Posts tagged with "gobots" - 1
Posted January 23, 2018 at 12:35 am

 When Action Toys first got the license to make Machine Robo toys, I figured some toy-accurate recreations of old Machine Robo stuff was the closest we'd ever get to new GoBots.  Heck, we'd heard that Action Toys specifically got the license to stuff that appeared in the Revenge of Cronos anime, and that animation didn't even feature prominently a lot of the guys we'd recognize most readily from Challenge of the GoBots.  

(GoBots rights are complicated, yo.  Hasbro bought Tonka long ago, but do they own the animation now?  Does Hanna-Barbara?  Does Bandai still own the original toy likenesses???)

And so a while back I got this tiny little Bike Robo (pictured below), who's kind of like Cy-Kill if Cy-Kill had a normal regular boring robot face.  No five-o-clock shadow, no yellow teeth -- I mean, those are the main draws, obviously, but with GoBots rights being such a quagmire, I figured it was the closest possible deal.

Fastforward to a BIKE ROBO DELUXE being announced by Action Toys, and oh hey what what it has extra Cy-Kill faces you can swap in what the holy fudge.  Can they do that?  Hell, I'm not sure they DID do that.  The one I ordered I had shipped taken out of its package so that it could fit into a smaller box for international shipping, but I've read that folks who had theirs shipped unopened had the extra Cy-Kill faces sent outside the packaging in a baggie.  So maybe Action Toys is just skirting the terms of their license by offering FREE FACES WITH PURCHASE or whatever.  Iunno.

But the point is, I bought the heck out of it, because Actual Cy-Kill With Five-O'Clock Shadow is a thing I have to have.  

As I said, he's BIKE ROBO DELUXE, which means he's large.  Well, larger than the other Action Toys Bike Robo, at least.  Relatively large.  He's kind of a Transformers Voyager or, more accurately, the size and bulk of aTransformers Masterpiece Autobot Car.  He sees eye-to-eye with MP Prowl or Sideswipe and has a similar heft.  (His ... chest is die-cast metal, I think?  Something in the torso.)

The other first thing you notice is that he comes with a little printed sheet that tells you which parts not to turn a certain way or they'll break.  GOOD TO KNOW, I GUESS.  You both want to see that first and not want to see that first.  This is not your typical mass-market Transformer where they see how long it survives with a five-year-old before putting it in stores.

Otherwise, he seems to be a pretty solid guy.  I'm careful with him, because, again, he's not a Hasbro toy so I don't know what I should expect durability-wise, but nothing seems like it's on the verge of breaking.  His transformation involves bending him over into a crouch while undoing all the teeny tiny details along the way that make him into a more pleasing Cy-Kill-esque robot.  Both his wheels partsform, but they kind of have to if you want to keep both modes' accuracy.  They attach with magnets, which is neat.  I mean, they also peg in, but mostly it's the magnets keeping them there rather than friction.  The tires are rubber.  

Also there's a white panel to replace the face panels in motorcycle mode.  I'm happy keeping the Cy-Kill face in there, though, 'cuz that's how Cy-Kill rolls.  Literally.

The only frightening part about the transformation is when you gotta push his legs together for cycle mode.  There's a diagonal cut through his thighs, and that's the joint that The Paperwork tells you will break if you don't move it correctly, and so making sure you're doing the thing you're supposed to do and not the thing you're not supposed to do is a few moments of anxiety.  Apparently The Paperwork just doesn't want you to think that's a rotational joint!  I'm not sure I'd have tried to rotate it there without the warning, but I'm sure as heck not gonna try it now, so mission objective achieved, I guess.

Bike Robo/Cy-Kill is pleasingly articulated at about the same level that current Transformers Masterpieces are.  Hell, I'm pretty sure he's just supposed to be a Masterpiece-style Cy-Kill.  He has double-jointed elbows and his fingers and thumb are somehow articulated even though they're big cylinders.  (He has actual unarticulated big cylinders to replace his fists with if you prefer.)  He's got a waist and an ab crunch and his head turns and, yeah, he does stuff.  

My only regret is that his head assembly doesn't bend up in motorcycle mode so he can look where he drives like in the cartoon.  

He also comes with some flame attack parts you can peg into his wrists, if you want him to be shooting stuff or whatever.

He's got three Cy-Kill faces: neutral, smug grin, and frustrated. (linked 'cuz my lighting studio photos of his frustrated face were all blurry)  I prefer the frustrated face 'cuz you can see his yellow teeth.  Those yellow teeth are important.  

I only put in the Bike Robo face for a review photograph.  Probably not using it again.

I have never inserted the blank white motorcycle mode panel.  I likely never will.

Everything else is pretty amazing, though.  He makes me so happy.  

Posted May 21, 2016 at 4:01 am

I very very very very very rarely buy non-Hasbro/Takara transforming robots.  As such, I am kind of... entrenched, I think the best might be, in certain expectations.  And I don't even know what those expectations are, really, since I so incredibly seldomly travel outside that box.  There might be all sorts of things, small things, that I take for granted.  Again, what are these things that I take for granted?  I don't know!  It is a strange world out there outside of my little world of robots from only one property.  It's like traveling to Canada.  Generally, our civilizations kinda work 99.999% the same, but there's always a surprise at what little stuff is different.  Like, their Taco Bells have fries, man.  Fries.

Anyway, this is Eagle Robo from Machine Robo, or as most folks here would know him better, Leader-1 from Go-Bots.  I may SHOCK you by revealing that Japan didn't get "Challenge of the Gobots."  They got Machine Robo: Revenge of Cronos instead, a 47-episode anime series with anime peoples and anime robots and whatnot.  There's no Guardians, no Renegades, just a buncha humans and robots fighting bad guys.  And everyone looks like their toys, because why wouldn't they?  "Leader-1" doesn't have a face with a mouth, "Cy-Kill" doesn't have a five-o'clock shadow, and they're actually both good guy robot mech folks.  You know how in all the Pre-Transformers stuff, all of the toys were good guys, even "Megatron" and "Soundwave"?  Same approach here.

There's now some new toys based on this old anime, and I thought, sure, I wouldn't mind having a modern-technology Leader-1-ish guy, and so now I have an Eagle Robo.  Size-wise relative to Transformers, he's essentially a large Deluxe Class toy.  He's got some die-cast parts.  And how intricate he is varies very wildly, depending on what part of him we're talking about.  

He transforms very similarly to how the original Leader-1 did it: Back 2/3 of the jet pulls down for legs, arms pull out from the sides, nosecone folks onto the back.  However, Eagle Robo tries to make this a little more complicated, but not all over.  The legs?  Still giant chunks you easily pull down from 2/3 of the jet, easy-peasy.  Nosecone folks back easy, too.  But, damn, this torso.  Someone spent a long time designing that part of the toy, and they had quite a few clever ideas, but it's all very small panels and flipping and flopping and cramming and it's definitely not very fun.  It pegs very nicely into place in either mode, but that middle part of the journey is not particularly rewarding.  

The result of your work is a great-looking jet, though.  A great-looking jet with Leader-1 chest vents piggy-backing on the middle of the jet's back, but a great-looking jet nonetheless.  There's not a lot of undercarriage junk, if any.  The bottom is a series of folded robot panels, sure, but they're flat folded robot panels that tuck up into the jet itself.  The jet has a narrow profile, as a jet should.  

The robot's weapon separates into missiles and... extra wing chunks?  Sure.  But they have a place to go, which is good.

The robot is less exciting.  The arms' jointing is kind of awkward, and the knees are so tight it's hard to bend them without getting lots of leverage.  There's less range of movement than one'd like from a product like this.

Frankly, the part that might excite me the most is the modular display stand that Eagle Robo and apparently everyone else in the line comes with.  You can assemble the display stand parts in countless ways, and the extendo arm that holds the figure over the ground is strongly ratcheted so you don't have to worry about the arm collapsing under any weight.  Which is good, because of the die-cast.  The more Machine Robo guys you get, the bigger and more intricate display stand you can build, in theory, since the parts are all modular.  But I only have the one right now.  Very unfortunately, the pegs are too large to be compatible with the toy-stand pegholes appearing on Transformers these days.

Eagle Robo, to me, exists in some strange Transformer uncanny valley.  There are many of the same principles that govern Transformers toys, but there's just enough that's off that I feel a little detached and wary as I go through its motions.  Not the toy's fault, obviously, but that feeling is there.  The choice of what kind of joints and where to use them, the structure of the toy itself, the general aesthetic... so much is close to familiarity, but just shy of it.  And you never know what the tolerance for roughhousing is on a toy that is 100% for collectors and doesn't have to withstand any child playtesting.  Am I going to break this if I force it? is a question you have to keep yourself guarded with.  Things did come off as I've tried to transform Eagle Robo, usually  the head and nosecone, but thankfully not in a way that they couldn't go back on.  Phew.

there, see, i tried something different, MOM

Page 1