?Waterwalk’s head and gray was close enough to Megatron’s that he could just squeak by as a stand-in for the Decepticon leader. But for a handful of years they were trustworthy and colorful, with a unique quality all their own, and they gave me hours and hours of fun.?The colors are kind of right and he’s a jet, but dammit, our biological necessity to own a Starscream made this half-assed match easier to accept! Because of that, I’m not swimming in them as I am with Star Wars or GI Joe. They were a firm secondary line for me, something to buy if the main lines had nothing new I wanted. GoBots as a toy line didn’t consume me as other lines did. The cartoon was over, and with no comic or major media left, with Transformers being the transforming robot of choice for most kids, and with the diminishing aisle space that the end of the ’80s was bringing, they didn’t really stand a chance. I didn’t know at the time they would be the last, but they were clearanced for a reason: GoBots were dying. The last GoBots I got were from a three-pack that was on clearance at Kay-Bee along with the official carrying care that was already marked way, way down. Being a Hot Wheels/Matchbox fan in addition to being a robot fan and (obviously) an action figure fan meant I essentially got two toys in one. We had just moved into a brand new house and I remember getting home late that night and ripping him out of his package and running Turbo over the unfinished wood top of our new kitchen table, shifting him from car to robot and back again. I don’t believe I had heard any advance warning about the line, which made it a total surprise. Turbo was a total impulse buy at Best department store. It was around this time I was fascinated by the Turbo Teen cartoon and wished that I could turn into a red sports car also. Turbo was my first, beginning a long love affair with red sports cars. There are others I wish I had been able to get, but I either never saw them or some other toy line grabbed my attention. I’m glad I managed to get the main cast with both the leader of the good guys and leader of the bad guys, along with a core group of their respective teams. Nothing wrong with a little literalism in names. I’m sure there’s an Internet nerd firing up his snark right now because of this, but it never bothered me. Their names are as on-the-nose as their transformations. It was way easier than prolonging the transforming noise while shifting the shapes of Transformers.
And with a couple of moves and a nice whirring sound effect you’ve got two robots fighting each other and blasting each other with their fist lasers or whatever. If you always kept one guy in robot form while he was being attacked by another in vehicle mode, it was easier to pretend. The trick to not noticing the scale deficiencies was not to have the jet and the bike transformed at the same time. GoBots had to get in line.īut, as you can see from some of the unfortunate instances of paint rub, I loved these little guys. Toss in Super Powers, Secret Wars, and other lines, and it got very crowded very quickly. GoBots were cool, but they couldn’t compete with the holy trifecta of Gi Joe, Transformers, and Masters of the Universe. My interest waxed and waned with how involved I was in other toy lines, so the fickle nature of childhood meant that I ended up leaving a lot of GoBots on the shelves in favor of that bright shiny new Quick Kick or Flint figure. And being smaller meant being cheaper, coming in around the same price as the smaller Autobots.Īs is typical with so many lines, I wasn’t able to be a completist with this line. Being much smaller, they were space-efficient little toys. But ignoring the downfalls of transforming toys of the times, GoBots were a lot of fun and the definition of 1980s hand-candy.
Personally, I had the same issues with them that I did with Transformers: scale issues (a scooter the same size as a fighter jet?), articulation issues (in some only the arms raised), and some odd, stilted robot modes (some of these guys don’t have hands). I’m assuming the scorn I’ve read comes from their simplicity, but the simplicity was part of their charm.
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