Every toy collector has an obsession. Some people are completely fixated on mutants. Some have to have everything Batman or Batman related. Maybe you only buy Jedi, or female figures, or maybe you only buy red toys. Everyone has that one thing that sticks in their brain and won’t let go. Mine is Starriors. If a thread pops up asking what toy line we’d like updated, Starriors is always the first thing that pops into my head. With every SDCC or Toy Fair I am always hoping to see the slightest hint of an updated Starriors line. But it never happens.
The weirdest thing? I don’t think I could honestly claim that Starriors is my favorite toy property. It’s probably not. I don’t sit around in hopeless devotion bowing to a shrine built out of vintage Starriors figures. I don’t even have a complete collection of the vintage figures. I have plenty of toy lines that take up my time and money. But still, this doomed toy line from 1984 that barely managed a blip on the radar of pop culture gestates inside my head like an amorphous fetus forged of pure potential. I was consumed by these toys for the briefest chunk of childhood. I remember sitting and staring at that double page spread of figures up there, hoping to grab them all. I can look at it even now 30+ years divorced from those days and still remember that tug of want.
For those scratching your head in curiosity as to what I’m talking about — and Starriors shows up in plenty of “what were these?” threads across the vast wasteland of the Internet — I’ll fill you in. Starriors was a toy line that debuted in 1984 from Tomy. It was a relative of their Zoids line but featured a brand new story for American audiences. The toy line was all robot, all the time. If anybody has ever read anything I’ve ever written, then you’ll know that if there were robots, I was immediately in love. Droids, Transformers, Go-Bots, B.A.T.S. . . . if it was made of cold steel and had a reactor where it’s heart should have been, chances are I was interested in it. Starriors was robot heaven.
As is required of any self-respecting toy line, the Starriors were comprised of Protectors, who were the good guys, and Destructors, who were the bad guys. There’s really no way Destructors could be the good guys, so already we have a ton of profiling going on.
Within these two groups there were a number of smaller groups, chief among these the human-shaped Wastors. The basic story was that it was post-apocalypse (robots and post-apocalypse — boner city) and humans were sleeping underground. The earth still needed tending to, so there were several robot classes that kept things functioning. Protectors had to rebuild the earth, Destructors were supposed to destroy any harmful life forms that cropped up, and so on. So the Destructors were technically supposed to be the good guys, except for a guy named Slaughter Steelgrave, who has the best villain name ever. He wasn’t too happy with man and was a bit of a whack job.
Most of this story can be found in the Starriors mini-series produced by Marvel Comics in 1984. Louise Simonson managed to breathe a ton of life into your typical licensed-property comic and told a complete story in four issues. Unfortunately, another four issue mini-series featuring robots ended up with a bit more success that year, and while Transformers went on to accrue another 76 issues under Marvel’s auspices alone, the Starriors comic ended and ended permanently, leaving us bereft of the further adventures of Protectors versus Destructors.
I think it’s possible that I might not have this little obsession with Starriors if not for that comic. Something about it — from the dark themes to the specifically detailed personalities — made a lasting impression on me as a kid. If you ever have a chance, track down those four issues and give them a read. The ’80s were the peak of the “comics based on toys” movement, and I rank those four issues up there with G.I. Joe and Transformers, which for me is high praise.
The toys, however, were standard lower-tier ’80s stuff. There are toys that sit proudly on the shelves of stores like Best or Hills, and then there are the toys that show up at drug stores like Revco. Starriors, unfortunately, was doomed to the Revco toy aisle. While I do believe they had a brief shot at the gold at Best — where I managed to score a couple before they disappeared — they would soon be discount items at Revco or worse, with their prices slashed down to mere pennies on the dollar. Were they bad toys? Not at all. They were limited, yes, with a basic seven points of articulation for the Wastor (humanoid) types. Their gimmick was a wind-up chest-mounted gimmick of some type. Saws that spun, drills that drilled, lasers that throbbed in and out — these were all pretty cool for the time, and the gimmick was utilized to great effect in the comic. But they were made of a lower-grade plastic, and even being as anally careful as I am, I managed to snap off an arm on one of mine.
That’s where my obsession comes in. This property that came into existence and left without fanfare or success has never managed to get the toys that it deserves. But now we have the ability to truly give them top-notch toys. Now is the time to take these old designs and give them a glossy 21st century upgrade. If we could take those squat robots with limited articulation and turn them into 1/12th masterpieces, this line would certainly grab even the uninitiated and hold their attention.
The best thing is the shared molds. Hotshot — leader of the Protectors — shares a mold with Slaughter Steelgrave. That theme carries through all the humanoid robots. The good guy shares a mold with the corresponding bad guy, with only their chest piece being the gimmick. That halves the amount of tooling needed right there. All you need is a chest void to slide in the appropriate gimmick — sans action feature, though — and you can get two toys for the price of one. Hell, they could even be sold as two packs, like this Sawtooth/Cut-up pack below:
With so many new properties popping up in the ’80s, not every toy line could make it. In toys, like in life, there are winners, losers, and underdogs. I like to look at Starriors as an underdog that could get a second life and surprise everyone by capturing a level of success it never enjoyed its first go around. All that’s needed is for someone to realize this property’s potential and update this!
