Horloge Robot

Horloge Robot is a Transformer of unknown allegiance from the Generation 1 continuity family.

Oui, I'm obscure enough that I didn't have an article on this wiki for over 40 years!

Horloge Robot is made out of the combination of 14 different vehicles.

Toys

AVI France

• Horloge Robot (1985)

Horloge Robot (French for "Watch Robot") is an exceptionally rare and obscure toy, releasing exclusively to the French market in 1985 via small electronics company AVI France with the official licensing of Hasbro and in association with national broadcaster Canal+ <ref>Images of a packaged Horloge Robot via x.com/tfwiki</ref>. He came in a single flat reddish brown color scheme without any stickers or paint applications, being packaged within a plain blister card with very little information besides the copyright markings, the transformation instructions, and the advertised feature of coming in "14 Pieces" as a descriptor of his ability to split apart into several small vehicles and back. As his name suggests, the core gimmick of Horloge Robot is the fact that his chest component doubles as a small digital watch.

Horloge Robot is clearly based on the Diaclone Gats Blocker mold... But, unlike most other Diaclone-derived Transformers toys, he is not an official re-release of his Takara equivalent: rather, Horloge Robot is none other than a bootleg of Gats Blocker that had been previously released by AVI France under the name of "Robot Quartz", as well as by a number of other bootleg manufacturers and distributors during this time <ref>An Ebay listing for AVI France's Robot Quartz</ref>. How Hasbro gave licensing to a knockoff of a toy from Takara, the de facto creators of the Transformers as toys, is anyone's best guess, but considering how they only started licensing Diaclone figures from the 1982 Car Robots line-up and beyond (Gats Blocker was a figure from the earlier 1981 permutation of Diaclone), it is very likely that they simply had no idea about this toy's bootleg origins.

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Notes

• Funnily enough, AVI France also released bootlegs of the famous Micro Change MC-06 Watch Robo toy, later released in the Generation 2 toyline as the plainly-named 'Autobot'. Some of these releases were actually done under the GoBots brand (under the franchise's French name, Le Defi des Gobots) <ref>"Les montres Gobots" at leforumdesgobots.forumgratuit.org</ref>, making this one of two times where the same molds were released both under the Transformers brand and a GoBots localization!
• AVI's "Robot Quartz" version of this mold was released in several other colors like white, blue, and teal green. The Transformers version, however; has only been found in the reddish brown deco. Considering how he seems to be a simple repackaging of previous AVI stock, it is not out of the question that the other decos could have also been released under Transformers packaging, but unfortunately, given how few copies have been found of Horloge Robot in the first place, we might actually never know.

See also

• Radio AM Robot, another bootleg-turned-official-figure.

References

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