Giant robot review: Lego 1990s giant robot!

 

It's my second post of a fifth week, and it's once again been a while since I did a robot post. As it happens, I just made an acquisition that definitely deserved a post. The backstory is that I was taking a look at my vast collection of Legos and other building-block sets, and remembered one thing I no longer have in my possession. That was enough of a train of thought to do a few searches of online listings, and found one particular set I remembered but had never owned for a price still in the medium double digits. I got the set in several food-storage bags, one of which had sprung a leak, and assembled it over 3 or 4 days. Here's a few pics of the finished product.

"I know what you're thinking, `Did he fire 9,999 shots or 10,000?' In all this excitement, I've lost track myself..."

As fans about my age will know well, this is a set called Robo Guardian, from a middle-period Space subline called Spyrius. This bot in particular was released in 1994, right when I was getting back into Legos in a very big way. In my usual fashion, I was completely obsessed with this set, but didn't put much thought into saving up money to buy it. What I did do was spend literal years building a custom rig, starting with bricks lying around from ancient sets that had long since been mixed beyond recognition and progressing to pieces of relatively new sets that I had bought with my own money. Then, in maybe ca. 1998, I decided it no longer interested me or fit with what I was doing, so I packed it up for a charity donation, without giving any further thought to whether a literally random kid would appreciate it or know what to do with it. With the purchase of this set, I came back to the source, and I have to way, my own design was better. Before I go into why, here's a few detail pics of the figures and components, starting with one I took during construction. I still love the robot!

Now, here's where the problems crop up. To start with, I made a couple tweaks just building the thing; the forearm blaster thingies originally pointed the other way, and the handlebars on the upper arms seemed to be there specifically to reduce the range of motion to nearly nothing. Then there's things either missing or useless, like the lack of articulation at the waist (I very specifically remember putting that on mine) and the two sets of wheels that don't touch the ground. Finally, there's still more extra bricks that just add to the difficulty of building it. One more thing is that there's a fairly complicated mechanism that provides a parking brake for the arm, which is handy but tricky to build and in no way explained in the directions. Here's a few more shots, including the back.

"Don't worry, you can trust me, I'm programmed with Asimov's laws of robotics. `I may not harm a human, or by commission of action allow to be harmed...' Well, they're really more like guidelines."

And here's a couple pics of the instruction manual.

And here's something out of legend...

The real question remains, how does the size of this thing compare to what was out there? Well, here's a lineup....

So, as already seen, this guy's definitely bigger than the Truckstop Queen, also the big Robotech red guy, and just a tad taller than the Bird Knight not counting the antennae. But the champion is still... Cap Rifle Bot???

With that, I'm wrapping this up. All in all, I'm really very happy to have put this together. My real regret is that I don't have at least a pic of my own bot to compare it with. The real lesson to me is, there are real reasons everyone seems to have at least one story of a toy or collection they gave away. It's normal to go through a range of shifting interests when you're growing up, and inevitably, there's things you let go or leave behind. The one thing I have to add is, if you were that kid you got the bot, I hope you had fun. That's all for now, more to come!