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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I grew up in the 1980s and as such I still have a box of toys leftover that I’ve ferried from one residence to another ever since I left the parents’ nest. Mostly, I was obsessed with all manner of robots in the same way that I am obsessed with multimedia hacking these days. Anyone who still hangs on to boxes of paraphenalia from their youth occasionally entertains the idea that these old toys might be worth something these day.

I pulled out my box of robots from the 80s recently and quickly disabused myself of the notion that any of this junk could be worth anything. In fact, I resolved to dispose all of it all just as soon as I exercise my reprehensible photography skill (or lack thereof) to capture them all in a more efficient form. And since this is my blog, and I haven’t had that much to say about the blog’s chartered topics lately, I will document the robots here, in case there is anyone else out there who cares. Plus, maybe someone else can identify some of these robots that I used to be keen on but can no longer positively identify.

I’ll start with some Transformers, always my favorite robots. Here’s Megatron, the villainous Decepticon leader who looked ever so menacing in cartoon form but looked somewhat silly as a toy:

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He was a Walther P-38 when transformed. I didn’t even understand what “Walther P-38” meant until a few years ago.

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