The Secret History of Mysterians: Almost the First Major Transforming Toy Line in America

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: In 1982, Knickerbocker Toys was the first major American toy company to notice and take interest in the Japanese transforming toy craze happening overseas. They took a look and said, hey, this might play really well with American kids. Let's do it here. And so, long before Taco was even thinking about GoBots, long before Hasbro would ever consider the Transformers, Knickerbocker Toys had plans in place to launch their own unique transforming toy line, aided and promoted by a comic book series and cartoon series by Marvel Comics and Marvel Productions. It was set to be the first major transforming toy line in America. They had the designs ready to go, they had the production art ready to go, and they had Jim Shooter, editor-in-chief of Marvel, in their conference room with the head of Marvel Productions on the phone when the hammer came down and it all fell apart. Knickerbocker Toys was done, the cartoon and comic book series were scrapped, and yet somehow, through the most unlikely of channels, the toys ended up coming to market anyway, and many ended up in your toy collection as kids. In fact, as you're watching this episode, you might start saying, oh my god, I think I had this toy. What? He's only one of them, guys. My name is Jeff, this is Beyond Transformers, and today's episode is about Mysterians, the toy line that was almost the first major American transforming toy line, as well as the crazy story of how they got to market anyway late in the game, and a look at some of the cool toys that you might barely remember having as a kid. Let's hit it. Special thanks to ToyHacks.com for sponsoring this episode. ToyHacks.com is your one-stop online shop for amazingly accurate reproduction toy labels that look just like the stickers and labels that came with your original toys. From every series of Transformers ever, to GI Joe, to many other toy lines of our youth, ToyHacks.com has an amazingly extensive library of extremely accurate reproduction labels, but it doesn't stop there. On top of that, they create these amazing upgrade kits to bring your toys, both new and old, to life with a new energy they never had before. You can give your toys much more realistic looking, much more exciting, sometimes more cartoon accurate, sometimes just wild and imaginative looks they never had before, and make any old toy of yours become the centerpiece of your collection. At the very least, it's worth taking a look at ToyHacks.com to see all the awesome stuff they've got to offer. Tell them Jeff sent you. ToyHacks.com. Knickerbocker Toys was one of the oldest, if not the oldest, major toy companies in America, over a hundred years old, when in 1982, they became aware of a Japanese animated series known as Lytan. Lytan is a toy line and cartoon that never would have worked in America for two major reasons. It's a transforming robot that turns into a cigarette lighter. So, one, you're promoting smoking to young kids, and even if you're not taking the smoking angle, it is a toy that is supposed to create fire. Now, the toy didn't actually create fire, but in the cartoon, that's absolutely what this thing did in its transformed mode. So, Lytan was never going to play well in the United States. And whether Knickerbocker Toys was aware of that or simply missed the point, they looked at Lytan and believe the appeal was not that it turned into an ordinary cigarette lighter, but rather that you had a robot that turned into a very simple geometric shape because this cigarette lighter was basically a giant brick. So, Knickerbocker Toys, instead of trying to import a Japanese toy in America, as Tonka and Hasbro and Matchbox would later do, they decided to create their own in-house toys from the best of what we know, and they came up with these toys that would all transform from simple geometric shapes into interesting-looking robots. If that sounds like a lame idea, I promise you the execution was anything but. These toys end up being extremely imaginative, fun, and if nothing else, different from the other later-transforming toys we would know. Unfortunately, at the very last second, and we know this from Jim Shooter's personal blog. Jim Shooter, the editor of Marvel Comics, is sitting in that office in 1983, and first of all, the meeting started several hours late, according to him, but second of all, once the Knickerbocker Toys executives came in, he described them as ashen-faced. They sort of agreed with his ideas, gave it a simple hesitant thumbs up, the meeting was over, and the next day, he found out that Knickerbocker Toys had been acquired by Hasbro. That's right, Hasbro. So in 1983, Hasbro acquires Knickerbocker Toys, and at that time, long before the idea of Transformers had occurred to them, long before they'd been in Japan and been at a toy show where they first bore witness to the Diaclone and Microchange toys that would later become Transformers, Hasbro saw no value in this slated toy line, the Mysterians, and so it was scrapped. Toy line dead, cartoon dead, the toys should have been dead too, but through a strange channel that we're still not totally clear on, the Mysterians came to life later on anyway. Here's what we know. There was a Hong Kong-based toy company known as Universal Toys, with an American subsidiary known as Kidco. Kidco and Universal Toys were discussing bringing this toy line, the Mysterians, to America. How they ended up with these toys, we're not sure, but they had them by 1983, and the plan was to produce the toys themselves. Well, a falling out happened between Kidco and Universal Toys, it never came to fruition, and then the president of Kidco Toys formed his own independent company, March-On, and later on brought the Mysterians to market anyway. No cartoon, no comic book series, but the same company name, Mysterians. And we got these toys anyway, possibly cheaper versions. I'd like to believe if Knickerbocker had produced the toys as originally planned, they might have been made of even higher quality parts, but these all-plastic toys had a remarkable charm all their own. And yet, that's not where the fun of discussing Mysterians ends. In recent years, toy scholars and Transformers fans have gotten really excited about Mysterians again, because some pieces of information have come to light that associates them pretty heavily with Transformers. For one thing, some unproduced card art surfaced in recent years, in which it is now clear that there were more Mysterians planned than the ones we originally knew about. The ones that eventually came to market were known as Mysterians the Hidden Force. That consisted of six toys, four of which we'll look at closely today. But there was at least one other arm of Mysterians that never made it to market. Mysterians the mobile force. And these toys from the card art appear to be many of what ended up being the G1 mini-bots. Crazy. You can clearly see in the card art, there's no mistake, those are toys that ended up being in the micro-change toy line and later became G1 mini-bots. G1 mini-bots. The plot thickens from there, though. A couple other important pieces of information. Most of the G1 mini-bots have a symbol on them, an M. And people have always assumed that stood for micro-change, which was the toy line they were released in in Japan. But that M has a different font than is ever used for micro-change. And so it's got people thinking, hmm, maybe it stands for Mysterians. If that sounds like too much of a reach, here's some other pieces of information to consider. Number one. Three. Many mini-bots don't have the M symbol. That is Bumblebee, Cliffjumper, and Bumper. Those three also have a totally different look. They have a very different style of transformation, and they look like they were designed to either imitate or possibly even fit in with a different Takara toy line known as Coral Queue. That toy line featured exaggerated vehicles that didn't look realistic. They looked a little bit silly, a little bit cartoonish, and had a place in the back where you'd stick a coin in that would make them go. Well, if you look at Bumblebee, Cliffjumper, and Bumper, they have that exaggerated style, and while they don't have a place for a coin in the back, they do have a square area that kind of imitates the same area Coral Queue had for putting in the coins. They look like they were designed to be part of that series. They don't have the M on them. The other ones all do. But the big smoking gun piece of evidence that scholars have been caught up on is that there is an unproduced, early mock-up art for the toy that became G1 Windcharger. And this artwork is not done by a Takara designer. It's done by a guy who worked for Knickerbocker Toys. And that's got people thinking. Did Knickerbocker themselves design these toys, who then got somehow acquired by Takara and used in the micro change line and then ended up in G1 Transformers? It might explain why those are, I'm sorry to say, some of the worst transforming toys of the entire series. Don't get me wrong. The Mysterions that we're going to look at today are actually really good toys. But somehow, those mini-bots never quite seem to be the same quality of toys everything else G1 seemed to offer. That's a possible explanation. One other point of interest for Transformers fans is that a lot of the ideas for the Mysterions cartoon that never came to fruition ended up recycled in small ways in the background of G1 Transformers cartoon. Not the major big stuff, other than the fact that you had some self-aware, sentient good guy and bad guy robots coming to Earth from another planet, but there were minor details and minor characters on the sidelines that showed up in G1 that seemed to come from the Mysterions idea that got abandoned, at least according to Jim Shooter. We don't have the actual script for the Mysterions cartoon. So, take it or leave it as you will. If you want to look more into this as a G1 fan, I've provided some reading below in the description. You can check out some links about some really scholarly research into this stuff. It is fascinating reading. But this episode is not about Transformers. It's about Mysterions. So, I want to take some time today to show you just how incredibly fascinating these toys were. They're tremendously fun. And the big question I'm asking myself as we look at these is: Had these toys been the first in America to get the cartoon and comic book series, to get the big push, would they have taken the place of G1 Transformers? Or were they always going to be outmatched by the superior later toy line? Mysterions are not in the same level as G1 Transformers. They aren't. They're not the same level of quality. But they are fun. They are unique. They are totally different from any other transforming toy line that we ever saw in the United States. They're so worth having. They're so worth discussing. Would they have been a hit? Let's head to the work table and find out. They're nothing like Transformers. They're nothing like GoBots. They're nothing like Voltron. they are very much their own thing. They are the Mysterions by Marchand, originally by Knickerbocker Toys. Now, it's important to be clear before we get started that this is not the original vision Knickerbocker Toys had. While these toys are roughly the same as the original designs Knickerbocker Toys came up with, they're not in the same colors, they don't have the same character names, and it's reasonable to assume there were other details that might have been abandoned along the way. Marvin Stoller, the head of Marchand Toys, originally president of Kidco, had nothing to do with the original Knickerbocker designs. He got these toys from Universal Toys, which was a Hong Kong-based company. We're still not sure how they ended up with them or if these toys were even totally legal. It could very well be these guys were unauthorized knockoffs and Hasbro just didn't have an interest in pursuing the copyright. Whatever the case, although honestly, Hasbro not pursuing a copyright in the 1980s, that seems unlikely to me, especially where Transformers were concerned. So, it's reasonably safe to assume that some arrangement was made as Knickerbocker was out the door. Maybe Hasbro sold the rights to these toys cheap, thinking they'd never be useful. We're not quite sure, but whatever the case, the toys we finally got are based upon the Knickerbocker designs, but may not have been exactly what Knickerbocker had in mind. Anyway, here are the four toys I'm going to show you today. There were six total. These are the four I liked the most, so they're the ones I've reacquired. There are two others I'll put up on the screen right now that I do not have and don't really have an interest in pursuing. But my four favorite ones. We have Bomber right here. We have Enforcer right here. We have Major Repair right here. What a name. And we have Tank Commander, possibly the most enigmatically named toy of the bunch to look at as well. And I got to tell you, these four toys may not look like Transformers at all. They're certainly not going for the humanoid look that GoBots and Transformers popularized. They look much more alien, which makes sense if they were alien life forms in the Marvel Comics and Marvel Productions storyline. But they're very unique. They're a lot of fun. Each one has a surprising amount of features and imagination for a moderately priced competitor to a G1 Transformers. So let's take a look at each of them. I'm going to go from my least favorite to my most favorite, as I always like to do. So we're going to start with Enforcer, who, for whatever reason, seems to be the rarest of the bunch to acquire today. Whether he was produced in smaller numbers or, I don't know, people just didn't hold on to him, it's hard to find Enforcer today. And I'm kind of fine with that because, honestly, he's not bad, but he's very, very basic compared to the others. So this is Enforcer. First thing you should know, each one of these toys didn't just transform from a basic geometric shape to a robot. They also had a surprise feature. And in Enforcer's case, there would have been a little drone that came out of here that I've lost. There's a picture of it up on the left. That was its own little fun thing. You know, Optimus Prime had a roller. Enforcer has a drone. And the drone docked right in here, closed up. Enforcer, whoops, isn't much to look at. He's awkwardly posed. He falls over easily. Not the best of designs. I'd be curious to know if the Knickerbocker version would have looked better. I believe the Knickerbocker version was supposed to be gold. As this toy was going to be very comparable to Light Hand. The main toy that they were inspired by and imitating when they made this series. So here's how he would transform. We're going to close that part up on top. Fold in these arms. Rotate that around. Close up this arm. Rotate it around as well. Stay closed. Stay hidden. This part right here, we're going to sort of fold this in. Fold this in. Fold this in. It's not a very satisfying transformation. But, you know, there he is. Well, he's something. I'd be very curious to know how the cartoon and comic series would have explained why they do this. Why a basic geometric shape? Is it because it was stackable? You know, maybe kind of like the Coleco Starcom line. It was just more efficient for transportation. Maybe they wanted him to be a lighter and just realized it was never going to get past American sensors. Past American sensors. I don't know what to do with this. It also doesn't hold its shape very well. But that is Enforcer. Take it or leave it. Honestly, as much as I kind of like this toy, I could see why somebody would want to leave this one. Trust me, they get better. They really, really do. Next up. I mean, the other three. I love all of them. I really, really do. I'm going to bring in Major Repair. Major Repair is just freaking cute. He is an adorable toy. Very distinct. He's also very, very loosely based upon a toy from the Light Hand series. There's a picture up on the left for comparison. [00:17:05] Speaker ?: Very similar. [00:17:05] Speaker 1: Almost a ripoff. He was supposed to have a bunch of little tools here that would snap out. Those are very hard to acquire today in the aftermarket. I didn't even bother because what I love about him most is the look and the transformation. He is just, he's adorably fun. Look at that face. He's so happy to be here. So similar to Enforcer, we're going to fold up the arms and tuck them in. Nothing all that different there. You know, a little spring-loaded power might have been fun on these guys. Maybe if Knickerbocker had produced them, they would have had that. Or at least a little better locking system. They don't just sort of float out in place again. His wheels on the bottom can push in. We close this and this. We push this up, push this down. And when you want him to be a robot again, kind of looks like a giant shipping crate right now. The button on the back makes all this happen. Push it once, the head comes out. Push it again. There's the feet. This guy's a lot more fun than Enforcer. He's much more thrilling and fun. So there's your spring-loaded features I was asking for. They're just not on the arms, which you just kind of have to push to get them to come out. But yeah, he's great. And he's only my third favorite of the Mysterians. So if Enforcer didn't do it for you, stick around. These guys do get better. Tank Commander used to be my absolute favorite. And when I see people talk about this toy line, he's usually the one who gets the most attention. It was just bold and ambitious to make a giant sphere turn into a robot toy. Tank Commander is not much of a robot. I'm so much sure. Is this like a walkie-talkie or a lightsaber? What is this thing? He can swivel, which is a nice feature. He's got this little radar dish up here. That's cool. And his big feature, every one of them has something that comes out of the chest. In his case, he's got this thing that, whoops, there is a dial in the back. And when you spin it, what's going to happen as I spin is, it's kind of awkward to do for the camera, that thing in the middle is coming out more and more and more as I spin. Even as a kid, I didn't find these controls very satisfying. It was not a fun nor quick feature. I would have liked it to kind of like spring launch instead, maybe. That might have been a nicer choice. It takes forever. But ultimately, this thing comes out. They call him Tank Commander. So maybe that's supposed to be a gun. For me, it always reminded me of R2-D2 in Star Wars. How he had that thing that would come out of the middle and plug into a computer. Make of it what you will. That's Tank Commander. And that is what he does. He can pivot. He can swivel. Transformation is not that impressive, but it is tactilely pleasing. It's fun. And, you know, as a kid, I just marveled at the fact that you could have a sphere transform into a robot. I'd never seen anything like that done before. You know, all the robot toys I knew in the early 1980s were very blocky, very rectangular in shape. This was ambitious, even if the end result wasn't brilliantly aesthetically different. He very much looks like... All these toys look like the shape they began as. You know, there's no total transformation. But there is a unique appeal to each one of them. So, let me show you the transformation. We're going to close that. Push down this thing. Push it in. Close that. In here, we are going to rotate these wheels. Rotate the wheel. Push in. He's a ball. I'm actually kind of amazed he's staying still there. He can roll. I guess. But somehow he seems to know where to end up. I'm not quite sure how they accomplished that. But he does always, more or less, end up where he should be. I don't know how they did that. It's pretty cool. To re-transform him, you hit the button right here. And his head springs up. That's really cute. And then he's got the... He's got the radar dish right there. And then you just, you know, sort of transform him again. And I always found this really enjoyable. The only part I did not like was making that thing come out of his chest. That was just unfun. And I have to believe the Knickerbocker toys version would have had a better solution. There's your tank commander. Cute guy. Used to be my favorite. Not my favorite anymore. The guy I love most now, who I didn't have as a kid, is Bomber. Bomber has a very distinct look. He kind of reminds me of the skull-faced guy from the Misfits logo. He's got that sense about him. And he's got a lot of extra features to him as well. He, first of all, is the only one who's a triple changer. So he's a robot here. And I'm going to show you his shape mode. Then I'll show you his spaceship mode. Or at least bomber plane mode. Then I'll show you his extra feature in the chest. It'll make more sense in his bomber plane mode. So we are going to put these little arms up here. These little gun hands. Push them in. Each one of them has very similar hands. His face is going to move up like that. Swivel around. Push that down. We've got the M now. Push these pieces in. Close that. Bam! He's a whatchamacallit. Again, I don't know what the in-story explanation would have been for these geometric shapes. It's fascinating to me. I really hope that one day somebody will find the original pitch for these toys. I'm sure there were handwritten notes. Or maybe an actual script. It was the age before email. But it's got to be sitting in someone's file cabinet somewhere. Probably Jim Shooter's. And as he's passed on, we may never see it. But anyway. For bomber mode, we have some options here, how this is going to work. For one thing, what we're going to do is there are pieces here that swivel out. We have little wheels. You'll notice March on cheapened out. It's not a real wheel. I'd like to believe Knickerbocker toys would have actually put like spinning wheels on this thing. Would have been a nice touch. We have these pieces that will come out again. This can now be wings with guns on them. And then on top of that, too, we have pieces that will become tail fins right here. That's kind of cool. And then I think it's supposed to be like this. But I like the idea, actually. In my own headcanon, Bomber's face can appear like that as well. And now he is just a badass spaceship or plane mode now. I kind of really love it. I'm going to embarrass myself here and admit that if there is a third landing gear, and there certainly should be one, it's got to be in here somewhere. But I can't quite figure out how to access it. You know, there aren't instructions for these guys. So if it's in there somewhere, tell me in the comments how I should have done that. In my mind, let's get that fin back up again. In my mind, this is as complete as I know how to make Bomber. I could see this being a really cute mode for a cartoon series. And again, I don't think the face was actually supposed to be out. That's just sort of something I like to do. I believe it should have been like this or maybe even like that. It looks incomplete that way. I don't like it as much. Here's the extra feature he has in his center. There is these little bay doors that open, these little doors that open up. And we've got that inside. Open up the doors on this side as well. What is this? Well, if you are lucky enough to have all the parts for Bomber, and good luck, these parts were so easy to lose. These little plastic bombs, eight of them, that you would snap in right here. And then from up top, you'd push right here and they would go down and bomb the toys below. It was a really freaking cool idea. A really cool idea. But man, who saved these guys? No one thought Mysterians were collectible. I own several of these and I guarantee they got thrown out years ago. Most of my toys did. But some people bothered to save their Transformers, you know, the brand name ones, that seemed important and worthwhile. Nobody was thinking of Mysterians. And that's why they're so hard to find now. These guys are surprisingly collectible compared to most other smaller, lesser known toy lines out there today. I think a lot of that is because of Jim Shooter's blog and bringing new awareness to these toys and the importance they almost had in Transformers history. [00:25:56] Speaker ?: Almost. [00:25:57] Speaker 1: But it's interesting. Fascinating. And I think also, most of us had these guys. And it's just fun to remember them now. Because unlike some of the other smaller transforming toy lines out there, you know, your Motobots and your RoboForce toys. These guys just didn't feel like anything else. They had their own unique style to them, for better and for worse. Kind of made them unforgettable, didn't it? Kind of. So, um, yeah. I've only recently been reacquainted with my Mysterions. I've only had these guys for a couple of weeks. I can't stop playing with them again. I've missed them in a way I didn't realize. It's nice to have them back. I don't quite know how to play with them. And I do play with my toys. I mention that all the time. I don't know how to explain the need for toys to transform into geometric shapes. I can't quite figure out an in-head... I can't quite figure out a headcanon explanation for that. I bet some of you guys could come up with some good ideas. Some of you are really imaginative and tell me some cool stuff. So, lay it on me. Why would you have these guys transforming into geometric forms? What would that accomplish? Are they all hanging out in some shipping warehouse somewhere? You know? Are they at the docks, you know, seeming like they are forgotten crates waiting to be shipped overseas? Is it just a space saving issue? In which case, how do you explain the one that turns into a giant ball? They're weird. They're different. They are unforgettable. Could they have surpassed Transformers had Knickerbocker released them properly? Could they, with their own cartoon series and comic line, have taken the toy world by force? Dominated the toy aisle. Gone through multiple lines. Maybe even ended up being the venue through which Takara's toys ended up making it to America. Because clearly there was some relationship between Takara and Knickerbocker toys with the minibots. Could we ultimately have seen the Diaclone and Microchange toys come to America as part of the Mysterians? Well, that's a lot of conjecture. Who knows? But these guys are fascinating. They're a fascinating part of history. And even without the historical element, they're just really cool toys worth knowing. Uh, my gosh. Bomber alone. I could tell so many stories just with him. But the rest are cute and fun as well. I can't get enough of them. And unfortunately, they're becoming kind of pricey online. But if you're patient and you look carefully, you might find a few cheap marked unknown robot toy, unknown Transformers toy, or maybe even thrown in some massive transforming toy lot. Well, they weren't Transformers. They weren't GoBots. And I won't even try to argue they were better. What I will argue is that Mysterians were incredibly different. And it would have been interesting to have our first major transforming toy line in America be actually American made and designed. It would have been interesting. It would have created a very different playing field. And I'd be curious to see how it would have changed other series as well. Again, I suppose there's a possibility that Diaclone and Microchange might have come to America as part of the Mysterians line by Knickerbocker instead of the Transformers line by Hasbro. Maybe. Whatever the case may be, these are fascinating toys. They're tremendously fun. And if you're looking to go beyond Transformers and try something a little bit different, man, these guys will satisfy that itch. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, please hit like. Hype us if you're filming it. Subscribe. Hit the bell to get notifications. Leave a comment below. I love to see what you guys think and respond as often as I can. And, you know, hey, check out our other episodes. We have so many old episodes to go through. I want to thank my fans who have been with me for a long time for being patient the last few weeks while my back was out, putting up with reruns. I never liked doing that to you. Thanks for supporting me anyway. I hope you enjoyed this new episode. And, of course, I'll see you next week, 9 a.m. Saturday for our next episode. Until then, do not forget to stay weird.