I've been planning things out for the month ahead, and I realized in the process that it's been a very long time since my last bot-related post. A big part of that is that I haven't had any new material. I did remember, however, something I've had for a while without ever quite deciding what to do with them. They aren't "giant" robots, and they aren't nearly old enough to be "retro" in and of themselves. Here are the lead robots of The Black Hole, VINCENT and the sinister Maximillian, as released by Diamond Select. But first, some background...
As mentioned in my review of the movie, the release of The Black Hole was accompanied by a toy line from Mego not long before the company went into bankruptcy, a decision many critical collectors link to the company's decision to decline a license for Star Wars. In hindsight, this was not quite the fateful decision it would appear to be. By all serious accounts, the core reasons for Mego's decline had little to do with any one toy line. (More detailed analyses point to their efforts to break into the electronic game market.) On the other side of the equation, if Mego had acquired Star Wars, they would almost certainly have handled it as they had other movie tie-ins before and since, above all as a profitable but predictably short-lived line. If anything, even observers in 1979 would still have predicted that Star Wars would soon be on its way out, while the only obvious reason hindsight gives why they would have been wrong was that Empire Strikes Back went on to possibly greater success. The real lesson is that businessmen are no better than anyone else at predicting something that never happened before.
At any rate, Mego did forge ahead with a line now familiar to collectors, now most notable for using the multi-jointed articulations made familiar by GI Joe and especially for the very detailed and much better selling robot figures. Since the toys were at least as much of a disappointment as the movie, the figures ended up scarce on the later collector's market, leading to high prices for comparatively widely distributed 3.75" figures and vanishing rarity for larger items, some of which were only released in foreign markets. The most astonishing item of all is a scale model of the Cygnus, released by MPC rather than Mego, advertised as over 2 feet long. The one that has always most intrigued me (and the only one I have ever sighted "in the wild") was a knockoff item, a Compurobot clearly based on VINCENT that was supposedly programmable. Ironically, this is probably the only "vintage" item that is comparatively affordable, with prices of about $30 loose or as low as $50 for specimens in-box. (See The Old Robots, also my main source for the Tomy windup bots. They are awesome.)
Fast forward, and there have been a fair number of releases, most notably from Funko, which I simply do not "get". The ones I finally picked up, around the middle of last year, are Vinylmates from Diamond Select. What stood out to me is that they are detailed and reasonably realistic compared to the movie. There is definitely some of the deformation of proportions characteristic of Funko (a fashion that was annoying me long before they showed up), but it only really shows with VINCENT's head, which has been turned from spherical to cylindrical. Here's some pics of the bots, with the Truckstop Queen thrown in.
"Let me get this straight, your master was planning to fly a starship directly into a black hole... and the crew didn't rebel until after they were on the way???"
In terms of size, the bots are about 4 inches, which puts them about on the same scale as 5-6 in action figures. Maximillian is rather strange; he's tall enough that the stand is redundant, and much more heavily built than VINCENT, who from all indications is hollow. Here's a few detail shots to show how the stands fit in, jokes not included.
Okay, okay... "Before you try to insert that stand, remember I have a laser." Happy?
As one more experiment, I tried these guys with the Giant Tonka Lady, the one figure I have that's about their size and of the same vintage and style as the original line. It should give some idea what the bots would have looked like if they had found their way into the Eighties toy box. What might have been...
But of course, we can't really end it there...
"You're our new parent company???"
That's all for now, more to come!
For more links, here's the sites with the best pages on Black Hole toys I could think of off-hand.
2 Warps to Neptune (and an updated post)
Mego Museum (with info on Italian releases and prototypes)
And one more, prototype page at Bug Eyed Monster.
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