And 'The Intruder'! I still have the Intruder. Come to think of it, I still have the Atomic Man, though I gather we had a different version in Britain than the one in the GI Joe line (GI Joe was Action Man over here, and Atomic Man had a black jumpsuit and black flocked hair in a kind of afro style).Originally Posted by Britt68
Kind of a shame IDW has the G.I. Joe license, since that would stymie any potential Atomic Man/Bionic Man crossover.
Still keeping my fingers crossed that Maskatron will show up in Bionic Man (Bigfoot is already on the way)...
Having just reread a couple of issues of DC's short lived Justice, Inc from the 70s, I want to see the Avenger back in action at Dynamite.
Reading the back and forth about GI joe I am reminded of my favorite Hasbro toy of the 1980s. It was not GI Jor nor was it Transformers it was. . . VISIONARIES!
A high tech world loses it's tech and enters an age of magic. After an implied apocalypse/genocide they live in near feudalism and are constantly fighting. Then a wizard offers to give any knight who can climb his mountain magic powers.
7 good knights and 7 evil ones pass the test and get animal forms based on the physical or personality traits they showed some were fairly normal and logical (lion for leadership, bear for strength, cheetah for speed) others less so (dolphin for. . . . being a girl, beetle for being a suck up etc.) some of them also get magical spells (energy shield, lightspeed which worked like teleportation, knowledge which just answered questions, fear etc.). or the ability to charge the now broken down vehicles by using magic. Then the two sides fought and the wizard sort of played good and evil against each other by giving presents that were usually double edged swords.
The show was more serialized than most 80s cartoons and the figures were better quality than most 80s toys (articulation of a GI joe plus a cool hologram feature). I know Hasbro probably has some kind of deal with IDW but since dynamite does so many fantasy comics and so many of my childhood favorites (defenders of the earth, zorro etc.) it seems like Visionaries would be a better fit here.
There were so many short-lived toy lines/tv cartoons/comic book tie-ins in the 1980s that it's hard to remember most of them. Shogun Warriors, Sectaurs, Crystar, Inhumanoids, Robotix... and probably about a half-dozen others that I am completely blanking on. For a while there, Marvel was working hand-in-glove with toy companies, working out backstories for toy figures, publishing the comic books, and sometimes even co-producing the animated series. Obviously hoping to repeat the runaway success of G.I. Joe and Transformers. ROM was fairly successful as a comic (and in fact I think that might have been the first Marvel toy tie-in), although it never spawned an animated series, but most of the others lasted less than 10 issues. Or was Micronauts the first? It's sort of hard to even think of that one as a toy tie-in, since the comic bore very little resemblance to the toy figures, with the exception of 4 characters: Biotron, Microtron, Acroyear, and Baron Karza. As far as I can recall, with rare exceptions the other comic book companies like DC didn't really jump on this trend. I think DC did the first Masters of the Universe comic, Power Lords, and Robotech, but that was about it. I remember there was this really awful toy tie-in miniseries from Archie called ManTech, based on a Remco toy line (bottom of the barrel of toy manufacturers). Anybody remember other ones that I missed?
As one of the better-known and longer-running toy-related series, I'd love to see Dynamite do Micronauts, basing it more closely on the actual figures (including Galactic Defender, Galactic Warrior, Space Glider, Time Traveler, Pharoid, Antron, Centaurus, Kronos, Lobros, Membros, Repto) this time. In fact, the original toy line (under its Japanese brand-name of Microman) was revived in the early 2000s for several new waves of original figures, and also included licensed figures of DC comics characters and various Japanese anime and tokusatsu heroes. These were imported through Diamond Comics Distributors and were available through comic book specialty stores, but sadly never made it to mass-market distribution (apparently they couldn't interest one of the major American toy companies in a partnership). They were some of the nicest-looking toy figures I've ever seen.
Last edited by positronic; 06-29-2012 at 02:19 AM.
I think the "80s toy" type characters would be great for Dynamite because many are forgotten and probably less expensive licenses that can be treated almost like new original characters while at the same time they all had their fans, fans who now have careers and are starting to feel that nostalgia. Sure you might want Micronauts and I might want Visionaries or Bionic Six but the right writing team could make these things appeal to people who may not have been fans in the past.
If they got Shogun Warriors or ROM, I'd pretty much have a heart attack.
Sh!te. That would be amazing!
I think ROM, like the Micronauts, is pretty much indivisable from the Marvel universe to most longtime fans, and any other company using them would suffer from the comparison, as indeed the last Micronauts revival did. Marvel really did some amazing things with those characters. Maybe Shogun Warriors though. Or Blackstar? http://www.virtualtoychest.com/blackstar/blackstar.html
Last edited by tony ingram; 06-30-2012 at 03:49 AM.
Dragon Lance
Mantra (Malibu)
Strangers (Malibu)
If we are talking toys from our childhoods, anybody remember MICRONAUTS?
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