Gobots! All the Gobots!

 

This ad appeared in G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero #43, Marvel, 1986. Poor Gobots. The Transformers poor cousins from the east part of town. Oh Gobots, when you transform you simply stand up, hardly looking like a sentient robot. I mean look at the blue car robot in the ad...lame. So too were there names. There was no Optimus Prime or Megatron. No instead you had names like Tank (turned into a tank), Loco (turned into a Locomotive) and Dozer (who...wait for it, turned into a bulldozer). Anyone who was a child in the Eighties remembers watching the Transformer cartoon but who recalls watching the Gobot cartoon? It ran for 65 episodes don't ya know?

Another fact. Both the Gobots and Transformers came overseas to North America from Japan (surprise!). However did you know that they were both originally human-piloted? That is a significant change. So why didn't Gobots gain the popularity that the Transformers saw? These are just uneducated guesses but I'd say that marketing was a huge part of it. The Transformers had personality and character with cool names. Everyone remembers the tag-line  "More Than Meets The Eye" and "Robots In Disguise", but what was the Gobots tag line? No seriously what was it? Oh yeah...it was lame.

Nestle I guess couldn't enlist the help of the Autobots or even the Decepticons for that matter. So they enlisted the help of the Gobots. Some lucky kid won a complete collection of the toys. Oh, well. I'd still be pretty pumped at winning a bunch of toys. Let's face it, toys are toys...or are they?