March 08, 2004
#31 :: Rock'em Sock'em Robot
He is Russian, I think. Sure, he's a Mattellian icon made (at least until recently) right here in the USA. But he's got that Dostoyevskian brow, those sledgehammer fists, and he glows with a fiery red when the morning sun hits my office window. He's a 6-inch Burger King knockoff with a thumb-lever for a spine. The original Rock'em Sock'em Robots were about 10 inches high, and connected to sets of dual thumb-powered triggers via sleds slotted into a bright yellow thermoplastic boxing ring. When I was 8 or 9, I desperately needed a set in my life, so that I could yell like the boy in the TV commercials, "Hey, you knocked my block off!!!" and then push the spring-loaded, ratchet-mounted skull of cubist plastic back onto those burly shoulders and go at it again. No, my folks replied coldly - as they did with Creepy Crawlers, Lite-Brite, Monster Magnet and just about every other disposable must-have toy - "It's a piece of junk." And so it was, according to this review.
This is one of those iconic products -- q.v. its appearance in Toy Story 2. A friend had one. A reviewer's note that the robots were not equally hard to KO rings true; there was always a bit of a scramble to get the one with the stiffer neck. I also still remember the "ZIZZZzzz" of the neck popping up, then a very brief silence followed by the thwack of a palm on the top of the robot's head, cocking the thing for another round. We beat on this wobbly, clattering apparatus mercielessly -- it was a BOXING game, after all. Not much of a context for restraint.
Posted by: Paul Bx at March 9, 2004 09:33 AM