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A first series of six figures from the existent range was chosen as the spearhead - this consisted of six of the first seven Popy designs (with Highway Robo being skipped). The toys were placed on blister cards, and loosely renamed: - Bike Robo became Cycle Man, Battle Robo became Tank Man, Jet Robo became Aero Man, Gyro Robo became Copter Man, Steam Robo became Train Man and Supercar Robo became Racer Man. The figures were all identical to their Japanese releases, though the back of the card promised that sending of proofs or purchase for all six would land the lucky buyer a free gold version of Buggy Robo (named Buggy Man). |
Machine
Men was Bandai's attempt to market their Machine Robo figures
in America and Australia, beginning in mid 1983, around the same time
Robo Machine was chosen as the name for the European line.|
In Australia, the line would fare somewhat better, going on to run until 1987. |
In
America, despite a television advert campaign (with the tag-line "It's
a Machine, It's a Man, Now you see him, Now you don't." - if anyone
has a video of this, I'd love to see it), the line - distributed by
Bandai America - was not a big success. However, it did help attract
the attention of US manufacturer Tonka, who then licensed the figures
and repackaged the line as Gobots later in 1983. Interestingly,
a number of the names for the figures when reissued as Gobots
would remain phonetically similar - Cycle Man because Cy-Kill, Tank
Man became Tank, and Copter Man became Cop-Tur, while the mail-in Buggy
Man's name was simply parsed differently.