Fiction: Xmas With Exotroopers Demo!

Back for Christmas with a fiction post from way back. Here's the opening/ demo for Christmas With Exotroopers, part of my longest running and least read series. It featured an evil Slavic wind god, genocidal nutcrackers, an angel based on a snail, and this, fair warning, possibly the most gorey scene I've written.

Though the principles of the combat exoskeleton were well-known, there was a persistent belief that the angled-slab armor of the exotrooper corps of Serbia, known to the Serbs as hercegs. “lords of blood” to their enemies, and to the wider world as “finbacks”, did not cover human beings but robots, or at least some unwholesome combination of the two. And the most feared of the exotroopers, a neo-Nazi ex-convict known as Zaratustra or Zed, had discoursed that there might be some truth to it.  Yes, the exotroopers were men, wholly separate from their mechanized armor.  But on another level, the human and the armor were in symbiosis.  Each of them customized the armor to his personality and preferred tactics, in Zed's own case welding a crown of rebar rods to his helmet to mark his status as commander.  Over time, the exotroopers had spent more and more time in their armor.  And for Zed in particular, the armor was a part of him even in his dreams. 

Zed found himself standing in the frame of a door knocked halfway off its hinges, with a festive Christmas wreath still hanging askew upon it.  At his feet is a fat man with a long, white beard in an unmistakeable red suit, still feebly clutching at his spilled intestines.  Beyond a short hallway, he could see a living room, decorated for Christmas and now smeared with blood and semi-solid fecal matter.  A man's decapitated corpse slumped on the hearth, and what remained of a woman was mixed with crushed gifts and the splintered ruin of a Christmas tree.  From behind the counter of an adjoining kitchen came the steady crunching of bone.

Zaratustra crouched to look Santa Claus in the eye.  “Let me guess,” he said.  “A little girl wanted a hippopotamus for Christmas...”

He snapped the dying man's neck, and drew a 12-gauge sidearm as he stood up.  In the kitchen, a huge, half-seen shape splintered cabinets as it wheeled about.  An enormous head reared momentarily into view, tossing blood-stained shreds of a frilly pink dress into a bowl of egg nog. As Zed took aim, hindquarters the size of whole turkeys pushed into view, and then ejected a literally staggering spray of excrement straight at his helmet.  He fired twice, virtually blind, at the hulking yet low-slung shape that smashed through one corner of the counter as it burst out of the kitchen.  Then he kicked, and his lashing foot met the ivory and bone of the bull hippo's swinging jaw...

“Zed! Lieutenant Zed!” The voice that drew Zed out of sleep was Zotgjakt, aka the Albanak, the only Albanian in Serbia's exotrooper corps and the only finback whom Zed might consider a close friend. “The Lieutenant is here for a briefing!”  And Zed lowered his foot, which he used to prop himself up in the closet while he slept, and replaced his outer helmet, which was crowned with pieces of rebar.  Within seconds, he was battle-ready.

Retrobots Revisited: Tomy Rascal Robot and others

Because this is going to be a toy blog if it goes anywhere at all, here’s another toy related post. This one got started at the Y*utube channel That Junkman. In the course of unboxing a delivery from a fan, the eponymous Junkman showed a small windup robot included with several vintage Star Wars figures. I and several other commenters immediately recognized it as a moderately famous Tomy windup toy, sold as the Rascal Robot. It just happened I already have several specimens, including one I had played with as a kid at my grandparents’ house. Here are a few more photos of my mini collection:

In my prior research, the featured bot was made and sold in the late 70s and most likely into the early 80s by Tomy, a prolific manufacturer of windup toys and electronics. At least some were sold on action figure-style cards, which bear the name Rascal Robot. The design was clearly modelled on Robbie the Robot from Forbidden Planet, and closely resembled Tomy’s remote control Omnibot. The toy came in a range of colors, mainly in solid silver or gold bodies seen here. Somewhat rarer variants feature decals on the chest and in some cases painted eyes. In more recent years, the design was included in a line of Tomy toys re issued by Z Windups, resulting in the middle specimen featured here. As can be seen, the reissue is substantially larger than the original. The manufacturer also made the extra effort to make the arms spin.


Of course, this was all part of a longer journey for me. I have many memories of seeing or playing with Tomy windups in my childhood, including an unsettling sighting of what I eventually identified as their “Strolling Bowling” game. However, I never seemed to get any of them for myself, and all the windup toys I have that I know I didn’t acquire as a teen or adult are happy meal toys or more obscure brands. As for the “Rascal” bot I played with, it’s the silver one featured here, finally given to me by my grandmother around the time I started college. I loved the little thing, though I found the arms wouldn’t twist more than a few degrees (those of the gold bot a acquired much later twist 360 without difficulty) and I long believed it was entirely broken. In a possible minor “Mandela effect”, I tried winding it up while taking photos for this essay,  and was completely surprised to find it worked.

Along the way, I caught wind of a few more Tomy bots. I purchased one, pictured above with a couple more windups, that I knew had to be a Tomy creation at the long-vanished local comic book store. This one turned out to be known as the Acrobot, and I figured out that the arms were part of an action gimmick: If it is fallen or knocked down, the long arms will push it upright, as long as they are lined up with each other. Later still, I found online photos of a third bot, with an overall shape that suggests a cross between Robbie and the “Lost in Space” robot. Unfortunately, while there are enough recent pictures from collectors to indicate that it was sold in the US, my own intermittent research has failed to locate a specimen for sale, or even a report of one being purchased in ebay or other competitive markets. The only collector to give an account of acquiring one simply states that it was purchased for a few dollars at a local shop.


All in all, I don’t have much to add about these bots. Tomy windups may never have had the prominence of brand name action figures like Star Wars and Transformers, but they were a major part of the toy market for many years. The fact that many people still remember them is all the more impressive given that they were marketed for and to younger kids who had little or no idea who was making them. If you have any around, it will definitely be worth your while to hold onto them. And double check if you have a tall robot with long arms and a bubble on top, because it just might be a collector’s Holy Grail.


Links

That Junkman video featuring Rascal robot (ca 3:30)

Collectors’ Weekly review with pics of the 3rd bot

The Old Robots website, dedicated to 1980s robot toys by Tomy and others