I started an Instagram last month to archive my colorizations of 1980s toy robot retail store newspaper ads sourced from library microfilm reels. I am trying to upload them in a roughly chronological order starting with 1984, but I already screwed that up because I just did a Diakron one (and I also uploaded an actual TRU cover so that violates my original intention, too). The idea is to collect all the ad colorizations I have done all in one place.

https://www.instagram.com/gobackatron/

On Tuesday, May 16, 2023 at 1:16:34 AM UTC-4, Evil King Macrocranios wrote:
> I started an Instagram last month to archive my colorizations of 1980s toy robot retail store newspaper ads sourced from library microfilm reels. I am trying to upload them in a roughly chronological order starting with 1984, but I already screwed that up because I just did a Diakron one (and I also uploaded an actual TRU cover so that violates my original intention, too). The idea is to collect all the ad colorizations I have done all in one place.
>
> https://www.instagram.com/gobackatron/
Cool! I just followed. It's nice that someone out there is able to archive some of this stuff.

On Monday, May 15, 2023 at 11:16:34 PM UTC-6, Evil King Macrocranios wrote:

> https://www.instagram.com/gobackatron/

So, some of this I have seen, but much of it I have not. The sheer dedication, the sheer insane dedication, to buy toys like Care Bears and Barbies, just to recreate the advertisements accurately? You're a madman!

At first I was berudgingly accepting your reasoning for transforming the red Sunstreaker correctly in the Diakron ad, but then you kept the mistransformations for assorted other ads, so I kind of wonder why one incorrectly-transformed toy offended you, but not the others?

I kind of love the mistransformed toys. I'm not sure why. I think it speaks towards the idea that kids "got" Transformers in a way that adults just didn't (and I mean parents, but also the folks putting together department store advertising). They reconfigure it into some random jumble and go, "Yeah, that looks like a robot or something, I guess" and they snap the picture.

I no longer have my Verbot, but I had him for many years and I loved him.

That early Jetfire with the white, pointy nosecone is trippy. How did you create that? Surely you didn't hunt down an unproduced prototype!

It's strange that they would feature incorrectly-colored Bumblebees and Cliffjumpers. Sometimes I think the department stores just ripped toys out of the packaging, based on whatever they had in stock, to create their own photography. But, that's a random guess and not backed by any research.

Hasbro says that nowadays, they will still farm out photography to third-party organizations. They seem to get it right most of the time, but Hasbro apparently provides no instructions so it's completely up to the photographers to figure out the toys and what they're supposed to look like. Maybe it's always been that way. No wonder there were so many packaging photos (and even official box art!) that were mistransformed.

Do you have both stickered and unstickered G1 toys so you can authentically recreate ads (unstickered Starscream in Campbell Supply vs. stickered Starscream in Zayre)? I'm almost afraid to ask what happens if you encounter an ad where the toys are stickered incorrectly!

Anything you want to share about your process would be fascinating to me.

Zob

On Tuesday, May 16, 2023 at 2:53:58 PM UTC-7, Zobovor wrote:
> On Monday, May 15, 2023 at 11:16:34 PM UTC-6, Evil King Macrocranios wrote:
>
> > https://www.instagram.com/gobackatron/
>
> So, some of this I have seen, but much of it I have not. The sheer dedication, the sheer insane dedication, to buy toys like Care Bears and Barbies, just to recreate the advertisements accurately? You're a madman!

The danger of spending so much time looking at old newspaper ads is that advertising works no matter how many decades have gone by in real life. Once in a while there's some weird magic spell the old microfilm weaves on me that makes me want to recreate not just the Transformers part of the ad but everything else around it. And I've found ad magic works on you even if you just consider yourself a robot collecting guy. So I have developed a soft spot of sorts for late 70's/early '80s toys in general because ads for these other brands are just pieces of the larger puzzle that was the era I grew up in. Unfortunately old ads don't care how much Barbies and Care Bears cost in the post Covid secondary market!

I don't buy every toy shown on the microfilm just to recreate ads. I can always use digital manipulation to colorize the microfilm scans. The quality is not as good as photographing the actual toy so if I resort to digital coloring only then I must not have cared about the products enough to collect them. Like for example Cabbage Patch Kids and Alvin and the Chipmunks plush dolls I was happy coloring in digitally because I don't feel the need to own those. Or there's some extenuating circumstance. I bought a Crystal Barbie and Ken because I didn't have the photo manipulation skill to properly convey the iridescence of their clothing. (At least that's what I tell myself.) That was crazy because Crystal Barbie pulls an insane secondary market value to someone like me who doesn't collect them. But I have come to love those dolls as representations of what else was going on in 1984 that I never knew about. I've seen so many Crystal Barbie ads that it's iconic to me almost in the same way Optimus Prime is.

The Care Bears was a good example of this ad coloring hobby making me collect things I would never in a million years intended to own. I really did like Care Bears when I was a kid so there's an emotional connection I have with them. I would draw Care Bears on book covers as much as I'd draw Transformers when I was in elementary. It is very interesting to me to cross fandoms and see what other toys from my childhood go for nowadays. In that case wanting to colorize the whole page supplied what little justification I needed to go Care Bear hunting. When I found out some Care Bear figures rarely pop up on ebay with their boxes, my collecting instinct was triggered and scoring a boxed Tenderheart Bear or Friend Bear or whoever at a good price was just as thrilling as snagging carded Stunticons or whatever.

> At first I was berudgingly accepting your reasoning for transforming the red Sunstreaker correctly in the Diakron ad, but then you kept the mistransformations for assorted other ads, so I kind of wonder why one incorrectly-transformed toy offended you, but not the others?

Yeah it's hypocritical of me to change that one to look how I want it to. I've decided the original version needs to be attempted as well. I just feel like it's a shame that the best Diakron ad I've ever found has such a huge flaw. With Transformers there's hundreds if not thousands of ads from the era so the mistransforms are comical sidenotes. But man, that mistransformed Countach really bugs me. It just really stings. And therein lies the dangers of messing around with history like this. Unless the original ad ever pops up and is widely disseminated, these alterations I do end up being the defacto standard defining what the truth was. I really shouldn't mess with them because someone (or some AI powered thing) will come along one day and see it out of context and accept that as the record of how things were. I kind of brush it off and say it's just toys so who cares, but when I do that I wonder if I am some sort of supervillain rewriting history.

> I kind of love the mistransformed toys. I'm not sure why. I think it speaks towards the idea that kids "got" Transformers in a way that adults just didn't (and I mean parents, but also the folks putting together department store advertising). They reconfigure it into some random jumble and go, "Yeah, that looks like a robot or something, I guess" and they snap the picture.

I love how every single Special Team leader ad I have ever seen that doesn't use line art always has the big robot head attached if the robot is posed loose outside of the box. All the store ad photographers without exception popped that large head on. Yet as a kid it was so clear to me how wrong it was to do that. 1980s adults-I don't understand their robot illiteracy sometimes.

> I no longer have my Verbot, but I had him for many years and I loved him.

Maybe he found his way to an antique store in Washington and I snapped a picture of him.
> That early Jetfire with the white, pointy nosecone is trippy. How did you create that? Surely you didn't hunt down an unproduced prototype!

I can't afford 40 year old prototypes or marketing samples or whatever that thing is but I can afford junker Jetfires and Macross Valkyries on ebay. That's what that illustration is-a hybrid cobbled together with the nosecone of a Takatoku VF-1S and the rest of the body from a Matsushiro Jetfire. It's basically a custom I created to match the ad. I feel bad for whoever ends up rummaging through my collection after I die, thinking they've fond some internal Hasbro employee's lost Jetfire prototype.

> It's strange that they would feature incorrectly-colored Bumblebees and Cliffjumpers. Sometimes I think the department stores just ripped toys out of the packaging, based on whatever they had in stock, to create their own photography. But, that's a random guess and not backed by any research.

That has to be how it went in most cases I think. I guess it depends on how closely some stores worked with Hasbro sales and marketing back in the day.. Yellow Cliffjumpers were probably common enough that the off the shelf theory could be just as valid as the Hasbro supplied photoshoot stock theory. The Dinobots in some ads with silver weapons could go either way. The stuff in some ads that's obviously Diaclones with Transformer stickers on them I would hope came from Hasbro. I'd hate to think something like that was off the truck and lost to time.

> Do you have both stickered and unstickered G1 toys so you can authentically recreate ads (unstickered Starscream in Campbell Supply vs. stickered Starscream in Zayre)?

You know how it is when you've collected for forty years-you end up with lots of multiples. I have lots of the same figure in various conditions and levels of completeness. I have a Bluestreak in pristine shape I got at a garage sale and it's missing a tire but that doesn't matter if all I need is his good side, you know what I mean? I can usually spare one copy of a figure for the greater good of the project. So yeah I will unsticker a 40 year old toy to get it to match an ad for my photo shoots. It kind of sucks in that some history is lost but then again, these labels were applied by children who mostly did a bad job anyways. We're the last generation of original owners of G1 original toys and we've gotta find other ways beyond collecting to relate the story of what it was like to collect them and what they were like. The toys (and us) are falling apart and there's nothing special about my collection other than the Very Legitimate Reasons I have for amassing it. I've broken a lot of eggs to make these omelettes.

To be completely truthful I must admit that not everything in my recreations are 100% original toys in pristine condition. There's a lot of photo manipulation. I don't own massive hordes of sealed boxed and carded figures. I don't have every possible packaging variation. It's all an illusion. I use reprolabels and repro bubbles and lots of trick photography. For example there's one Wal-Mart ad from black Friday 1984 where Sunstreaker has the Diaclone headlight stickers. I can't even begin to imagine where I'd buy a Sunstreaker like that. Plus I don't think anyone makes repro headlamp stickers for Diaclone and Diakron Countachs. I wasn't about to remove my DK-1's headlight stickers to use on my Sunstreaker. So I shot the DK-1 and the Sunstreaker in the same pose and then digitally cut and pasted the headlamps from one onto the other.

My biggest dirty little secret is the Sideswipe and Jazz I used to reproduce the earliest Transformer ad I've ever found from April of '84 are actually a reissue Sideswipe and a G2 Jazz with reprolabels on it. I just don't feel like digitally retouching every little spot of chrome wear, chipped paint, and all manner of other defects in my original G1 toys when nice shiny newer versions exist. And I am cheap. The Starscream I used in that April '84 ad is another Frankenstein with Kingdam wings and stickers and not a true Diaclone with Transformer labels as the original photshoot toy was. Because I can't even afford Diaclones. So I am a fraud and my obviously photo manipulated pictures are obviously photo manipulated.

> I'm almost afraid to ask what happens if you encounter an ad where the toys are stickered incorrectly!

On Tuesday, May 16, 2023 at 7:55:19 PM UTC-6, Evil King Macrocranios wrote:

> And I've found ad magic works on you even if you just consider yourself a robot collecting guy. So I have developed a soft spot of sorts for late 70's/early '80s toys in general because ads for these other brands are just pieces of the larger puzzle that was the era I grew up in.

I can definitely agree with that. I wasn't cutting out and saving toy advertising until probably 1989 or 1990, but of course by then the Transformers era was pretty much over and it was all about saving Ninja Turtles ads for me. (I do have some Transformers: Generation 2 ads tucked away somewhere, though, I'm sure.) As the years have gone by and I've looked at them again, I find myself drawn to all the other stuff that's being advertised as well—old Nintendo cartridges and ancient Nerf guns and a lot of stuff you just don't see in stores any longer. It's like a little time capsule.

I bought a Crystal Barbie and Ken because I didn't have the photo manipulation skill to properly convey the iridescence of their clothing.

Mad respect. Absolute mad respect.

> When I found out some Care Bear figures rarely pop up on ebay with their boxes, my collecting instinct was triggered and scoring a boxed Tenderheart Bear or Friend Bear or whoever at a good price was just as thrilling as snagging carded Stunticons or whatever.

Well, if you ever need pictures of vintage 80's Strawberry Shortcake dolls in their original packaging, hit me up. My wife has a bunch of them.

> And therein lies the dangers of messing around with history like this. Unless the original ad ever pops up and is widely disseminated, these alterations I do end up being the defacto standard defining what the truth was.

The versions that you've put on the Internet will arguably outlive the microfiche versions. Yours have already probably been saved locally on dozens or hundreds of computers worldwide. The accuracy of 1980's toy advertising may not be significant on a global historical scale. But, that's probably what they said about all the early scrapped Beatles songs that John Lennon threw in the trash, or the diary that Anne Frank's sister kept.

> I love how every single Special Team leader ad I have ever seen that doesn't use line art always has the big robot head attached if the robot is posed loose outside of the box.

Yes, you just unlocked a core memory for me. That was definitely a thing back then. Hot Spot walking around in a Defensor mask like he was trick-or-treating.
And it bugged me every time!

> It's basically a custom I created to match the ad.

That's so awesome. Insane dedication.

> The Dinobots in some ads with silver weapons could go either way. The stuff in some ads that's obviously Diaclones with Transformer stickers on them I would hope came from Hasbro.

If the store advertising was produced early enough that it was meant to roughly coincide with the toy's release, then it stands to reason that preproduction toys were sometimes used as placeholders. Whoever colored the cartoon models for the Dinobots was using Diaclone toys, since Swoop has a blue chest and gold talons, and Slag has grey horns instead of red, Snarl carries a grey sword instead of a red one. I wonder if the same early, inaccurate toys were just getting passed around to the cartoon studio, and then the guys who produced the TV commercials, and then the guys who took the photography for the store ads, and THEN the guys who did the photo shoot for the Hasbro toy catalogs...

I do wonder why stores thought there were only three Dinobots in the initial Hasbro assortment. I wonder if this is somehow related to how there were only three Dinobots introduced in their first cartoon episode.

> So yeah I will unsticker a 40 year old toy to get it to match an ad for my photo shoots. It kind of sucks in that some history is lost but then again, these labels were applied by children who mostly did a bad job anyways.

Well, I've scraped off vintage stickers to apply reproduction labels, so you're not the only one ruining these things. Reproduction stickers are sort of like I'm lying about my collection. But, at the same time, I cannot stand badly-applied stickers. It's my collection to enjoy for the next 30 or 40 years, or however long I've got left, and I don't want to stare at toys with misapplied Autobot symbols. At least when you scrape the stickers off, you're restoring the toys to what they looked like fresh out of the package.

(Now when I walk by my toy collection, that little voice that used to say "those stickers look awful," now it says "those are fake stickers" instead. That little voice needs to shut the hell up.)

> So I shot the DK-1 and the Sunstreaker in the same pose and then digitally cut and pasted the headlamps from one onto the other.

Ah, clever trickery. There is no shame in that.

> Photographing my collection of junkers and reissues and then digitally touching them up gives me an appreciation for people with truly impressive collections and legit toy photographers. As a hobby what I do really isn't a kind of toy photography that anyone even thinks about. You're the only person who has ever thought about the sticker situation I find myself in sometimes. It's neat to tell you about it.

I don't thnk you're giving yourself enough credit. You've found a niche, one that's basically unexplored in its entirety except for you. There are dozens or hundreds of folks running blogs who just take pictures of the new toys as soon as they open the packaging. But, really, it's the same photos of the same exact toys over and over. There are varying degrees of competence and skill being demonstrated, but once you've seen one well-lit, in-focus picture of Masterpiece Mudflap, you've seen them all.

So, don't ever denigrate your efforts by implying you're somehow less legitimate as a hobbyist or photographer. What you're doing takes not just a wealth of knowledge ("this blotchy black-and-white photograph is a slightly darker shade of grey than I'd expect, so this must be a red Bumblebee instead of a yellow one") but also an impressive litany of photoshopping talent and, from the sound of it, a great deal of clever and creative photo trickery. That is not to be dismissed lightly. You're not just snapping pictures of whatever toy you found at Target and calling it a day. You're constructing authentic-looking historical recreations, and that's so impressive. It takes real effort and determination and a helluva lot of love for the brand.

Zob (THOSE ARE FAKE STICKERS... seriously, I know, okay, just shut up)