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.

Awesome in the Machine

I really liked Machine Wars. Sure the molds were reuses of Euro G2 and some unused G2 with nothing original made for the line, but long hair don't care I dug it. Just a neat anomaly in the Transformers world. Beast Wars was in full steam when this line was tested out at Kay Bee's (some folks swear to have seen them at Meijers and maybe they did) judging if vehicle based TF's would still sell (it didn't do well, to a beast naysayer's nay saying). Lot's of folks like to say Machine Wars was in response to a Kenner employee misspeaking at BotCon essentially causing the line. I don't necessarily agree with that. I mean, sure it's possible (I'm not one of those robot nerds who thinks he knows everything), but it's a little hard to fathom why a toy company would sink the small fortune to release such a line just to cover a mistake an employee said to a relatively small amount of people (in a time when not enough people had the internet to really spread the information). I'd imagine Hasbro/Kenner (remember when Kenner made Transformers?) would just move along like nothing happened and if questioned would just say the employee was mistaken. I like to think the employee was directly speaking about what Machine Wars turned out to be and probably just worded it badly or it was interpreted wrong (I mean, people do make mistakes).

Of course that's just me theorizing and only folks employed by the involved companies know the actual truth. Regardless, it was a super neat line. I always have and still really do like those old classic boxy Transformers toys and just overall thought it was neat. Machine Wars toys had these pretty great decos that were not traditional on mostly traditional characters. Not to mention that packaging just screams out to me. Those colors man, there just not what M&M kept babbling about when they found him, they're a real visual treat on that box. I always found the budget of the packaging hilarious. They essentially reused box tooling they had and made the toys fit inside them and doctored up some existing art (in some cases of not the same toy) to match the new characters inside.

Most of the molds found themselves released in other colors and as other characters in other lines, but there's just something special about that little series in the blue boxes to me.

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