I remember these little guys being marketed with a “Robotech” banner, though they were definitely not canon:
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
See? Rocks, and not altogether convincing rocks, at that (do rocks usually have eyes?):
