When Machines have a War

 

With this weekend being a holiday weekend, I'll be honest, I'm a little checked out mentally. I could use the break. That being said, let's talk about Machine Wars! For those not well acquainted with Machine Wars, shortly after Beast Wars started, MW was launched as a Kay-Bee exclusive (toys were reportedly seen at some Myers stores) Transformers line. It was pretty small and made up of unreleased G2 molds and late G1-early G2 European toy molds.

The cast of characters was mostly the classic crew and the line was basically an experiment to see if vehicular based Transformers would sell well again. While I loved G2, it didn't sell as well as G1 and Beast Wars pretty much brought Transformers back to it's former glory. Unfortunately Machine Wars didn't really take off and it wasn't until the Vehicons of Beast Machines that vehicular Transformers returned to store shelves (aside from the vehicle bots in Takara's Beast Wars series) with RID bringing vehicles back in force. 

That being said, the line has no fiction what so ever. The tech specs pretty much painted the toys as the characters returning without much detail to give you a sense of why they all looked different. Megatron's bio vaguely hinted at him being a jet again after the canceled G2 ATB toy. Thundercracker's hinted at a little character progression, but that was it.

Most fans (myself included) considered them a continuation of G2 as Beast Wars was basically G3 when it first launched before the story line got changed into the one we all know now. You know, I've always wanted to see that idea continued. Maybe I'll look at it some more the next holiday weekend. The closest to actual fiction Machine Wars ever got was tied into the BotCon 2013 exclusive set which had a Machine Wars theme. In it's included comic, the new Machine Wars Transformers followed on from the prior G2 themed set's story line. Which in itself was their take on how G2 would have taken place within the classic cartoon fiction. In all honesty, it wasn't bad.

The above art is a restoration of Optimus Prime's box art from Machine Wars that I found on Google Images. If you or someone you know is responsible for said restoration, I'd be happy to credit you. Please leave me the info in the comments section below. 

Starcom was pretty rad

Starcom was a pretty neat short lived line of toys with a matching short lived cartoon. If you read off the list of companies involved it sounds more like an itinerary of presenters at a merchandising expo. Toys by Coleco, cartoon by DiC and distributed by Coca-Cola Telecommunications (sometimes big companies own other big companies), and developed with the help of the Young Astronauts Council to get kids interested in NASA. Under all that was actually a really neat bunch of space toys.

Starcom would fight the ill intended Shadow Force in another epic struggle of good vs evil. Toys were smaller space themed (like the name would suggest) vehicles with small scale figures. The figures has cool little guns that your mom would tell you would get sucked up by the vacuum cleaner. The figures were pretty dang cool with the NASA inspired good guys vs the evil sci fi fantasy inspired bad guys. Because things you find entertaining are bad in the eyes of things you find boring.

The most dominant play gimmick was the 'Magna Lock'. If this was a fan wiki, I'd make a bad joke about that. This is a fan blog, so I'll make a bad reference. The Magna Lock was a series of magnet plates on the vehicles and play sets as well as on the feet of the action figures. This was meant to simulate the gravity boots of the space explores as they fight in zero gravity. What happened more often was the figures got stuck on the refrigerator.

Starcom had a pretty short life, according to Wikipedia the cartoon only had 13 episodes. Also according to Wikipedia the line only lasted around two years, though it did get a second life when Mattel released the toys in Europe and Southeast Asia and was apparently pretty popular there. From my own memory, I remember liking the cartoon quite a bit. I'm sure I could find a few episodes on DVD thanks to budget releases as seems to be the home for old cartoons. Which isn't a bad thing,  video racks at discount stores have long been a staple of my entertainment.

I had a few of the toys, bought on clearance at Kay-Bee toys. Like a lot of oddball sci fi toys of mine, they'd find their way in a weird homogenized city made of such toys. They were the perfect scale to interact with my Transformers and often found themselves operating under the command of Hi-Q. Hi-Q was a fair leader who made sure everybody got their 15 minute break every 3 hours.

Transmetals 2 commercial

If it's one thing I wonder, it's that why do those kids have so many tiny disposable cups on hand to play with? A dentist's child perhaps? Is one of them sick and get's his pills everyday in those cups and thought it would be neat to save them for Beast Wars play time? Who knows, but what I do know is that this commercial is another in a series of great examples of 90's Transformers commercials. Those are some solid toys in the commercial to boot. Dinobot 2 and that Cheetor were great figures are the epitome of the Transmetal 2 ideology.

Cybershark was later used as Sky Byte in Robots in Disguise/Car Robots. Funnily enough, I've mentioned not getting the CR toys until they were released here as RID due to broke ass community college kid symptoms. Though most of the Predacons were molds from Beast Wars, so it's not like I didn't technically miss out at first. That Cybershark was totally at my local Kay Bee for 5$. A whole stack of them. So many that I wonder if the manager would have let me take them all for 20$ just to get rid of them. Of course at the time 20$ wasn't as easy to come by as 5$, so I just had one.

Freaking paint rubbed off his chest the first time I transformed him.

KB Toys, rise from your grave

Here's another know it all putting their two cents in

In a feel good moment in a time where most are a little bummed  that Toys R Us is going out of business, news hit yesterday that plans to resurrect the Kay Bee brand name are underway. As usual on the internet this news was met with great applause and the usual amount of predictable naysaying (good thing this ain't a drinking game or I'd have died of alcohol poisoning over a decade ago). While it does feel good to see an old well loved name return, and the news brings such good karma points as taking resumes from Toys R Us employees, one does have to look at the facts when considering the possibilities of this venture being successful.

Point blank, Toys R Us is closing business because of high prices. No matter how much know it alls like to point out internet-based shopping, the bottom line of the size of the crowds at your local Walmart on a Saturday or Christmas season obviously points to retail still being well and good. In fact as internet based shopping is becoming more and more a force in how we buy things, most successful retail stores have integrated internet shopping into their business model with the success depending on how the chains utilize their strategies.

Going back to Walmart, while success and ultimate satisfaction will depend on each stores staff, they've been doing some good work utilizing internet based shopping with their retail experience. I'm a big fan of their grocery ordering system. Either on their site or app, my wife and I complile a shopping list of what we plan to buy each week. When we're done, we reserve a time for pickup when we finalize our purchase. Any item we select that is ok for a substitution is usually substituted for a greater priced or larger portion version of what we've picked and any item we won't take a substitute for is not charged to us. We are notified of these details from an email that we get around an hour before our pick up time. With the apps use of location services, the employees know when we pull up usually and meet us shortly after depending on the amount of people waiting in the designated area. Each purchase includes a online survey form for that purchase that we do every week and literally see the difference by the next week. They have a similar service for online store pick up with a lounge area equipped with lockers that your purchase is waiting for you in (they're locked and only you have access to unlock yours).

Assuming this new Kay Bee will do as they say and work better than prior toy stores such as Toys R Us or even the original incarnation of Kay Bee, one can assume web site/physical location integration will be utilized. Another hope will be for better pricing. Kay Bee formerly specialized in close out toys at low prices with newer toys costing more than a Walmart (sound familiar). As the retail landscape has changed since Kay Bee shut down, I can only imagine what the new version would be. Indoor shopping malls are still a thing, but in my area, have really reduced since the 90's. Big box style open air shopping centers cover the landscape here with many smaller stores in the smaller shops in between Target and Petsmart.

I can easily see a toy store the size of an Old Navy or a Five Below in one of these shopping centers doing well. I can imagine a similar sized store with a healthy mix of normal retail toys and  higher priced boutique collector items with those neato low cost items like novetly slimes in the mix doing well even outside the Christmas season. Working in a well executed web site integration and you might just well have a hit.

Sure people order like crazy from Amazon, but even Amazon is working on physical locations. If you look at all the reports of delivery items being stolen off porches last Christmas (I even got a po box in retaliation), you can see an example of why a person would be interested in a good store pick up experience. Or no matter how much a rando will tell you that Amazon is how they buy anything, not much longer you'll hear about how they spent all Saturday shopping in a shopping center.