Best and Worst toy lines of the 80's and 90's Part #3

Here's the third and final installment of my best toy lines of the 1980's and 1990's. As always, this will cover two toy lines that I like and one that I just dislike. As always, comments, flames, ideas for other articles are accepted at my e-mail address above. Without further adieu, here's the last two that I like.

Line: Transformers
Company: Hasbro (1984-1990)

What can I say about this line? Well, Transformers, along with Voltron, brought over the cartoon style known as Anime from Japan to the children of the United States. In case you do not know, Transformers is the story of the heroic Autobots versus the evil Decepticons. After crash landing on earth two million years ago, the battle still rages on the planet Earth. How can you fight a war with giant robots without getting noticed? They took the guise of various objects native to the planet Earth. They ranged from something small and handheld, like an audiocassette to something as large as an 18-wheeler.

The toys for this line were great. They cane in all sorts of sizes and costs. I liked this line because they were, at first, a combo of metal and plastic, but by the end they went to all plastic. This was a good combination that Hasbro came up with because they were both good looking and durable. The paint jobs on the figures were very good, so good, in fact, that you really did not need the labels attached. The faces on all the figures were vary detailed and looked vary close to (if not dead on,) the ones from the cartoon.

What really made this line was the fact that the toys transformed from one form to another. At first you could really tell the good guys (Autobots) from the bad guys (Decepticons) because the good guys were generally some type of wheeled vehicle. For example the leader of the Autobots, Optimus Prime, transformed from a 18-wheeler truck to his robot form. The bad guys were generally something that could blend in with its surroundings, like a tape recorder, or something that had more of a destructive purpose like a jet fighter or a handgun. An example of this is the right hand man of the leader of the Decepticons, Soundwave, transformed from a handheld tape player to a robot. What was also neat about Soundwave, was the fact that he could carry another Transformer inside him that you could purchase separately, giving you two toys in one. When you went to transform the toys from one form to another, most of the time they looked like their counterparts from the cartoon.

Later on in the line, they came up with the idea of not only the Transformers that changed from one form to a robot, but when they combined they formed one giant robot. This gave the line some fun variety with the characters they used. It started with the Constructicons, and then the Aerialbots (who were in my opinion the coolest of them all,) then the Protectobots, and the Stunticons and I could go on all night with the others. They also introduced in the later lines the Headmasters, who where transformers who could change shape, but did not have a head until it was attached, the Targetmasters, who instead of having a separate head, had a special smaller figure that converted into a gun for their character to use. The last ones were the Powermasters who were transformers that could only transform with the small assistant sitting in it's place.

What also was vary unique to the line was that on the back of the package that you got your figure on, was something called a tech-spec for that particular character. This would give you their name, the function they served with what group they were with, and a short description of their personality. Also attached to that was a sort of line graph that was scrambled that gave their various statistics like strength, endurance, intelligence, firepower and several others that I cannot recall off-hand. To read these line graphs though, you had to have a small piece of red plastic transparency that decoded the line graph from the other red scribble on the graph. The package art, much like the ones for the GI Joe line, had the character in their robot form in some sort of neat looking pose. They were very beautiful and each one was a good work of art.

Best figure: Optimus Prime (Great figure, everyone should have owned one)
Worst Figure: Blaster (Why make an Autobot version of Soundwave?)

Line: M.A.S.K.
Company: Kenner (1985-1987)

Well, I guess you found the surprise. The M.A.S.K. line came from a cartoon of the same name that was run about the same time. The premise of the show was that there were a group of heroes that were on call for a special group called the Mobile Armored Strike Kommand that fought against the forces of Venom. The gimmick with the show and with the toy line were that the identities of the main characters on the show were hidden by a special mask that gave them a special ability such as the ability to fly, shoot light blasts, or shoot darts. The other gimmick was that they drove vehicles that transformed into combat ready vehicles that could fly, go on the water or stay on land. There was even a short-lived DC comic book line.

The toy line was modeled closely after the cartoon, and in fact had some additions that were not in the cartoon. The vehicles were of vary small scale (about the same as a model car) that were able to fit the equally smaller action figures. The great part about the line was that not only did the figures fit the vehicles, but they were also multi-jointed so that they could fit in. They also came with small masks that you could put on and take off the small figures. There was also the fact that the figures did not come with guns (probably because they could not make ones that could not fit in the figures hands.) The paint jobs and designs of the figures were only so-so because of the fact that they were about only 2.5 inches tall, but they did a good job with what they had.

The vehicles were also great likenesses of those on the television show. The paint jobs on all of the vehicles were dead on with the show and lasted though all sorts of torture that you could put on them as a kid. The transforming mechanism came one of two ways, spring-loaded or manually. A good bit of the toys in the line were of the spring-loaded variety, which were really fun to use. It also looks like that they designed some of the vehicles from real life vehicles. For example, one of the vehicles was a tractor-trailer rig that made me almost want to go out and buy a real one. In the second year of the line, they introduced some vehicles that could shoot their weapons, it was fun and all, but it seemed to take all the fun out of it. There was only one playset in the line, and that was Boulder Hill. It was a gas station at the base of a hill in one form, and transformed into a battle ready headquarters for the M.A.S.K. personnel.

The package art on the vehicles was great. On the front, it showed a drawing of the vehicle transformed in combat. The art was vary eye catching because it was almost comic book style in the way it was done.

Best Vehicle: Switchblade (Cool name, cool vehicle.)
Worst Vehicle: Collector (Why name something that?)

Worst Line: GI Joe Extreme
Company: Kenner (1995)

When I started this series of articles two months ago I extolled the greatness of the original GI Joe line, and in the last article I'm burying one of the lines that came out after the original line was gone. When I heard that this line was coming out and was supposed to be a version of GI Joe in the future against a new enemy, I was happy, but when I saw the results, I shunned the line.

The reason I did that was because what Kenner made was nothing like the original GI Joe line. The figures were larger (I could accept that), but they suffered from the disease that all action figures seem to suffer from now, and that is that they have huge muscles. Their muscles were so huge, in fact, it was unnatural looking.

Then they gave them all sorts of torn up uniforms, stupid poses and even stupider looking faces. They even gave some of the figures weapons that fired soft missiles with air. If I wanted something that launched soft missiles with air, I would get something from the Nerf line of toys. The vehicles also left something to be desired, as well. The names and designs of them were like rejects of the original line of GI Joe toys. If I was going to buy something GI Joe related, I want something that sounds like it has a military counterpart. Does 'Bone Splitter Armored Tank' sound like something we would have in our military arsenal, or does Mobat sound closer?

I'll let you make the decision.

Well, that's all for now. Maybe next month I'll hit on some of the other lines that I liked from the 1980's and 1990's. Maybe make it my Honorable Mention column. I won't be as long as I am here.