For every rare gem of a toy robot ad I found I had to endure countless pictures of dead bodies, car crashes, plane crashes, toddler pool drownings, suicides, explosions and worse. As I've written before, anyone who dares revisit the newspapers of the past subjects themselves to headline after headline of horrific cruelness and calamity. Alas, the last two weekends have not been kind to our hero and the Fort Lauderdale microfilm reels have proven dastardly opponents unwilling to give up their old toy robots newspaper ads without first subjecting me to all manner of mayhem and cruelty. So was born the Vintage Space Toast Tour-the name I came up with for what other people would call going to the library when they're on vacation. I'd been visiting libraries for years before I went to Lauderdale that first time back in '07 but it was during that visit when I got the idea to blog afterwards about the stuff I found. ![]() I'll just be happy having an ad that should not be.Īnd so Vintage Space Toast Tour 2009 draws to a close with an unexpected visit to the place where in a sense it all began-Fort Lauderdale. I'm not going to worry about the implications of line art existing for a toy that there isn't supposed to be line art for. Yet it kind of bothers me how unofficial and not as professional the art looks compared to standard GoBot line art-as if someone at Spencer was drawing it themselves based off a toy they had in front of them. Nowadays that would be like Hasbro releasing exclusive Transformers at Hot Topic (or Spencer since they're still around). It was only later when I was processing the ad for inclusion at the GoBots section of the Vintage Space Toaster Palace that I realized it was line art of the unreleased Snoop! Now I don't believe this means Snoop was a Spencer exclusive and saw release through that chain of mall stores. At first I couldn't figure out what that thing was in the line art-was it some sort of space station or generic robot or maybe a stationary set? When I'm taking my pictures of these ads at the library there's no time to contemplate what I've found so I don't give it much thought and I move on. Since I wasn't paying attention when I was a kid I have no reason to doubt the established line of thinking, but boy finding this Spencer ad from Decemmessed with my head a little. and that only prototype carded samples exist. GoBots collectors have resigned themselves to believing Snoop was not released in the U.S. ![]() Snoop was an awesome toy that turned into an SR-71 Blackbird and got released in abundance overseas under the name Sky-Spy. For Micronauts it was the Gyrotron, Shogun Warriors had the mythical Combattra Zargon, for Transformers it was the blue colored Bluestreak and for GoBots it was the Renegade named Snoop. Or in most cases wasn't even released at all, yet everybody knows a guy who says he had one when he was a kid. toylines from the eighties had a "toy that should not be"-the figure that got shown in catalogs but for whatever reason was made in such tiny numbers that none survive to this day.
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