#adverttoons

[therobotmonster]

What does the Comic tell us About the Brute Force Toyline that Never Was?

Brute Force was Marvel's failed attempt at joining in the toy-cartoon-comic fun back in 1990.

What isn't often talked about (if ever) is how much effort Jose Delbo (and whoever else was doing character design work in pre-production) put into planning for the realities of toy design, because it's not hard to suss out what was intended from the art alone.

Parts Reuse Was Planned From the Start:

The metal production molds are the most expensive part of toy production, so any time you can reuse parts across multiple figures is a savings. Each side has two unique members (Hip-Hop and Lionheart for Brute Force, Armory and Ramrod for Heavy Metal) three that share obvious parts with an opposing figure.

Uproar and Wreckless appear to use the same upper arms, upper legs, pelvis and probably chest. Uproar's bullets were likely planned as an accessory.

Surfstreak and Bloodbath appear to just have different heads, maybe tails, and either different accessories and limbs or just different accessories depending on execution.

Soar/Slipstream and Tailgunner appear to have unique add-on armor for the wings, heads, and legs. The wings might also been different, but I'd guess that when time came to mold plastic they'd have used the same ones.

Size Classes are Easy to Guess:

The "charge into battle" shot gives you every indication of what size everyone was going to be sold at. My guess, based on the art and the action features later shown off, is it would break down like this:

Small - Soar, Surfstream, Bloodbath, Tailgunner

Medium - Lionheart, HIp-Hop, Ramrod, Uproar.

Large - Wreckless, Armory, the toxic mutant (if they planned on making the off-theme guys)

Super Large - Heroic and Evil Transports

It's harder to place Heavy Metal since they don't seem to have add-on vehicles, but the art represents Armory as being huge and a major threat...

And uproar seems to have mass equal to Lionheart on his cycle, though he might have been packed in with the villain's large transport or had another add-on vehicle planned later.

It's likely that the vehicle-attached figures would have gotten solo releases, likely with different decos. As was the style at the time.

They Planned for Action Features, and I think I know what they were.

Furman and Delbo knew how to make a toy-comic, and everyone gets to show off their action feature in a toy-comic. Brute Force leaves some solid clues for what those features would have been. Now, there would probably have been launchers (Wreckless's Bearzooka), water-shooters (Surfstream almost certainly had one), etc, but I'm talking more about the showcase feature.

Surfstream and Bloodbath Were Low-Effort Transformers-

-or else they were biting MOTU Dragstor's style. Surfstream and Bloodbath clearly had both swimming/rolling configurations and upright figure configurations.

Soar (and likely Tailgunner) Had Blast-Away Armor

You don't do this trick twice in 4 issues if it's not your gimmick.

Wreckless and Uproar loved Hugs

My guess is there was at least some thought put into the possibility of Wreckless and Uproar having a "bear hug" feature that could work as general limb-swinging and chest pounding. In addition to the grabs Wreckless does a lot of right hooks and, oddly Uproar mainly fights with his mace for a character with bullet bandoleers. This one's harder to nail down because the actions are very obvious for bear/ape characters, but either a weapon-swing or a grab/bear hug seems really likely.

Wreckless's gun is the kind that you could mount on a figure's shoulder without them needing to hold it in-hand, so the arms might have been free for the action feature if my guess is right.

This Octopus Bastard Spins

You can't tell me Armory doesn't spin. perfectly radially symmetrical middle section designed in such a way the central body could spin while the legs and head stay stationary. arms that grip weapons or other figures, he's huge and clearly meant to be Heavy Metal's mega-weapon. He spins.

Hop-To Heroes

Now, if there's one thing the Brute Force characters do, it's leap. But the characters with the larger lock-on vehicle armor all leap out of the vehicle to attack a foe at least once.

I have to wonder if the vehicle figures were intended to be ejected from the vehicle as a leaping attack. (this would seem thematically in line with the armor-shed gimmick from Soar) This would be in addition to some general reconfiguration between low-riding "speed" modes and upright battle modes.

Ramrod would have had a headbutt gimmick.

It's literally all he does in the comic. I don't think he even has a gun.

Conclusions

Brute Force was intended into be a not just an action figure line, but a feature-heavy character driven line. The play patterns imagined were ambitious. I see Starriors, Transformers and Centurions DNA in there, and it would have been a lot more fun than Captain Planet for an eco-themed franchise.

The Marvel crew clearly learned a lot from the toy industry from working with Hasbro, Kenner, Mattel, Mego and numerous others through the years, and it shows. This concept started with toy ideas, it's just a pity no one was incentivized to make them.

[therobotmonster]

The game I'd love to make but is well outside any conceivable skill-set I'd have access to works along these lines.

In one part of the game, you would build a party and go out on various adventure quests. Clearing dungeons, clashing with villains, etc. The game is packed with little toyetic adventurer characters you can recruit, each one colorful and unique.

Between missions, however, you're managing your base like an Animal Crossing village or neighborhood in the Sims, and they get up to stuff based on their personalities and quirks. Conflicts between characters can cause various random events, ranging from typical wasted resource style penalties to special levels/minigames.

So if you leave, for instance, the wacky comic relief character alone with an inventor super-genius character they might just not get along, or the former might disrupt one of the latter's experiments and unleash a new monster or send the current party into another dimension requiring them to escape, etc. Having the responsible one take the place of one or the other can reduce that chance, but if you have the responsible one and the hothead together, they might get in a fight and the hothead wanders off for awhile blowing off steam.

To add a few extra plates to spin, the characters that don't do well together at base will often work very well together on missions. Preventing mishaps is basically impossible, the actual goal is to balance things so the extra events help your progress rather than hinder it. If you do it well, your characters become buddies and the penalties drop and the bonuses increase.

If all that sounds like the plot structure of a 80s-90s cartoons advertising action figures or the play-scenarios they inspired, that's the idea: replicate the feel of the toy adverttoon experience by having this expanding cast of wacky characters that, if they're not engaged in fighting the forces of evil, are getting up to wacky hijinks at the base.

Every contemporary video game RPG wants to give me a party of emotionally dysfunctional weirdos and then bends over backwards to ensure that none of my interpersonal decisions cause any intractable conflicts or have any lasting consequences, which just feels wrong to me – like the latter is actively undermining the former. I want to see an RPG that goes full early 90s dating sim. I want an RPG where organising my party composition is like that logic puzzle about getting a fox and a duck across a river.

[therobotmonster]

My Retro-Cartoon Ramblings, Part 8

And while we're on the subject of anthro-crimes... the Paw Paw Bears.

I know this looks like its from the 70s, but this was 1985. Sorry, folks. This is where the void stares back.

They put that on the USA Cartoon Express.

Enough creepy stuff...

Let's look at Jem, one of the weirder AdvertToons of age.

It's not the MTV inspired format, there were other shows doing that. No, Jem was different because it was basically just like Transformers and GI-Joe.

Jem was, in essence, a superhero show, despite the fact that its about a rock band that secretly runs an orphanage, in a sort of animated precursor to Hanna Montana. The "normal girl by day/rock star by night" thing is what one expects from the demographic and subject matter.

Except that the rival band, the Misfits, want to straight-up MURDER Jem. Compared to that, the secret barely explained supercomputer and the horde of moppets mean nothing, not when Pizzazz and her girls are rampaging across the nation like Decepticons, completely unopposed.

The two bands work for the same record company, but Pizzazz will commit attempted homicide three times an episode just to knock Jem, whose band sings a completely different genre of music, down the charts.

The gulf between the effort involved in the conflict and the underlying stakes of the rivalry make these characters superhumanly petty, and it makes the whole show worth it.

That and, the fact that Rio can't choose between Jerrica and Jem, both of whom are the same person, and both encourage him in his pursuit. So boo on him for double-timing, but she's like... gaslighting the hell out of him, right?

Girl is up to some next-level head games.

I think I'm officially team Pizzazz here.

[therobotmonster]

My Retro-Cartoon Ramblings, Part 5

I am not going to insult anyone by telling them they need to watch Gargoyles. This fact is self-evident.

Taken series-by-series rather than by franchise, it is the king of the Battle Animal Genre, even if they're not technically anthros.

Great characters, great story, great animation, a fan-frikkin' tastic voice cast, as deep of lore as you could hope for. The fact that it has yet to be rebooted or resurrected or turned into a movie is baffling.

In my book, the way you reboot a kid's franchise to work for a sophisticated audience is you "Gargoyles-it-up". Rich characters, a sorrowful undertone, scenery-chewing villains and a satisfying lore.

But Will Riker in a robot Gargoyle suit is also here. (He represents capitalism.)

Now taken by franchise, the TMNT of course rule the battle animal roost.

They made the genre, even if there were others who were scrapping for that place at the time. I can't tell you the kind of switch that went off in kids heads when we first saw this:

You can not understand what the initial TMNT wave was like unless you were there to get caught by it. Context doesn't help. A nation of children botched our save VS ridiculous but extremely fun bullshit, and my kidvid/toy aspirations crystalized just a bit more.

What gets lost is just how bonkers the show actually was. While remembered more like an AdverTtoon in the Has/Ken model, with wisecracking action figures going on sci-fi capers, the reality was way more Looney Tunes. An old lady pulls an assault rifle on the boys in episode 1!

The whole thing is exceptionally cartoony, though not in the way a lot of latter-day crossovers would have you believe. The world is less wacky-for-wackiness's sake, and is more the exact kind of world where "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" make sense.

It's the one thing that makes OG Fred Wolf TMNT unique among all its other variations, reboots and predecessors. Everywhere else, the boys are the barometer for weird. They're the out-of-place thing in a (more) sane world.

In 87, they might live underground, but the turtles are cool-kid everyman characters. They're normal New Yorkers compared to the tourists from Dimension X and the horde of mutants, robots, robot-mutants, and a grown man calling himself the Shredder that show up each week.

Coming out of the first major wave of turtlemania was like awakening from a fugue state.

[therobotmonster]

My Retro-Cartoon Ramblings, Part 1

I am bored, so I'm copying an old twitter thread to a series of posts here. Bailing out some of the better content before Elon sinks that bitch, as it were. Maybe give ya something to watch during the strikes. Some improvements and edits may be made.

80s Cartoons Tiered and commented on in no order in particular, but starting with an obvious high-ranking contender, Before he was solemn robojesus martyrdad, Optimus Prime played b-ball, called decepticons "boobies" and okayed building robot dinosaurs for… fun, I guess?

What I'm saying is its goofier and more fun than you remember. It also had a way of feeling bigger than it was. Fun fact! I knew I wanted to create toys and kidvid the second I heard the metallic clunk of Sludge's torso being dropped on his legs.

It's also about 35% jank by volume. Just assume that's true for everything here. Animation errors, coloring errors, voice errors, plotting errors, conceptual errors, its all there. Sometimes all in one scene.

Next up, Masters of the Universe. One of the first of the new toy commercial cartoons (Which I call "AdvertToons"), and a weird artifact in and of itself. Nonviolent to the point of comedy, with a weird mix of sinister-sounding lore and super-cuddly after-school special morality.

It's a show where a creature which is explicitly stated to be a demon can be redeemed because Orko wants to be his friend. It feels like an artifact from another dimension, being one of (if not the) last all-US produced animated series (for awhile at least.)

It's one of the few shows I recommend everyone watch at least a couple of episodes. Not so much because it's good or holds up, but just because it's so uniquely of its time.

ALSO, if you're looking to do animation with a small team... you could probably pull off a series like motu on youtube with a team of half a dozen if you used all the same tricks with current tech.

(continued in part 2)