When I was a kid (you know, in the late 80's and early 90's) I picked up a G1 Sandstorm at a garage sale. This was before the internet and I honestly thought he was Springer. He turned into a car and a Helicopter. I figured he was just some funny colors. There were toys that were the wrong color, like G1 Galvatron. Years later, I found I was wrong and I even saw an episode of the show and again I knew I was wrong. Did anyone else ever make a mistake like this?
I once thought G1 Crosshairs was Optimus Prime He transformed into a Red and Blue Vehicle that Vaguely resembled a Truck, and the one that was once in the Playroom at my Grandparent's house didn't have his Targetmaster partner, For all I knew, he was Optimus Prime.
The only thing that I can think of off the top of my head is that when I was younger I had some G2 gobots and I didn't know who was who, so I took to calling them Ironhide=Kup(he was a silver pickup truck), Sideswipe=Ultra Magnus(he was blue and had the nearish head shape), Soundwave=???(I don't remember), Mirage=Starscream(I didn't have Starscream then, also the cockpit chest-ish thing).
Around 1984-85 there was a Japanese import shop in Burbank CA that had these off-colored g1 Transformers with little drivers. Back then I thought to myself, who wants these knock-off transformers, I mean, a red Sunstreaker, and blue and red Ultra Magnus, pass...
When I first saw Inferno in a store display a good few weeks before the show I thought he was the minicon Firebot. When i saw Mirage I thought he was a new version of Thrust, then they revealed him as Tidal Wave and I saw what big of idiots the writers actually were
When I first started collecting as an adult I bought a bunch of Beast Wars figures at a stoop sale knowing not much of the series outside of some of the main casts names. I looked at Polar Claw and thought "This must be Soundwave"
Considering the Tank drone has 3 general's stripes on him I'd say it's reasonable to think he was Tankor. I understand a lot of people mistake Pyro for some sort of Optimus Prime. And kids used to confuse Bumblebee and Hotshot during the period Hotshot was being replaced with Bee and before that Hotshot was confused with Hot Rod.
came home one day around 97-98 and my brother was playing with polar claw and I told him to get that POS KO out of my face... well after he proved to me that it's a real transformer and there was an entire new show about them called Beast Wars.. I was into collecting once more.. about 2 years later.. lol
I had some pre-tf toys (microman reflector, astro magnum, finnish black tracks, rare ass browning version which i can't seem to be able to track down) that I thought less off because I thought they were knock offs - I never did see Shockwave or Reflector on the shelves so I had no idea what they looked like (Sweden didn't have mail aways) I managed to trade my black tracks for a real version off a friend of my cousins though (AAARGGH!!!! ffs, if I had only known) but the rest were just stand ins for the real deal - I remember being impressed by the astro magnum. I thought it was really similar to what I saw on TV, but i just "knew" that the real version would be so much better...
I was also able to get a g1 bumper lot with several other g1 figures such as astrotrain, rodimus,etc. "cheap" because bumper was listed as bumblebee.
For the longest time as a kid I thought G2 Hubcap was Cliffjumper. Didn't help my dad threw out the cardback 2 seconds after I had opened him.
