Knockoffs in Disguise - Sludge Central

With the hysteria of the new Transformers movie and living in a world of constant nostalgia, I wanted to share a revelation that I came to recently. It had nothing to do with the meaning of life, or the fact that I feel I was meant to finally bring Dingbat and the Creeps to the Broadway stage. This is one of those little mysteries that I was bent on solving.

I got into a conversation at work about Transformers. Believe it or not, it was about the fact that I didn’t have too many Transformer toys as a kid and rarely watched the show that much. I did catch the show on occasion and I did have the original, awesome Optimus Prime figure/truck. It was a killer toy. For my taste, I was never too intrigued by the Transformers. I was more of a fan of the Go-Bots for some reason even though robots in general never did it for me unless it was C3PO, R2D2, or Vicki from Small Wonder.

The Go-bots were basically a knock-off of Transformers. They road the wave of popularity that transforming robots created in the ’80s. I mentioned in this nostalgic powwow that I had one Go-bot figure whose name escaped me but I remembered what it looked like. It was then my mission to scour the Internet for the exact figure I had. Luckily I found this site that had a list of every Transformer and Go-Bot toy ever made. I checked each and every one of them twice with no luck finding my old toy. It was frustrating to think that the mighty Internet couldn’t solve this mystery for me. It shows how reliant I am on the net, but there really isn’t any other way to find this kind of thing out easily. I figured if it wasn’t a Transformer and it wasn’t that specific Go-Bot that I thought then what the hell was it?

My friend Steve sent me a link to check out in hopes that I may get to the bottom of this.
http://www.toyarchive.com/Gobots/StoreDisplayShellConvert.html

I’m sure it was my birthday or Christmastime and an Aunt, Uncle, or cousin actually drove up to get gas at Shell and remembered that they didn’t by little Jay a gift! Oh crap! Luckily they are selling these knockoff Go-Bots aptly named CONVERTIBLE ROBOTS, and you can get one when you buy some gas. I can honestly say that I had alot of knockoff toys in my childhood because the real ones were always more expensive and sometimes harder to find. This knockoff, even though generic, was more convincing as it took me over 20 years to figure out that it was a ripoff and not a real Go-Bot or Transformer. It was perfect for kid who wasn’t a huge fan of either of the shows because I had no idea that it wasn’t even a real character. It truly was a robot in disguise.

There aren’t many things in life that are worse than knowing you had a knockoff of Go-Bo figure as a child. What a sad memory to hold in my heart! I owned a knockoff of a knockoff. I think falling into the toilet and getting your ass all wet just after you took a shit might be the only thing worse.