GoBots

From MediaWiki
Revision as of 20:19, 11 November 2015 by Giggidy (talk | contribs) (→Cartoon)
Jump to navigationJump to search
The name or term "GoBots" refers to more than one character or idea. For a list of other meanings, see GoBots (disambiguation).
Note: not actually robots. Also, very occasionally not actually vehicles.

"Autobots versus Decepticons" wasn't the only war between shape-changing robots in the 1980s, as there was an even bigger, if briefer conflict... the war on toy shelves between Hasbro's The Transformers and Tonka's GoBots.

GoBots was Transformers' main competitor... at least in the realm of "robot-based toy lines". (Among other heavy hitters, Kenner's Star Wars was cranking out Return of the Jedi toys aplenty throughout 1983 and 1984.) It is, overall, not looked upon very favorably by the fandom-at-large, with most of the criticisms leveled at the way it was marketed, with goofy character names and a less sophisticated cartoon (and it's not like the original Transformers cartoon was exactly highbrow entertainment). That GoBots ran for barely three years, as opposed to the seven of Transformers, only further reinforces the idea that Transformers was the powerhouse winner between the two.

The series does have its fans and collectors, however. Hasbro also now owns the GoBots IP thanks to its acquisition of Tonka in the early 90's... but don't go expecting any kind of revival. The relationship between Hasbro and the GoBots is... complicated.


The original Tonka GoBots

This was printed in an issue of the Marvel Transformers comic. Proving the old adage that, if you can't beat 'em, subvert their publications to your own ends!

Toyline

GoBots made its US premiere in 1983, nearly a full year before original Transformers toyline's debut. It had a similar origin, being mostly made up of pre-existing Japanese toys used under license by an American distributor, in this case the Machine Robo series by Bandai spinoff company Popy. The bulk of these figures are roughly the size (and retail price) of a Transformers Mini Vehicle, though often more complex and with a much broader variety of alternate mode. The line was also filled out with some larger original molds, including spaceship-bases, cap guns, and several designs originally intended for Machine Robo that didn't actually see release in that series (like how the Transformers "Scramble City" combiners were not-yet-implemented Diaclone designs).

Cartoon

Challenge of the GoBots was produced in the United States by Hanna-Barbera (and Wang Film Productions in Taiwan). It aired in some markets outside the US (such as Australia) with the title Challenge of the Machine Men. The 65-episode series ran in syndication from 1984 through 1985. It focused on a much smaller cast than the Transformers cartoon, mainly the Guardian trio of Leader-1, Turbo, Scooter and their human allies, and the Renegade triumvirate Cy-Kill, Crasher and Cop-Tur, and their own human "ally" Dr. Braxis. While many other GoBots toys were featured throughout the series, they were typically relegated to guest spots, though the Guardian Small Foot would show up frequently enough to almost be considered a main character.

One of the most notable aspects of the cartoon was it had multiple recurring female GoBots, in stark contrast to the really, really, really guy-heavy cast of Transformers. Crasher and Small Foot saw the most screen time, but many other female GoBots showed up, often in recurring roles. One the Guardians' human allies was even a woman of color. Chalk it up to Hanna-Barbera's generally more progressive attitudes for their time!

Although the Tonka-toyline-created tagline was "Mighty Robots, Mighty Vehicles", the background material for the cartoon established that the GoBots are not true robots, but rather alien cyborgs; a race of alien humanoids, who, after a great catastrophe, had to put their brains into "GoBot forms" to survive.

GoBots versus Transformers

Despite being first to the market, having many more low-price items than its competitor (theoretically making them more desirable, at least to parents' wallets), and a ton of early press coverage stating that it would likely be the victor in the battle of shape-shifting robot toys, GoBots was left in the dust by the vastly better-marketed Transformers. The line struggled its way into 1986, with a spin-off toyline (complete with theater-release movie) called Rock Lords featuring transforming robot rocks. Yes, rocks. Didn't exactly set the world on fire with that one. Shortly after, the line fizzled out, while Transformers enjoyed a few more years before it too finally "died".

GoBots in the "modern era"

Hasbro & Takara

Following its mid-Eighties demise, GoBots remained a dead line in every regard up until 1991. Hasbro bought Tonka and its subsidiaries (including Kenner), acquiring all of Tonka's intellectual property, which included the GoBots IP... sort of. Due to a lot of factors, much of the GoBots property was and still is outside of Hasbro's control.

The toy designs are unquestionably 100% owned by Bandai, direct rivals to Hasbro's partner TakaraTomy. In 2015, Bandai announced a series of high-end, super-posable toys based on several of the original Machine Robo toys that got turned into GoBots, but sold under the original banner. The cartoon, by every indication, is primarily the property of Hanna-Barbera. The entire series was released on DVD by Warner Bros (who now own Hanna-Barbera) as an online-order-only, "manufactured on demand" series, and is still available today. The website makes no mention of Hasbro, while the DVD disks and packaging note Hasbro's ownership of GoBots and "all related characters and elements". Since the cartoon's character models are based on Bandai's toys, those too are of questionable ownership. Basically, this leaves Hasbro and TakaraTomy either unable or unwilling to use the original likenesses of the GoBots characters without heavy alteration.

In fact, both companies have done very little with the GoBots IP overall, seemingly content to bury it outside of periodically using the line's name as a Trademark for non-Tonka-GoBots products, primarily for pre-school-aimed toys. Hasbro staked that claim early on with the Generation 2 Autobot toy "Gobots" in 1993, and various uses of the name (in various parsings) over the next decade. The name "Leader-1" was Trademarked in 2003 for Armada Megatron's Mini-Con partner, but there's been little to no use of GoBots-original names since. (At one point in development, Armada Unicron's Mini-Con Dead End was going to be called "Gobotron", but that idea was ultimately discarded.) Remember also that Trademarks can expire if not used regularly, leaving them open for other entities to snap them up, so this lack of use leaves much of the GoBots cast names in a sort of rights limbo. Hasbro once again renewed the Trademark application in 2015, for currently-unknown products.

Hope you're ready to drop some serious funds for these.

In 2004, Takara took the first tentative poke at using the GoBots fictional property under the Transformers banner with the "G1 GoBots" set, an e-HOBBY-exclusive redeco of six recently-reissued Mini Vehicles. Early online images of the set labeled each of the six toys with the name of a GoBot who had that alternate mode: Bad Boy, Bug Bite, Path Finder, Road Ranger, Small Foot, and Treds. However, feeling skittish over how Bandai might react (despite Bandai's lack of Trademark on any of those), Takara dropped the names from the final packaging and promotional materials, leaving only the more defensible "G1 GoBots" group name, with the packed-in bio for the whole group introducing them as visitors from another universe (conveniently not identified), with technology astoundingly similar to the technology seen in the GoBots cartoon. The toys themselves are not even colored like the GoBots they were briefly named after, using "prototype" color schemes for the original toys, or all-new decos seemingly created without direct inspiration.

A long dry spell followed, until 2007 when Hasbro released Fracture, a Crasher-inspired redeco of Classics Mirage, as part of a Walmart-exclusive series of toys for the live-action movie toyline. The toy (as well as the others in that wave) was originally intended as part of the Generation-1-based Classics line, and in fact "Fracture" was originally intended to be Crasher-the-GoBot, having crossed dimensions. Her cardback bio makes reference to GoBot Crasher's personality and powers... but also does not actually call her out as a GoBot in any way, not even a sideways "came from another universe" hint. At face value, she's a native Cybertronian. Deco artist Joe Kyde later noted that they had to prove to Hasbro higher-ups that the chosen color scheme actually existed on a real life racing car in order to color her that way, suggesting the desire for a bit of plausible deniability. After that, GoBots was relegated mostly to much smaller deco references. Movie-series toys Backtrack (also deco'd by Kyde) and Deadlift have deliberate deco homages to the GoBots Night Ranger and Spoons (respectively), complete with tampographs of the "MR-**" designation numbers from the original GoBots toys, but they too are fictionally Transformers-universe natives. There's been precious little else out of Hasbro or Takara toy-wise since Deadlift, and he came out in 2010.

All in all, Hasbro and Takara seem quite shy about having any actual toy product directly, unambiguously branded as a Tonka GoBots character.

Hasbro licensees

In fiction, GoBots made some "appearances" in Transformers comics... mainly by various Cybertron-native Cy-Kills getting killed, a gag that is not at all hack and tiresome each and every time it happens over and over again, wow so clever[1]. "GoBots" was also a frequent "cute" term of derision for human characters to use in reference to the Transformers in various comics. It's extremely likely that these references would have remained even if Hasbro didn't have some fingers in the GoBots IP.

While GoBots-as-GoBots has been virtually nonexistent in the mass-market Transformers outlets, Hasbro licensee Fun Publications has not been shy about making more overt ties to the former competitor.

Bandai is very unhappy.

BotCon 2007 followed up on the earlier e-HOBBY use of the GoBots and continued the story begun there, specifically naming the box set's white Bumblebee redeco "Bugbite"[sic], thus firming up the connection that was always implied... though his bio card only hints at him being more than just another Decepticon, and the accompanying comic stopped just short of outright stating that Bug Bite was a displaced GoBot. He explained that he came from another universe, seeking to destroy the cause of the Cataclysm threatening his reality, which lines up with the G1 Gobots bio information from the e-HOBBY set, but again, did not outright name his home... juuuust inching towards the line but not actually crossing it. The storyline was followed up in the 2008 Transformers Collectors' Club online-exclusive text story "Withered Hope", which unambiguously cemented the G1 GoBots as being GoBots from the GoBots universe as depicted in the Challenge of the GoBots cartoon.

GoBots-as-GoBots once again lay fallow for a while after "Withered Hope". Occasionally side-references would be made in-fiction, mostly in the form of "Shattered Glass" and "TransTech" iterations of GoBots as native Cybertronians. In 2010, the Collectors' Club membership "freebie" toy Dion came with Cop-Tur, a blue redeco of the toy's mold-mate Mini-Con Jolt. Though his characterization was inspired by the GoBots Cop-Tur (the blue deco was actually a result of the gang-molding with the Dion toy rather than a deliberate choice), they were quick to declare that he was a native Cybertronian, not a displaced GoBot. In 2013 a "Withered Hope" follow-up story called "Spatiotemporal Challenges" was announced, but to this date has not seen release.

The 2010 IDW book Transformers Animated: The AllSpark Almanac II, a retrospective covering the third season of Transformers Animated, would take things further. In the profile for Stretch, a character created for the book based on Porter C. Powell's GoBots-homage limousine from the show, it was heavily implied that he wound up in the actual Challenge of the Gobots cartoon after the events of the book. Additionally, a news story in the multiversal paper ALTernity Today (itself drawing connections between Transformers and Robotix, a former Hasbro '80s robot line) gave Challenge of the Gobots a universal stream designation, thus implicitly pulling it into the multiverse. Finally, the book used its ubiquitous Cybertronix text to, among many pop-culture references, introduce new installments of "Ask Vector Prime", a feature from the Hasbro web site during the Cybertron series. These question-and-answer segments were not limited to events and characters from the Animated universe (a point of contention among many fans), and one declared that Gobotron was another manifestation of the Transformers' creator-god Primus.

And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and see!

In 2015, as a part of the run-up to BotCon, Fun Publications unveiled a number of new Facebook-published features, broadcasting on the Axiom Nexus News network. One of them was yet another revival of Ask Vector Prime. With a prodigious output of answers to user questions, sometimes more than ten a day, the feature managed to cover the depth and breadth of the Transformers franchise... and the Tonka GoBots. The word "GoBot" or "Gargent" (the universal stream designation of the GoBots universe) show up almost 50 times in the column. New GoBot universes were introduced, and many characters and concepts were explicitly referenced by name. The first major example of this was when Jim Sorenson Vector took the step of publicly canonising a GoBots character as a Transformers character: the Evil One, an ancient and villianous GoBot, was said to be the Gargent incarnation of the Fallen. A picture was even put up of the Evil One's animation model. [2] Stretch was explicitly confirmed to be the GoBot Stretch (and the reason many GoBots look like Earth vehicles). The amount of GoBots questions shot up once the Evil One question was asked. Vector Prime later described a dimension-hopping encounter where Optimus Prime and a small team of Autobots teamed up with the Guardians to battle the Renegades, marking the second official GoBots/Transformers crossover.

But all of this was insignificant next to a doubling-down on this strategy...

And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer.

Renegade Rhetoric. During a storyline wherein Vector Prime was called away on urgent business, he was replaced by a series of rotating guest hosts, one of which was Cy-Kill. Not a covert nod or a Transformers Cy-Kill or even a Cy-Kill under a deniable new body, the actual Hanna-Barbara Cy-Kill with a modified screen capture from Challenge of the GoBots as his profile. Notably, this picture was swiftly replaced by an illustration originally commissioned by Fun Publications. This suggests that, while Fun Publications is able to reference names and events from the cartoon and is willing to turn a blind eye to character designs, they draw the line at actual screen captures.

Over the course of his nine-day run, he proceeded to mention virtually every significant GoBot character and toy (and some that weren't), often sharing biographical and descriptive details. He also went into detail about their adventures, including both detailed descriptions of Challenge of the GoBots episodes and fanciful tales invented wholecloth. This was partly down to leading questions from some fans, who would ask for any information on a specific GoBot and then added that to this very wiki.

When Cy-Kill proved to be the most popular of the guest hosts, the column was expanded to its own feature, which as of today (November 10, 2015) remains ongoing.

Easter Eggs

“ This is a universe of nigh-infinite possibilities, so perhaps... ”

—Unicron reflects on the possibility of GoBots in Transformers, TF Armada #18 (letters page)

Given the similarity between the properties, as well as the transition from a Transformers competitor to dead product line partially owned by Hasbro, it is perhaps inevitable that there would be a large number of GoBots Easter eggs:

Notes


References

  1. ↑ The negative fan reaction to the violent deaths of the TransTech iterations of Cy-Kill and Scooter resulted in Pete Sinclair stating that this would be the last GoBot death scene in Fan Club works, and they've since stuck to that.
  2. ↑ "Q: Dear Vector Prime, Who is the Evil One from Gargent? A: Dear Evil Enthusiast, Megatronus, in his shame, goes by many names. You may know him best as The Fallen. The Gargent Cluster birthed a version in which he became known as The Evil One. Sadly true-to-form, his Dark Heart nearly destroyed Cybertron--er, Gobotron, only to wind up under the Nazca Lines on Earth. Interesting that in both the Gargent and the Tyran clusters, my tragic brother was drawn to your Pyramids. I note that Devil Z had similar affinities, both for the Pyramids and for the Nazca Lines. Hmmmm... "
Retrieved from "https://tfwiki.duckdns.org/index.php?title=GoBots&oldid=1023126"