how to fully transform anymore), if I recall correctly, were some sort of special mail order Transformers. I could be mistaken.

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The 6-changer! A rare species indeed– a Transformer that can actually change into 6 different things. This is the Autobot 6-changer. I believe that the Decepticons had one as well. Here, kitty:

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One of his 6 forms was a mechanized feline of some sort. I don’t remember this robot’s name but I think “cat” figured into it in some way.

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Here are some miscellaneous robots that don’t fit into any well-defined toy lines such as Transformers, Gobots, or Robotech.

First up is some rubber robots. I have no recollection of how I obtained them:

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I call these the cereal robots because I believe they came in boxes of cereal. If memory serves. the cereal in question was Cap’n Crunch, a cereal with its finger of the pulse of the nation’s youth; years later, they would have a Cap’n Crunch-themed CD-ROM game pack-in.

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I remember these little guys being marketed with a “Robotech” banner, though they were definitely not canon:

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They were sort of like Lego robots, or perhaps Barbie Doll robots that you could dress up. They came with all manner of fashionable accessories:

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Small grab bag of robots today. Here is a set of older Transformers remade as rubber figurines. I think these were packaged with later Transformers that I purchased. Or did they come with McDonald’s meals in the late 90s? I don’t remember exactly.

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I remember the code: Red = Autobot, purple = Decepticon. The figures from left to right depict a Decepticon jet Transformer (most likely Starscream), some Autobot, one of the Constructicons, and one of the Insecticons.

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Ah, Robotech. Still an enduring favorite to this day. It was a cartoon series that was way ahead of its time, or perhaps just way too mature for an audience my age when I first discovered the show. I just remember seeing a transforming robot on the first show I saw (episode #5, incidentally entitled “Transformation”) and I was hooked.

I seem to recall that it wasn’t always easy to find Robotech toys back in the day, or perhaps they were just more expensive or that Transformers took precedence in my discretionary toy budget. Can’t remember. But there were some cool Robotech toys and I didn’t get my hands on even a fraction of them.

I did amass a complete collection of these adorable chubby Veritech fighters– Miriya’s, Rick’s, and Max’s. These are their guardian configurations, halfway between jet and robot:

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Now let’s get into Gobots, the other transforming robot from the 80s. The people who engineered these machines came up with some goofy ideas. I’ll always remember Tom Hanks in the 1988 movie Big where he had no qualms about calling out the naked emperor by stating that it wouldn’t be much fun to play with a transforming building. In light of that, it’s pretty hard for me to understand how I ended up with 4 of these Gobots (I’m pretty sure they came from that line) that were actually rocks that transformed into robots.

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See? Rocks, and not altogether convincing rocks, at that (do rocks usually have eyes?):

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