Rise of the Robots

 

When Star Wars blew off the doors of my perception in the seventies and made sci-fi desirable to the masses, it also ushered in a new era of collecting. Suddenly, Airfix wasn't the sole purveyor of model kits and the market began to see an influx of japanese kits enter the market. Whilst we had Tamiya, with its high end collector grade models, they had mostly featured military and car kits. Now the likes of Imai and Bandai appeared, bearing all kinds of weird and wonderful models from unknown anime and tv shows in Japan. My first encounter was with the Macross series kits, heavy duty military robots and powered suits that looked like they had been made for use and used, hard. The detail was intricate and the robots had the added element of moveability and poseability, shadowing the future rise of the action figure genre.Unfortunately for me though, the sudden influx of exciting new models meant I had to struggle to keep up with the flow and a lot of my college grant went on the purchase of new kits each week. Later on, in the 1980's, as demand petered out, the kits appeared in discount stores and I was able to buy several kits at one stroke. Just recently, I found one that had initially eluded me, the Walker Galliar from Bandai. More toy than kit, it has the ability to transform into two vehicles, but actually making it up needed several pair of hands to make sure all the joints connected! The Galliar was one of a later series of kits from a show called Xabungle, and the range featured what appeared to be a range of mining robots sent into battle. While most of the kits feature bipedal walking machines, some were very odd looking indeed.

TRAD WALKING MACHINE

SENDVEAD WALKING MACHINE

CRAB WALKING MACHINE

MACROSS DESTROID DEFENDER AND SPARTAN

NITTO 3DSF ARMOURED FIGHTING SUITS

LEGIOSS ARMODIVER

Whilst modern sci-fi and robots are generally out of the scope of Moonbase Central, these models represent a turning point for me, when I abandoned my search for vintage toys and began buying up all the japanese toys and kits I could find. Then of course, ebay emerged and the rest as they say, is history..