Screw This!

There was a definite pecking order among the transforming robot toys of my childhood. Transformers were high class citizenry, GoBots were solidly second class and Convertors were at the bottom of the heap (I mean, they didn't even have a TV show). The GoBots in my childhood collection never got the same respect as even similarly-sized Transformers (Huffer and Seaspray were so much cooler than their Tonka counterparts).

I owned exactly five GoBots (not counting my three Rock Lords that were technically part of the same universe). When I was a teenager I gave all my GoBots, Rock Lords, Transformers and Convertors away to a younger family friend. He was a fan of the then current Beast Wars toys and loved the Power Rangers' Zord toys so I thought he'd really appreciate my bunch of transforming robots. 

He didn't. It broke my heart when I later saw many of my old toys lying broken in his toy box. Moral of the story: Don't give away your toys! Don't do it! It doesn't always work out like it did in Toy Story 3.

Anyway, when I began collecting Transformers as an adult I still considered GoBots to be pale imitations of the "real thing." The Marshmallow Mateys to Transformers' Lucky Charms. But then I got my hands on some inexpensive GoBots at a flea market and one of the fundamental tenets of my toy faith crumbled.

It turns out that GoBots are really good toys. Some of them I'd even call great toys. It may have taken me decades but I now see the light.

That was a long-winded way to get me to this point: Behold the majesty of Screw Head!

Of the five GoBots I owned as a child Screw Head was my favorite. Given my new appreciation for the GoBots, I HAD to reacquire him.

Even given my recent experience with a far greater number of GoBots than I had as a child, Screw Head still rates as a favorite. His face looks a bit like a Cylon Centurion, which isn't a bad thing at all. It's definitely an evil robot face offering no comfort to the puny human populace. 

His articulation is normal for the time and mostly serves his transformation. His arms rotate at the shoulder and the shoulders themselves can swing inward for his transformation. Each leg bends backward at the knee and there is also an "ankle" joint. 

He's got quite a bit of chrome on him. Chrome was a common feature of many 80's toy lines and I think every GoBot I own has some somewhere (often on the head).

His alternate mode is a big ol' drill tank. He loses the red in this mode but still shows off the chrome. There's a sticker representing the windshield. He's got a small plastic wheel on each limb which allows his drill tank mode to roll around a little but in my childhood imagination this mode was also capable of flight.

I never understood why the powers that be at Tonka decided that the lame motorcycle robot should be the leader of the bad guys. I owned Cy-Kill when I was a kid, too, and he just couldn't hold a candle to Screw Head. Screw Head's black, red and chrome color scheme screamed "evil" and his alternate mode promised so much more destruction and devastation than a motorcycle. The only explanation I can come up with for why Screw Head was not selected to be the ultimate baddy is that no one could possibly believe that he was as inept and ineffectual as the evil leader in a cartoon series needed to be.

There's just no way that anyone who looks this positively badass wouldn't have kicked Leader-1's tail fins and turned Turbo and Scooter into mangled piles of scrap. If Screw Head had been in charge of the Renegades they would have won every battle. Eventually, all of the Guardians would be destroyed and the TV series would have ended after only a few episodes. The boring motorcycle robot was only put charge for the greater good of the series. Cy-kill was believably lame enough toprovide the pathetic schemes and sad little skirmishes required to the series alive. It is the only explanation that makes any sense.