man, what the hell?
I had this toy when i was a kid ( a very spoiled kid, mind you) - yeah, this Transformer was cool 'cause not only did it turn into this cool looking sci-fi gun, from a nearly equally cool looking (and articulate) robot mode - but when you pressed the trigger the lights would flash and it would make a loud zap noise if my memory is correct (hey, it has been over 20 yrs, alright?) Now when you bought these toys, they always had this crazy cool airbrushed rendition of the character's robot mode on the box, just to further drive home the point about how great these futuristic techy things were and how badly you needed to have them. The toys generally looked cool, but the robot modes were kind of hit or miss in ways (as more emphasis was made in representing their vehicle or object modes as opposed to the robot modes.. for obvious reasons). So yeah, they released this one, but WHAT HAPPENED to the box art? Did someone blow it or what? Look at that awful picture. He looked really cool in the cartoon, the comic.. pretty basic design... guh. I guess the guy was partying too hard and hungover that day, and he had a deadline. look at that crappy HAND. There's not like just one problem with it, there's like at least 14 seriously shitty problems with poor shockwave here. The fet. The perspective. The dumb wires in his chest. He just looks like an asshole. Man, does it feel good to complain about things that don't even matter... I have more to say about shockwave but that will wait for a future episode.
Kids love guns. i am pretty much from the last generation of kids who got to grow up with toy guns which looked somewhat accurate before the parent groups started going out of control and outlawing them left and right. gee, that's funny, i don't remember too many stories of kids flipping out in the 1980s and bringing real guns to school to mow everyone down!! (doesn't mean it didn't happen, but it sure wasn't quite as spectacular if it did) I remember I was probably in high school, I guess, when Super Soakers were introduced.. now the title of a popular line of pornographic videos, likely, but in the late 80s these were hi-powered squirt guns which could blast liquid like.. geez, i dunno, 30, 40 feet? They were battery powered I think, I remember they had these huge crazy tubes on them so you could have plenty of "ammo." This was after the previous round of crazy parental groups, or whatever, so as they released they were already crazy designs/wacky abstract colors. They didn't last too long before the media freaked out "ohhhh noooo, guns gun gunnns?" And you'd hear reports of kids filling them with bleach and shooting people.. ahh, I dunno. Anyway I remember they got outlawed pretty damn quickly, in Boston at least, and I'd see them in Child World all wrapped up in police tape. very strange. i think they resurfaced after the mania died down (hey, there was money to be made) but it always seemed kind of goofy to have these guns that looked like sci-fi wacky cartoons, as opposed to.. you know,a cool black and silver metal GUN. Yeah, phallic, i know. We've all seen A Christmas Story though. My dad had an old air rifle leftover from when he was a kid, I used to play with that thing. It felt cool to carry it around the yard, make the loud POP noise. Sometimes I would shove some clumps of dirt down the barrel and satisfyingly shoot it onto the side paneling of our house. Yeah, that kind of ruined the firing mechanism, sorry Dad...
Guns.. guns, guns.. Yeah, i had this cool batman gun too (I know, "Batman doesn't use a gun!") Hey, it was a cool toy, i didn't care (and I sure thought batman was the bee's knees) It has a little flip-up mirrored plate with a batman icon on it, and lik the oter toy i mentioned, you'd "fire" and it made a noise and lit up. but man, this thing mad e a REAL noise, it was loud (and therefore, better). My Dad was a great guy, he'd go to NYC sometimes for business trips and, wracked with guilt on being absent during the week, he'd sometimes bring me back little toys like that to remind me that I should love him (heh heh) or comic books from Philmac Pharmacy. So one night he gets in late after I have already been tucked into bed, wearing his business suit and wakes me up kind of excited "here, boy, I got you a batman gun..!" I was a little confused, but i put the battery in and shot the batsignal (or whatever) across the wall and this HUGE WAILING SOUND rang through the whole house, waking my poor brother up and upsetting everyone.. he snatched it back "ahh... maybe you can play with it tomorrow" but I already knew I was gonna enjoy pissing everyone off with this loud thing.. heh heh heh.
-Ron, voice of the Nostalgic Generation
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