Sharkticon warrior by Hasbro/Takara

(I think the movie starts in 3 days)

My first introduction to the Sharkticons was in the Transformers movie. The character was utilized afterwards in the cartoon series, but their performance was most memorable in the movie. Used as the personal army to the Quintessons, the Sharkticons sole purpose was to catch intruders and either bring them to so-called “justice” by their masters or render the intruders to a scrap pile of leftover parts. When their Quintesson masters delivered sentence (and it always ended poorly), the accused was dropped into a watery pit full of these living garbage disposals where their fate was ultimately to become a mere snack.

(innocent?)

The character is one of my top 5 favorites in the Transformers legend and it's gotten very little love since the 80's. The design is really unique and hasn't been replicated in years, rows of chrome teeth and eerie neon green eyes are the main highlights on the figure. In primary mode he looks the most show accurate. The large head that starts to tapper off as you get closer to the tail, frail looking front arms offset by the larger hind legs and the tail tipped with a spiked ball makes the character look like more of a hybrid between a tadpole and a piranna. In robot mode the design is kind of lacking. The best thing I can say about it's robot mode is the head is amazingly accurate and well detailed. The real overall detraction for me is the legs. I'm not sure if they are to long but they are deffinately too close together, causing the figure to be top heavy and suffering several face plants off my shelves, risking damaging or breaking the toy.

Being a Transformer of the 80's, the construction of the Sharkticon is sturdy but if you apply too much pressure to the joints you'll run a risk of snapping the plastic components. Newer Transformer toys are equipt with pressure sensitive ball joints that purposely snap out of place when too much pressure is applied. You simply snap the limb back in and continue playing, just that simple. Many a Transformer of the 80's suffered battle wounds that had to be super glued into place, ultimately ruining the play value and eventually ending up in the garbage. But, such was the fate of many toys and thus bringing about the sometimes unholy cost of purchasing some of these toys from our childhood.

Powered Aboras from Ultraman by Bandai

Ultraman has had such a colorful array of evil monsters to battle over the years. Some of them range from the totally believable to the extremely bizarre and everywhere in between. Over the years his villains have gone through amazing overhauls where their physical appearance and abilities have been augmented with technology and magical powers. As the Ultraman saga has evolved over the last several decades, so has he and his opponents. Aboras is one of those many characters

(a shot of the original costume. Lots of reused elements)

(not only a battle of the behemoths, but in a stadium no less) 

Often being mistaken for a blue Godzilla-like creature by those not aware of it, this creature has been around since some of the most early incarnations of the saga. In the Ultraman Powered story, Aboras is one of two ancient devil beasts (or kaiju) sealed away in a magical sarcophagus' long ago in an attempt to save the world from their terror. His arch-nemesis is Banila, a red bipedal monster with almost matched skills. When both tombs were “accidentally” unearthed, both of these titans decided to battle it out until only one was left standing. In the first incarnation, Aboras won and was destroyed shortly after by Ultraman. The second time around Aboras seemed to be victorious but Banila reformed and both were destroyed by Ultraman and the WINR by using a combination of high frequency sound to stun them and a Mega Spectrum Ray to vaporize them.

(new and improved)

Aboras' reintroduction into the Ultraman saga was met with a complete upgrade. Because of budget constraints, Aboras was an altered Red King costume painted blue and a new head. The Powered version has a really cool tyrannosaurus rex look with a tadpole-like tail while keeping the more elongated arms and horn on his head. The figure captures every aspect of the redesign, especially capturing every single bumpy scale along the body. It's a really substantial toy and feels really good in your hand. He's not really oversized to any degree, just big considering the fact he's a friggin' mutant T-Rex. The figure fits in well with the rest of the series and (from what I can tell) is in scale. 

Centurions Ace McCloud flashlight from Kenner

Centurions: Power X Treme was a half hour American cartoon brought to us by Ruby-Spears and animated in Japan by Sunrise in 1985 as a 5 part miniseries with was followed up by a 60 episode season in late 1986. Comic book legends Jack Kirby and Gil Kane contributed to the design and concepts of the show and some of our favorite voice actors of 80's cartoon lent a hand at bringing the characters to life. Kenner brought the world of Centurions to toy store shelves and DC Comics provided a comic book series that was sold all over the world.

Centurions was a great series of 8 inch scale action figures with the ability to “plug” in upgrades to take on any challenge, much like the TV show. The line was comprised of 3 three heroes(Ace McCloud, Max Ray and Jake Rockwell), 2 villains (Hacker and Doc Terror) and about a dozen or so add-on kits to make taking on challenges on land, in the sea or in the air easier. About 32 holes lined the heroes jumpsuits where you could mix and match upgrade pieces, giving a sense of creativity to any kid who played with them. It was such a hit at retail that Remco (famous for knock-off toys) made their own version called Man-Tech. It Never had a chance and only lasted a few months at retail before hitting clearance.

Along with full sized figures, Kenner made a series of 3 ¾ inch figures outfitted with flashlights or binoculars. The figures themselves were almost identical to their larger counterparts with only a few exceptions. I think it could have grown more popular if they had pushed the 3 ¾ figures harder with actual mission specific attachments. Mind you not every figure in the set was as cool as Ace McCloud here, the Doc Terror figure really blows since the flashlight is permanently stuck in his chest.

Ace McCloud here is the perfect scale to slide into a GI Joe or Star Wars battle. Poseable at the shoulders and hips, the figure loses articulation at the elbows and knees which is the only place this figure fails. Ace still has all the ports on him the 8 inch figure does , which makes me think where this line could have gone at a smaller scale. The red rocket backpack takes 1 AA battery and is wired to the lamp head, which will plug into the figure wherever you can find a hole. The only other minus I’ve found about the figure is the lack of removable helmet, but depending who you are is the real deciding factor whether this ruins the toy for you. All things considered, it's a really cool pocket-sized interpretation of the figure that kids of the 80's could have taken with them everywhere.

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.

Mexican bootleg Ultraman by unknown maker

Viva Mexico!

Mexican bootlegs are a branch of toy collecting I wish I could get more involved in. It's such a bizarre genre of toy collecting. There's no list of what was made, so who knows if you have a complete set or not. They are meant to be a novelty of sorts, which would drive completists absolutely mad. If you find something that catches your eye, buy it quickly because who knows if they made 10 or 10,000 of that figure. I'm not one to say something like that, one of my base rules of collecting is there's rarely only one of anything; but this isn't normal toy collecting. I have friends that own small armies of Homer from the Simpsons as every DC and Marvel character imaginable and near full sets of vintage Star Wars figures made out of lead. I own a few bizarre figures myself, from “Big Chap” from Aliens to E.T (bagged as a character known only as Space Friend) and today's topic of discussion, Ultraman.

Bought off of an eBay auction in mid December, this particular Ultraman figure has no maker's marks or indentifying symbols. This isn't a surprise since most unlicensed Mexican figures are void of such markings. The figure is molded in silver plastic, possibly blow molded like most figures just like him from south of the border. No paint applications on the toy anywhere nor any traces of paint lead me to the conclusion that this figure was meant to just be a silver hunk of plastic. The only confusing thing about the figure is the gym shorts sculpted on the figure. The ridge on the head is an Ultraman trait as well as the chest piece, but the booty shorts left me scratching my head. I know toys such as him are often sold by sidewalk vendors, especially in front of Luchador exhibitions. Maybe the figure was meant to represent a certain masked wrestler, the mystery may never be solved to be honest. Enjoy!