Being a vintage VHS Video nut, with a particular penchant for old Sci-Fi and space animation, I was intrigued by this Jayce and The Wheeled Warriors tape [above]. Like Ulysses, another video cartoon I've never heard of but own, I've discovered that Ebay is full of Jayce toys! Loads of them like the one below [although this one doesn't appear to mention Jayce]. In fact it seems really quite popular so who on earth were Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors?
4 comments:
The story of Wheeled Warriors is a strange one.
Mattel creates a small line that is supposed to be one of the "gap fillers" around massive lines like Masters of the Universe, and somehow get a marketing push that involves a cartoon.
The animated show takes off somewhat, and kids find the toys you linked, wanting Jayce and getting the Lightning League.
Mattel had plans to put Jayce into the line in series 2, but series 2 never made it to production, leaving us with the anomaly of a cartoon more famous than the toyline that generated it, featuring a completely different set of main characters.
There is quite a following of this mid-1980's toy based show: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayce_and_the_Wheeled_Warriors
It looks like Babylon 5 creator, J. Michael Strczynski wrote for much of the show.
I was mistakenly convinced that these were the same scale as Mattel's (much earlier) Battlestar Galactica vehicles and bought a similar looking 'driver' figure in the same brown hard-plastic as the Glactica Viper pilot.
Looks like an interesting toy line with a bit of ZOIDS flavour.
Don't remember the toys but do remember the cartoon being shown on ITV during the school holidays in the late 80s.
Awesome show which, apart from the vehicle designs, had very little to do with the toys themselves.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXl_wX9hJkc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLU1GfIIGLE
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