Quest for a Robot Ad
May. 20th, 2024 06:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerJumping the gun on the fortieth anniversary of the Transformers for the sake of coming up with an “unpopular fandom opinion” this leap year, I supposed that would preclude trying to make a post about how their comic book had gone on sale in May of 1984. At the start of this month, though, in the course of a mere twenty-fifth anniversary I saw a trailer for a special theatrical showing of the first episodes of the Transformers cartoon, which also amounted to jumping the gun. Somewhere in the midst of all of this, I started recalling having seen a particular comic book ad for “Transformers without their corporate name,” and was amused by the thought it must have been in one of the early Transformers comics themselves, given I didn’t read a lot of comics in my youth.
As I’d be heading back home for the long weekend, I thought this would be a chance to go through those early comics tucked away in a cabinet, bagged but not boarded and worse for wear before the bagging. As I leafed through them, however, I couldn’t find the ad in the first twelve issues. By that point in history I was inclined to think Hasbro-supplied Transformers would have been available in sufficient supply and my odds of finding the ad later would be getting slim.
I had read a few other comics that year, though, and I decided to look for one Marvel comic that never got past being a “four-issue limited series.” Having missed the chance to buy the first issue of Transformers might have nudged me towards asking for a comic called Starriors, which tried to characterize and sell robot toys from Tomy. (I suppose the comic did more with characters without human faces than some might suppose, although it took toys that might have been thought of as “giant piloted robots with people in their heads” and turned them into merely human-sized robots with special circuits made in the image of their vanished creators.) It turned out the ad I remembered was in one of those comics, and I nodded at the impression some of the inexpensive toys at the top of the list were in fact from the Machine Robo line, which wound up repackaged as the GoBots, and kept wondering if one or two of the later robots in fact might not have wound up packaged as Transformers for all that I could also suppose their vague descriptions clear links to established characters too.
In all of this, I had happened to notice a different tiny ad for “imported model kits,” illustrated with tiny pictures of the USS Enterprise and the Space Battleship Yamato. At the time that second picture, at least, wouldn’t have meant anything to me, although I reminded myself there would have been plenty of people a little older than me who would have seen Star Blazers. I could make too big a deal of “there were secrets I could have picked up on back then,” of course.
As I’d be heading back home for the long weekend, I thought this would be a chance to go through those early comics tucked away in a cabinet, bagged but not boarded and worse for wear before the bagging. As I leafed through them, however, I couldn’t find the ad in the first twelve issues. By that point in history I was inclined to think Hasbro-supplied Transformers would have been available in sufficient supply and my odds of finding the ad later would be getting slim.
I had read a few other comics that year, though, and I decided to look for one Marvel comic that never got past being a “four-issue limited series.” Having missed the chance to buy the first issue of Transformers might have nudged me towards asking for a comic called Starriors, which tried to characterize and sell robot toys from Tomy. (I suppose the comic did more with characters without human faces than some might suppose, although it took toys that might have been thought of as “giant piloted robots with people in their heads” and turned them into merely human-sized robots with special circuits made in the image of their vanished creators.) It turned out the ad I remembered was in one of those comics, and I nodded at the impression some of the inexpensive toys at the top of the list were in fact from the Machine Robo line, which wound up repackaged as the GoBots, and kept wondering if one or two of the later robots in fact might not have wound up packaged as Transformers for all that I could also suppose their vague descriptions clear links to established characters too.
In all of this, I had happened to notice a different tiny ad for “imported model kits,” illustrated with tiny pictures of the USS Enterprise and the Space Battleship Yamato. At the time that second picture, at least, wouldn’t have meant anything to me, although I reminded myself there would have been plenty of people a little older than me who would have seen Star Blazers. I could make too big a deal of “there were secrets I could have picked up on back then,” of course.
