"The Retromancer [...] shall be an odd creature. He shall not know when to quit, nor when to thusly shut up, and will prattle on about the accounts and the descriptions of the aforementioned Dummies, and their accursed, Devilled synthetic flesh shall not deter him. He shall be indefatigable in this pursuit. Just not in other, more valid, more rewarding pursuits."
Of course no toyline, not even one based on unmitigated vehicular carnage, is really complete without a few villains to spice up the playtime action.
Torturing tiny plastic dummies is fun and all, but what really determines the success of a toy franchise is whether the enemies are cool enough to keep things interesting. It was obvious by 1992, about a year and a half after its debut, that something, something evil, had to be added to the Incredible Crash Dummies line.
The Ninja Turtles had Shredder and the Foot Clan. G.I. Joe had Cobra. And the Crash Dummies had, tada, the Junkbots, led by a spurned former crash test dummy with a backstory steeped in a nice minty tea of neglect, treachery, and betrayal.
Fired from the Crash Test Center (playset available at your local K-Mart, of course), this unnamed victim of cold-hearted Upper Management cursed the very existence of his plastic-headed brethren and sought refuge in a local junkyard, hoarding and brooding and plotting revenge a la Phantom of the Opera.
And you thought everything was nice and neon in the land of vehicular safety.
Along with a repudiation of the crash dummy society that tossed him to the curb (here's a story lesson for ya, kids: even your favorite heroes get sacked and go batshit sometimes), came a dark desire for revenge. At least, that's what the supplied quotes on his backing card indicate: "Why should I crash cars to help humans? Who needs humans? Machines should rule the world!"
And so the newly-styled "Junkman" created his Junk Army, as one does, and birthed three nefarious minions: Jack Hammer, Piston Head, and Sideswipe. And so the four evil bad guys could now terrorize their do-gooder counterparts with such dastardly deeds as sabotage, kidnapping, and the worse offence of all, neglecting to separate their recyclables.
Pieced together from odd scraps of junkyard garbage, jutting and bulging, topped with steel radiators and spangled with mangled axles, the Junkbots were pretty damn bad-ass for a toyline aimed at "children aged 3 and up."
Truth be told, they may well go down as the most fearsome action figure enemies of the early '90s. Bebop and Rocksteady were buffoons, after all, as was Shredder. Given the choice of throwing it down with a ninja or a six-foot-tall mountain of scrap metal and carburetors, I'd pick the former — a ninja I know I can kill with a well-aimed shotgun blast to the face.
Of course, while the Incredible Crash Dummies were designed to be broken apart and put back together over and over again, in reality a Crash Dummy only had a life expectancy of about one or two good years. Too much punishment (or the kind of punishment meted out by a kid with deep-seated anger issues) meant a sure demise for the figures' tiny internal springs, rendering the toys useless.
There's no use having a crash test dummy around if you can't pop him back together for another suicide run when you get bored with the LEGOs.
This fundamental design flaw perhaps had something to do with the line's ultimate demise only a year after the debut of the Junkbots, in 1993. (By the way, that's not me in the above picture. I was five in 1993. I envy his mustache, though.)
After going supernova and shedding off an amazing assortment of tie-in merchandise, including Incredible Crash Dummies sticker books, wallets, bean bag chairs, Valentine's Day cards, lunch boxes, blow-out party favors, pencil cases, View Master reels, piggy banks, sunglasses, wallets and wall posters — all plastered with adorably hokey catchprases like "Slammin' and Jammin'!", "Doing the Boulevard Bounce," and "You Drive Me Up the Wall!" — the whole thing vanished from sight, leaving a lot of memories, a lot of history, and a whole lot of tiny orphaned plastic arms and legs.
...And, truth be told, some odd curiosities as well. More on those next time.
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