Current Ramblings
Tuesday, October 05, 2004
Screw the debates. I already know who I'm voting for.
And since Cheney isn't the terrible public speaker Bush is and therefore the VP debates didn't seem like they'd be very funny, I spent the debate watching GoBots.
Yes, GoBots. I often come into work to find that my coworkers have left VHS tapes of old cartoons on my stash, figuring I'd want them. More often than not, they're right. Today's present - and it was free, because it didn't even have a sleeve - was a tape with two GoBots episodes: "Trident's Triple Threat" and "Doppleganger". GoBots is an interesting case in the history of pop relevancy and kiddie-show marketing. It actually predated Transformers by about a year, with toys that were also brought over from Japan (in this case by Tonka) and a show put together by Hanna Barbara. But somehow Transformers was the one that really lived up to the new Cabbage-Patch standard of children's toy crazes, despite coming in a year later. The variety of the toys was probably one factor - Transformers had a lot of different sizes and price points, while the vast majority of the initial GoBots toy line were small carded toys - but ask your average 20-something why Transformers was better than GoBots and they'll say it was the shows. I really liked GoBots when I was a kid, I specifically remember Turbo being my favorite, but once Transformers started there was just no competition. Hasbro knew what they were doing when they asked Marvel Comics to work on the story behind the toys they pulled from all over Japan. While the GoBots show (judging from the, um, two episodes I just watched) is only marginally goofier than some of Transformers, the characters, even the characters' names, helped make a difference. Who sounds like a more impressive leader, Leader-1 or Optimus Prime? Cy-Kill or Megatron? Graham was going on the whole time about how they changed Herr Fiend's name to Dr. Go so he wouldn't be offensive or anything (what with being evil and German), but they still gave him a goofy German accent and a monocle and had him talk about experimenting on people and made him clearly a Nazi. But silly and late-Hanna-Barbara as it may be, I'm really glad to have some actual episodes of GoBots on tape, since they're clearly never getting any kind of modern release.
posted@10:29 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments