Red bendable robot from Marty Toy 1985

Great success! I have located a second Marty Toy bendable robot in a pile of toys I already owned. I have no recollection of where it came from, when you own as much stuff as I do it's not all that surprising. This little guy was found while I was sorting through boxes of toys in my storage unit last week. Among the TMNT, Voltron and GI Joes was this forgotten classic; buried at the bottom. With this discovery came some more information about this line.

The series name is still unknown to me, what loose examples I have found show the figures holding a melee weapon and a shield with a sticker on it (I assume the sticker gives the user a +5 for defense, or maybe a +2 in stamina). The melee weapons seem to range from a battle axe to a sword and even a futuristic machine gun from what examples I've found; each one cast in a metallic different from the color of the robot so the weapons don't blend into the figure. A lot of time and attention was put into this line from a designer's standpoint. Coming out just after the final fizzle of the Star Wars POTF line, Marty Toy may have been hoping to appeal to some of the Star Wars fans left in the wake of the line's last hurrah. But just like most of the company's previous releases, it was ultimately forgotten and it became merely a faint memory.

Marty Toy should be remembered as a company that made several toy lines out of the same shtick, rubbery bendable figures. They never carried a license to any great property, the card art was simple and probably designed by the company's executives. Actually the card art used so much black space, it should have been considered racist to a degree. Besides this robot line, the character designs for their other series were very plain and un-inventive. In all actuality, the company had two other series that I can find readily in my research; Outer Terrestrial Creatures and Gremlin Creatures. Both series used the same character designs and barley even changed the paint schemes, if they were altered at all.

This second example I found has seen some better days. Neither arm bends anymore at the shoulder and it seems that's not the only wire that's snapped under the skin. The robot shows some rubber fatigue on the right shoulder and some tearing due to the broken wires under it's rubber skin. The sculpt is very unique to this figure, very different from the green robot I reviewed earlier. The rubber it's cast in is a crimson color with a small amount of silver flake to give it a metallic look. This line was obviously the crowning achievement to Marty Toy before they just ended up disappearing one day.