B is for Bad Boy Bender and the Bat Bots

Who will be performing live at Guildford Civic Hall from when until then!

Or......

A is for Almost Superheroes

Or Super Heroes, Super-heroes or even Superhero's as some feebleBayers will insist on calling them . . . Superhero's what? Which one?

I'm going to presume, guess AND assume (it winds-up you-know-who and that pleases me) that these were larger gum-ball machine prizes, although they may have had a header-bagged issue as well, probably mid-to-late 1970's, but; maybe later . . . the accuracy doesn't really matter, as while they have a charm (like a lot of rack-toy shite), they are - on one level - really, really, really shite, and will only ever be a curiosity, even when the full facts ARE known!

They turn-up infrequently, but I've been encountering them pretty-much since I started collecting again back in the late 1980's, usually in ones and twos, although both this lot and the bulk of my collection in storage were together, obviously amassed by someone else who saw through the charm to the shite, no . . . saw through the shite to the shite . . . hold on - I'll get it right in a minute . . . oh - you know what I mean!

The weird thing about them and the reason for today's alternate titles (apart from the fact that I couldn't make up my mind which one to go with), is that while they look - at first glance - to be 50mm space robots of some kind, when you study them, they all have Batman's logo on their chest[cabinet]s! I mean WT-very-F?!

Then you realise the left-hand 'knobbly-knee' robot has a Bat-Hood^TM, with Bat-Ears^TM and a utility Bat-Belt^TM, while the one in the middle looks a bit like Bender from Futurama? In fact there are elements of Bender in both right-hand designs, but I suspect any resemblance is either coincidental or was the other way round with Groening and/or his/the artist/s having some of these esoteric lumps of polyethylene on their desk/s as they started the Futurama project?

To give the post another image! The reason I was picking these up even when I was only a small scale collector is they were smallish, at around 50mm, and I tended to collect the stuff no one else rated at the time - up to 50mm!

You can see the Gemodels spaceman (whom I always consider a spacewoman) which I also collected from the off (there's a bagful in storage, all different colours, even a marbled-swirl one - I think?) is a slight 50mm as well, with the Crescent-for-Kellogg's at a more traditional 54mm, the two German Wundertuten coming-in around the 60-mark and a factory-painted Hong Kong copy of Archer at their original 70-odd-mil.

Sometimes I look at these and wonder if I haven't just missed a Batman parody episode of Futurama, but then I realise the Asian toy-producers had pretty-much stopped using the HK marks by the time of the TV show (late 1990's) and I was encountering them earlier than the show anyway.

I'd like to think there are more poses, but I'm pretty sure my in-storage sample has the same three poses and no others? It's just struck me that the Bender-Bot is wearing his Bat-signal^TM Bat-logo^TM like a medal; on a chain!

Also - I'd like to say there are other colours, but my memories of the storage lot seem to suggest this is it, there may be dark blue ones, or maroonish-red ones, but I think rack-toy  'armyman' green, brown and 'sand' is your lot? Greyish-black maybe?

But they're great aren't they? I mean they're shite, but it's some great shite!

Go Batbots^TM!