Back in the eighties, the Transformers weren't the only transforming toys you could get your hands on...there was a whole heap of clones and competing brands trying to get you to part with your pocket money and buy them instead of saving up for Optimus Prime!
Transformers biggest rivals were the Gobots , who actually came out as toys before Transformers properly existed (Transformers were created from merged Japanese toy-lines with different names)! They also had their own cartoon (also before the Transformers cartoon) and later a couple of movies...
It was after the release of the movie Gobots - Battle of the Rock Lords, that a spin-off set of toys known as Rock Lords appeared! Despite never owning any Gobots, something about the fact they were rocks instead of cars made me want to pick up some Rock Lords, and so my brother and I got a few each!
The few that I got (and still have in my flat somewhere) were Boulder (leader of the good rocks), and Sticks 'n' Stones and Slimestone, two evil rocks! They were a lot simpler to transform than quite a lot of the Transformers, but still came with that worry that you'd snap a bit off if you tried to transform them wrongly!
Along with each toy, you got a free mini-comic...and it is one of these comics that is the real purpose of this post, as I just found it hidden away in one of the many boxes from my cupboards I'm currently working my way through sorting out! Here in all it's splendor then, is said comic...
Rock Lords only made it to three series of toys before being cancelled, but I reckon they should bring them back, along with the Gobots, in the next Transformers movie...just to shake things up a bit!
Anyhoo, this wasn't the only comic-type thing I found in the box, so check back soon for some more random scan-type posts!
I've got that two-headed one, and a couple more things that I only THINK might be Rock Lords, erk!
ReplyDeleteA surprising thing in the Internet age is that a lot of my favourite Transformers that I had as a kid were actually Gobots - "Transformers" being the obvious catch-all term for transforming toys, just as "Pogs" was to illustrated cardboard discs...
Yeah, everything was a Transformer! What's annoying is that I had a lot of copy-cat toys that were bought from the likes of "What Everyone Wants" in Edinburgh for a few quid, and don't have the names of them to look them up on the internet! If I find their broken shells in the toy-box I might stick up a "find-these-toys" type post! ;-)
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