Grossery Gang 4-inch figures are just a couple years old and tragically received very little love. I picked up all I could find and quite like them. Very much in the spirit of Food Fighters. Great paint and very wacky fun.
I have a bunch of Gormiti toys that I bought back in 2013. Not because I'm a fan of the franchise (I hardly know anything about it) but I picked them because they looked like cool monsters to have.
SNAILIENS My parents got these toys for me and my brother in the 80's from a discount store. They're obviously trying to be TMNT knockoffs, but they were some of the most full featured and playable toys from my early childhood. The thing we had the most fun with was the rubber shell launcher. That thing had so much power that if you put in on the floor it would bounce off the ceiling. Classic old toys being dangerous but also awesome. I don't have any surviving parts of these old toys as they were heavily played with and eventually destroyed or lost. I still remember them though, good memories of playing with them with my brother.
Are you trying to upset me? New theory after 35 years? Brawn (G1) was NOT originally a microman or diaclone? Are Starriors and SuperNaturals really that obscure? I remember them pretty well.
Lol...not trying to upset you at all. I’d remember seeing that thread you linked to. Here’s a link to a thread I made last year after finding Chris’s video...you ought to drop a line in there...haha. And, a belated thank you to you for the role you played in solving the mystery (pun!). If it weren’t for the information, I wouldn’t have known the name of the toyline and wouldn’t have had any luck tracking down that little yellow box of a robot! And I do remember both Starriors and Supernaturals from back in the day...but they did seem to come and go relatively quickly. Mysterians
Shadow Strikers, had to look it up it sounded too interesting, and boy howdy do I kind of want the Hurricane Scout Plane now. Anybody ever hear of Snailiens? Kind of vaguely remember them but never got any. ~edit~ Someone actually did remember Snailiens! HA!
@Roger Semerad has heard of Snailiens...lol. I had not...until today. It looks like they might have been a little after my time. A lot of these obscure toys flew past me back in the day. We lived in the middle of nowhere, money was tight and we just didn’t have the access, unfortunately. I had had to live vicariously through friends and those kids in the TV commercials, largely. Lol...
Yeah I saw that after I had posted. I was a kid during the 90's and I only have the faintest of recollections of the things. Saw them maybe once or twice on the store shelves and then they were gone. As far as toys I own the only ones I can think of are Matchbox Connectables, Kidco Key Car Datsun(don't have it anymore cousin stole it when we were kids, little asshole), and Playskool Go-Go Gears. Seriously thought I was crazy with the Go-Go gears. It's a toy for little tikes but damn it all if anyone ever mentions them.
Youtube really does seem to have everything on it. It's hard to make out details, but that's the first time I've ever seen the bad guy figures for this line. One more thing I just remembered about these toys was the premise of the backstory. I don't remember specifics, but I do recall that they were tiny aliens that had their battles in the back yard of a kid. That's actually a pretty clever backstory for a kids toyline, because if you took them outside to play with them, they were actually in the same environment as the comic. I've also got to reinforce the fact that those shell launchers were legit powerful. It took all our strength as kids to invert those things, and our fingers got sore quick. We never hurt each other with them, but we did knock over some stuff and left marks on the walls. Our mother took them away at one point because of it, but our dad eventually gave them back to us. Edit: I found this site SNAILIENS that has a transcript and pictures of the artwork from that comic. It's pretty bad, but it's there for anyone who wants to read it.
I just read the whole thing...truth be told, I feel better about Snailiens now...lol. There’s a certain creative charm in there...like how the good guys got their Earth names. Haha. Thanks for sharing.
That's a pretty cool wood toy. It's like a really well put together lego technic model, but with more fine detail. Kinda related, I've been watching some videos from a guy called Chris Ramsay. Among other things, he does videos of him reviewing/solving puzzles. The more complex ones are truly incredible pieces of design and engineering. They are also incredibly expensive, so I'll never own one. Even so they are quite something to see.
Most obscure toyline that I own that isn't some random untraceable knockoff from my childhood is probably Xevoz. I'm not sure it even made it to Europe at all? All I got I bought online when it was in its final cancellation sales. Shoulda bought some more, really. It was a line of heavily stylised figures with interchangeable parts via ball joints. Connected to Stikfas somehow? You got some pretty wild bug creatures, elementals and frankenstenian punk rockers and a lot more. Every set included multiple heads and hands, always with a comedy piece. The black panther jungle warrior, for example, came with a pair of red boxing gloves. Pretty good stuff. I've got some stuff from the 90's still knocking around, too, but I'm not sure that Z-Bots and Fistful Of Aliens are obscure to a forum filled with toy collectors. Mighty Max certainly shouldn't be. I think I miss Z-Bots the most, though... I think Gormiti is big in... idk for sure, somewhere in southern Europe? Italy? They started as little monopose element dudes that you got in multipacks and random packs and then branched out into various sizes of more or less articulated figures. I've seen them still in stores but uh I haven't exactly had any opportunity to keep up the past year or so.
HUGELY underrated cartoon series. Hard to see a good quality copy now. It should be a must watch for any SciFi fans. Was continual parody of 80s&90s sci-fi classics with a stellar voice cast.
I didn't have any toys from it, but I remember a cartoon called Botsmaster I think, the main human was named ZZ Zoolander. I remember thinking the toys were cool but I never got any as a kid, been meaning to look them up.
Autotech! I remember seeing them on toy shelves as a child here in the UK. Took me forever to find the name of them, and anytime I mention them it seems to jog memories!
Welp, there's a 20 year old mystery solved. I found one of these things back in my hardcore flea marketing days in the early 2000's and always assumed it was a McDonald's toy. Nostalgia--flea markets used to be so good for toy hunting.
i had one of those too as a boy in the late-80's/early-90's. GALOOB must've flat-out overproduced on that CANTEEN set, or, perhaps it was the shelf-warmer of the line, who knows...
