Retrobots Revisited: Rock bots!!!

 

It's time for another post on my day off, and I decided it was time for another bot-related post. This time, I have a lineup of what has long since become the supposed epitome of silly '80s robot toys. These are the GoBot Rock Lords, the robots that turn into rocks and by standard jokes had the same play value. In fact, I have had a few of these since I was a kid, and I played with them enough to have a sense of their strengths and weaknesses. So are they relics that deserve the ridicule, or a misunderstood gem of pop culture? The verdict is... guinnocent!

The backstory told briefly is that in 1986, after several years of brutal battles on the toy aisle, the Tonka GoBots were falling behind Transformers. (See Rogun Robots parts 1, 2 and 3.)  On top of that, the Transformers were in the process of getting their own movie, and Tonka and their suppliers couldn't allow a multimedia mineshaft gap. Thus, they launched not just a new series of toys, but a whole spinoff line plus a movie called GoBots: Battle of the Rock Lords, which I have of course long been aware of but somehow only just found out had a US theatrical release. Alas, the movie was a flop, and the toys struggled along for a year before being discontinued in 1987. It must have been only a few years after that when I picked up a couple at the comic book store, one very cheaply and the other for a high enough price that I waited a little while before buying it. Here's a couple closeups of the more expensive of the pair.

Apparently, this guy is Boulder, and not just a good guy but their leader. (See Super Toy Archive, ancient by internet standards and still awesome.) The aesthetic is quite different than the other bots, good or bad, enough to raise a suspicion in my mind that this is yet another originally unrelated design that the GoBots line bought up. (Of course, that's also pretty much how Hasbro came up with Megatron.) In the first wave, he fought alongside Granite and Nuggitt, against the evil forces of Magmar, Sticks 'N Stones and the other bot in my collection, Tombstone. The line went on to introduce a second wave of the rock bots, followed by a third wave centered on the transparent Jewel Lords and the Rockasaurs. Moving on, here's the other member of the pair, truly rocking those shoulder pads.

And while we're at it, a few pics in rock mode.

"Psst... Have the lawyers from Hasbro left yet?"

Now, what will be immediately apparent is that these toys have limited articulation that can easily be worn out. As far as I recall, the green bot was very loose even when I got him, and time hasn't helped. He can do a mean kick with either leg, but the arms do little more than fold in or out. The real shock, which I only noticed a few years back, is that the anthropomorphic good-guy bot has even less motion. He unfolds into a fighting stance that looks okay. However, the legs don't go any further than you see here, and the only way to approximate a punch is to raise one arm and swivel the whole body. Here's a few pics to show the degree of inaction.

"Put up your dukes!"

"I literally can't!"

"Hey, I can be a cheerleader!"

"If I had a waist..."

"Wait, was this the GoBots audition or for the 3 Stooges?"

So, what was the play value for these? Clearly, the articulation was seriously limited, though still probably not the worst for transforming robot toys, and these were if anything the better figures of the line. I can further recall sighting at least one more in the wild back in the old days, and finding them unsatisfactory even by kid me's standards. (Judging from online pics, Nuggitt was begging for the firecracker treatment.) For actual play, I'm sure I used the evil bot as a  main henchman for various villains. If it came to that, he was probably one of the biggest bots that I had before I got hold of the Robotech red guy. On the other hand, I honestly can't remember if I did anything with the good-guy bot. The culminating irony is that I almost certainly played with them more as rocks than as robots. While I had enough of the real thing lying around to figure in play time (most notably as ballast for a Lego ship), there were times when I needed something more, and these more than fit the bill. They were especially awesome as asteroids, all the more so with the Micro Machines and arcade prize ships I usually had to work with. When one of these was incoming, it actually dwarfed most of the usual fleet.

That brings us to the mindboggling twist: Somehow, these spawned an apparent knockoff line, not from the usual suspects like Convertors or Masterbotix but from a major manufacturer that hadn't even been in the transformer arms race. I sighted these occasionally before I finally bought one well into the 1990s, and I think I had heard but flatly disbelieved the story that these were at least nominally part of the Mattel He Man/ MOTU line. I learned much later that there were two of these, Stonedar and Rokkon, both released in 1986. It's the kind of timing that might be put down to coincidence or convergent evolution, except that these were followed by the wonky Meteorbs the following year, reportedly originally designed and manufactured by Bandai, the same company that made most of the GoBot line. Here's a few pics of the one I have, definitely identified as Rokkon.

"Rock on, get it?... Hey, what are you doing with that jackhammer?"

The strange thing about this one is that it actually mostly fits the aesthetic of the Masters of the Universe line. It also has a decent range of articulation, which could have been better if the rock was integrated with the limbs and body instead of a shell around them. The one effective flaw is that he doesn't really turn into a rock that could withstand inspection from all directions. On a certain level, the sheer randomness is impressive. Of all the leads to follow into the robot ring, Mattel went with the single most ridiculed idea of them all. On top of that, they put it in a line that had never been closely associated with the genre (though there had been other MOTU robots before). What's most puzzling is where they thought they could go from here, which admittedly is the same problem Tonka quickly ran into.

And to wrap this up, here's a lineup with the Truckstop Queen!

"Speaking of rocks, diamonds are boring. Also controlled by an evil genocidal cartel."

And why not Sidekick Carl and the Giant Tonka Lady? I told you these things are big.

That's all for now, more to come!