Battle Robo

I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid, Gobots had a bad rap. To a third grader on the schoolyard, Gobots meant your parents were too poor to buy you Transformers. It was like the scarlet letter of the playground.

It didn’t help that the Gobots cartoon seemed aimed at pre-schoolers, while the Transformers cartoon was a sci-fi epic adventure.

No matter how you cut it, Gobots were not cool.

Then you grow up. You grow out of Transformers. You grow out of toys, until one day, you find that one thing on the internet that you used to have, and then a whole new world is open. Maybe you found out about Chogokin. Maybe you found out about Popy.

Wait a second – Popy? Wasn’t that the name stamped on the inside of the legs of my Gobots?

Then it hits you. POPY MADE THE GOBOTS. Then called Machine Robo, they were designed by the Popy Design studio PLEX, who went on to design most of the Super Sentai Robots.

To say that Gobots have a serious history and influence would be an understatement.

Matt Alt summed it up well in his article about Machine Robo here.

So now, as an adult collector, you take a second look at these little toys, and what do you know, they are actually pretty cool.

We’re going to take a look at some Gobots / Machine Robo toys, and hopefully maybe you will find something cool about them too. We’ll be using both the Gobot and Machine Robo names, as the toys themselves are interchangeable.

First up is BR-02 Battle Tank Robo, also known as simply TANK in the Gobots release. Tank was a futuristic battle vehicle with chrome weapons and tank treads. It was basically a block of war.

The entire body of TANK was diecast metal, with the rest of the parts being hard sturdy ABS plastic. The toy featured both painted and molded details. Once again, there’s that Popy blue plastic…

Gobots never had an intricate or believable transformation; that wasn’t the point. As long as it went from one mode to another in some fashion, they were cool. This one basically bends over and BAM! It’s a tank.

TANK has two weapons. In tank mode, there is a dual chrome cannon on the front, and another cannon on the top. Both cannons are removable and can be used as weapons in robot mode.

Simple. Fun. Metal.