No, this war was comin’ home thanks to the loosening of restrictions on children’s programming. It’s not enough to wage war in the toy aisles…especially not in the 80’s. Hell, just to show how progressive the bad guys were, Crasher was Cy-Kill’s 2nd in command (although we can’t help but wonder if she was banging the boss-bot…if you know what I mean and I think you do)!
To Hanna Barbera’s credit, they looked at the toys and asked “Why can’t some of them be girls?” Each side, Guardians and Renegades, had female GoBots: Path Finder, Small Foot, Sparky and Spay-C for the Guardians, Crasher, Snoop and Vamp for the Renegades. Just looking at the toys, yeah, you’d have to be kinda nuts to assign gender to them…I mean, they’re robots, right? Or, given that they’re all from a boys’ toyline…well, what boy is going to decide that one race car might be a boy and another race car might be a girl? Probably not anyone you grew up with…although if you did, track that person down and give ‘em a pat on the back for their progressive thinking! As each line got their own respective cartoon in 1984, sure enough, voices would have to be assigned to bring these toys to life. This…this is what inspired me to write this article. Conversely, any Transformer you picked up, all you had to do was turn the packaging around to find out if this bot was a commander, a grunt, a philosopher or so on. Take GoBot Optimus Prime look-alike Road Ranger…what’s his story? Where does he fall in the hierarchy? There’s absolutely zero indication. But maybe that’s too easy, since the names scream their rank. Was he strict and by the book, running the Guardians like a well-oiled military unit? Or was he more laid back? On the other hand, we caught a glimpse right away when we bought Optimus Prime that he was a sage-type leader and not overly militaristic. When you bought Leader-1 in early ’84, you had no idea what kind of leader he was. Transformers on the other hand, thanks to Marvel, not only had the cartoon come out much sooner after release of the toys (though still a week after the GoBots debut) but even if you, for some strange reason, couldn’t watch the show, when you bought a toy you still had a blurb in the Tech Specs not only about the powers and abilities of the character, but also their personality.
#TRANSFORMER GOBOT FULL#
Nothing more would be added until the cartoon started to air in 1984, a full year after the toyline was released. Whether it’s Renegades and Guardians fighting over Gobotron or Decepticons and Autobots fighting over Cybertron, the story is the same on the surface. The main story is the same…only the names are changed to protect the innocent. Two warring factions whose seemingly eternal struggle spills over from their home planet to Earth. And for the more confusing instances (dinosaurs on the good side, construction vehicle bad guys), there were stickers with each factions logo on them to remove any confusion. First, they decided to split the ‘bots up by their alternate modes, cars on one side, planes and most anything else on the other. Hasbro, with the help of Marvel, avoided this pitfall two ways. The only two subsets you knew for certain what side they were on were both on the side of the Renegades, the 2 combiners Puzzler and Monsterous, and the regular, non-combining monster GoBots. Each side had varied color schemes and alternate modes. Because if you were looking for any other visual cue as to which ‘bot was on which side…it simply wasn’t there. Lost your card backs? Then you, my friend, were shit out of luck…well, unless you had an obsessively good memory. Not helping was the fact that the only way to tell between the two factions was to keep the packaging! If there was a lightning bolt and a dark background on the card, it’s a Renegade. GoBots were divided into Guardians and Renegades…but seemingly at random.
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