By Alex Villafania
INQUIRER.net
THEY’VE been fans of Hasbro’s Transformers toys and cartoons, but now they’ve had a change of heart and embraced the GoBots. TransFormers Philippines is now GoBots Philippines, complete with a logo and slogan change: “We changed our name, we changed our fandom, we are no longer Transformers Philippines…” and a link to http://transformersph.blogspot.com
Of course, there’s more to this than meets the eye.
TransFormers Philippines is playing a week-long prank starting today, April Fool’s Day. In an interview with hackenslash.net, TransFormers Philippines moderator Azrael Coladilla said the prank is targeted at the more specialized fans of the GoBots, a short-lived cartoon and toy series that was itself a minor success.
He said they also did an anti-Transformers prank last year when the site “shifted allegiance” to the Decepticons, led by the evil Megatron.
Like the Transformers that came after them, the GoBots involved a war between two groups of alien robots, the Guardians led by Leader-1, and the Renegades led by Cy-Kill. The cartoon and toy series only lasted from 1983 to 1986, compared to the Transformers line that started in 1984 and spawned a series of cartoons as well as last year’s live-action movie.
Coladilla said the Philippines has a small group of GoBots fans that has always wanted to have its own online community.
“We do this prank every year but it doesn’t mean it’s only for laughs. We’re actually planning to have a GoBots Day soon to feature the toys and cartoons owned by some of the fans,” Coladilla said.
Still, Coladilla said the TransFormers Philippines community will remain as it is and will continue to feature all toys and cartoons related to big robots and mecha. Of course, it will still be a Transformers world.
May 15th, 2008 at 10:56 am
If we are talking about the Gobots animated series truly it was really an awful cartoon but if you checked the toy line ( I would suggest the “Machine Robo” lineup instead of the Gobots U.S. version ) these robots were really well designed including my favourites like Pathfinder, Blaster, Pincher, Tux, Snoop, Stacks etc. I even saw a magazine dedicated to the Machine Robo series: http://www.hlj.com/product/TYT02022 check ‘em out and i’m pretty sure that maybe this will change how you look at the Gobots aka Machine Robo.