GoBots
transforming robot toys produced by Tonka
GoBots was an American media franchise that was a line of transforming robot toys produced by Tonka from 1983 to 1987, similar to Hasbro's Transformers.
Although initially a separate and competing line of toys, Tonka's Gobots became the intellectual property of Hasbro after their buyout of Tonka in 1991. Subsequently, the universe depicted in the animated series Challenge of the GoBots and follow-up film GoBots: Battle of the Rock Lords was established as an alternate universe within the Transformers multiverse. While Hasbro now owns the fictional side of the property (character names, bios, storyline), the actual toys and their likenesses were only licensed from Bandai in the 1980s, were not covered by the Tonka acquisition, and are not available for Hasbro use.
History
The GoBot toy line was based on figures produced by Popy of Japan (the now-defunct character division of Bandai), named Machine Robo. In another similarity to Transformers, Tonka decided to make the figures sentient robots, rather than human-piloted mecha as they had been in Japan, and divided them into two factions – the good Guardians and evil Renegades (although early figures were simply described as ‘Friendly’ or ‘Enemy’ on the packaging). The figures were all given individual names, in contrast to the simple designations they received in Japan.
Introduced in 1983 by Tonka Inc., the GoBots toys were part of the robot "sensation" that swept the nation for a short time.
The line sold well initially, but was overtaken by Transformers. 1987 was the final year in which new Gobots were released.
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This entry incorporates text from “GoBots” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.