TAtTF: Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors
In honor of Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors first session hitting DVD, I figured that it was high time I said something about the line and shared a couple of TV ads from it.
What’s that? You aren’t familiar with Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors? For shame! Let me enlighten you. The Wheeled Warriors was an toy line from Mattel that didn’t last very long. In fact it came out in 1983 and was over almost immediately.
Like 90% of toys from the 80s there was also a cartoon that is much more notable than the toy line, because it was written by none other than Babylon 5 scribe J. Michael Straczynski. Straczynski was also a writer for The Real Ghost Busters and Captain Power, so he pretty much was on my Gods during my childhood and I didn’t even know it.
Notice that the toy line was sold without “Jacye” in the title, most likely because the toys came packed with figures that looked nothing like their cartoon counterparts and didn’t even mention the story from the cartoons anywhere on the packaging. You can tell by the advertisements that the commercial doesn’t indicate any kind of a deeper story other than Good vs. Evil, the toys are just vehicles that you add accessories to coolify them.
I had the head bad guy, Saw Boss, and he was a pretty cool toy. The bad guy Wheeled Warriors featured brain like things as the vehicles pilots making them fairly unique with the whole killer plant/vehicle being driven by an evil brain. One of the low points of the Wheeled Warriors (at least the one that I had) was that since almost all the parts could be swapped, they were destined to be lost. If I was good at anything as a child, it was being a sissy and losing things. Thankfully for the three other kids that did love the Wheeled Warriors, they made accessory packs to replace some of your missing parts. Now THAT’S smart marketing… well except for the part they weren’t able to sell any of these things.
April 14th, 2008 at 10:20 pm
[...] Via: Toy Bender [...]