The Warner Archive has added the original five-episode miniseries to their growing library of DVDs, and it’s now available exclusively through. Like most GoBots, Bad Boy has numerous abilities because of robotic body. He is actually smarter than he lets on, preferring to let others under estimate him. He is a rough street punk always ready with an insult and looking for a fight. Nobody is going to claim that Challenge of the GoBots is high quality, must-see TV, but there’s no doubt that it’ll carry a lot of nostalgia for now-grown kids who remember this show from childhood. Bad Boy is a Renegade GoBot who turns into an A-10 Thunderbolt. As always is the case when stuff like this happens, shenanigans ensue, and the now-metally GoBots launch into battle against each other with the fate of Earth in the balance. So the GoBots essentially are human brains inside robot bodies. After a conflict between the heroic Guardians and the evil Renegades devastated their home planet of GoBing, the Last Engineer saved his people by putting their brains into GoBot techno-bodies. The GoBots story hits a lot of the same notes as the Transformers one, the biggest variation being that the GoBots started out as human-like aliens. As blatant as it is, there’s a sort of endearing audacity about such up front product placement that was a defining characteristic of a lot of cartoons from the mid ’80s. New characters that popped up in episodes were sure to show up in toy stores before long. As with many cartoons of that era, the GoBots series really was little more than a promotional tool for selling more action figures and playsets. It started as a five episode miniseries produced by Hanna-Barbera that would launch an ongoing cartoon series that lasted nearly seventy episodes. Probably because I was more into the toys and less into the TV show, I don’t have a lot of memories of Challenge of the GoBots. I do make disparaging jokes comparing other things to the GoBots these days, but I always feel a little guilty about it as I remember the fun I had with these robot guys when I was little. I wasn’t so much into the cartoons as I was into just playing with the toys and transforming and untransforming them all a million times over. I also had Transformers, but the GoBots always held a special place in my heart. I have fond memories of getting a bunch of the toys, including a big base thing with a button activated siren on top. That said, I’m not ashamed to admit that I was all about the GoBots when I was a kid. Calling something “the GoBots of (insert better similar movie, game, or toy here)” is a common and disparaging phrase. The GoBots, deserved or not, have gotten a bad rap since their release for being nothing more than Transformer knockoffs. For the Transformers, that would be the GoBots, similarly sentient alien robots with shapeshifting capabilities. As with anything that becomes popular, there would be imitators and second-string versions of the original. Robots that changed into vehicles through ingenious plastic and metal engineering captured the imaginations of a generation, and there was no doubt that Takara and later Hasbro were onto something big. Starting in the mid-’80s, the Transformers became a dominant force in toy aisles around the world.
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