Robo Force Review: If '80s Toy Cartoons Were Made Today
Like its nostalgia toy lines, Nacelle throws back to the past with tech of today
The main question running through my head while watching Robo Force, a new animated miniseries (for now) in six 30-minute installments, was, “Who is this for?'
On the surface, it seems to be a cartoon to sell toys, like many of Gen-X's '80s favorites. But the toys aren't that easily available – I've never seen them at mass retail, though they are supposed to be available at Walmart. And the show is on Tubi, which isn't necessarily a place a kid might stumble across the way they would have syndicated cartoons on a network's afternoon lineup in the '80s.
The show is also an ambitious launch for an entire “Nacelle-verse,” which consists of various '80s and '90s toy lines that production company and toy company Nacelle has picked up the licenses to, even though they don't necessarily go together easily. To whit: Sectaurs, which predated David Cronenberg's The Fly remake, were like a PG version of that sort of body horror on a planetary scale, all nightmare human-insect (and arachnid) fusions, while Power Lords were based on the surreal, dreamlike alien creations of artist Wayne Barlowe. How do you mesh those easily with the cartoony, Ninja-Turtle inspired humanimals of Biker Mice From Mars and C.O.W. Boys of Moo Mesa? Not in any particularly logical way, but one idea might be to follow the Marvel approach of individual origins first, followed by a creative way to make worlds collide.
Instead, Robo Force is set on a future Earth that has already made contact with multiple alien races, and features C.O.W. Boys, Biker Mice, and Sectaurs just mixing with humans casually without explanation. A kid might wonder why some of the humanoid characters look like Mantis from Guardians of the Galaxy – no in-universe explanation is really provided in these six episodes, but any Gen-X toy collector will recognize them as Sectaurs.
And that's the real audience, I would wager. Middle-aged men (mostly men, let's say) who remember all these lines, but probably not with a great deal of specificity, since none of them lasted long. It wants to bring back the feel of those old toy-commercial cartoons while being somewhat better, and at times deliberately worse – the theme song is an earworm that's kind of awful and great at the same time. It will stay in your head if you watch all six episodes, because unlike the old shows that generally ran the lyric version upfront and an instrumental at the end (save He-Man and She-Ra, who did it backwards), Robo Force does the full lyric version at the beginning and end. The lyrics literally tell the story of the first episode, just in case this ever becomes syndicated and viewed out of order.
In my online conversations with other toy collectors, I've heard some grousing about the animation quality, but I think some may be looking back with heavy nostalgia filters. Filmation, for one, repeated sequences and cels to save money, and they simplified the Masters of the Universe toy designs quite a bit. The Robo Force characters retain a lot of detail, though I think Nacelle did right by making the toys first, and more intricate. Using 3-D modeling and cel shading, it's easier and cheaper to get quality animation, and while Robo Force certainly isn't Pixar-level, let's give it some due credit – it's way better looking than most cartoons based on toys. It has an advantage in that its main characters aren't human, but rather big, blocky machines that don't need a wide range of facial expressions.
Robo Force had a cartoon pilot episode in the '80s, but not like this. The hook for the new Robo Force is based on the real story of the toy line – a much-hyped set of robot action figures that retailers heavily bought into, only to see kids vastly prefer the more sophisticated Transformers. Here, they're full-sized service robots, made instantly obsolete by more humanoid creations called the 101 series (a Terminator reference the target audience will get). Society adapts, the 101s integrate at the highest levels, and the Robo Force models end up doing the menial jobs nobody else will. But then the 101s start malfunctioning and going rogue – is it random, or some sort of evil pattern? Who will save us? Well, you probably already know.
The 101 series aren't especially toyetic or interesting, but the six-episode arc is more of a Transformers One-style storyline to establish how a schism in Robo Force will ultimately create good and evil factions. For the most part, those designs have been updated and improved from the original suction cup, Dalek-esque figures, though at least one of the classic '80s toy designs shows up. Characters die, too, but because they're robots, this would have been allowable in '80s kids cartoons, which frequently utilized the loopholes restricting any depiction of violence against other humans, but not machines. I'm not sure if the new toys have any action features, but the storyline showcases all the robot characters' powers as if they did. Again, I don't know that this will actually reach a lot of kids who want the toys to duplicate the onscreen action, versus adults who just want detail and articulation.
To make the story more relatable, the robots are joined by their creator, a young woman of South Asian heritage named Soraya Aviram (Julee Song), whose counterpart is a white corporate douche named Nima Tannhauser (Jack Chisholm). Initially set up as an adversary who wants to buy her out, he's more of a frenemy by the end, and slightly more complex than the typical supporting character in a good toy vs. bad toy show. One hallmark of those old cartoons, though, was awful non-middle-American accents, and whether by accident or design, Robo Force has at least two of those, one “Russian” and one “Jewish mother.” Hey, I'm not complaining: Safari Joe is my favorite ThunderCats villain besides Mumm-Ra.
Why Dwayne Johnson and his ex-wife and ex brother-in-law are attached to this, I'm not sure; it's not immediately like anything he's ever been attached to before, save maybe the fact that he played a G.I. Joe character. It's also not like he called in celebrity favors for the cast – the most recognizable name in there is Nacelle's own head honcho Brian Volk-Weiss, who also directed and wrote the theme song. From what I understand, Johnson's pal Ryan Reynolds may be more hands-on with the Biker Mice cartoon, when Nacelle gets to that; there is a post-credits tease at the end of episode 6, but it's not for them, though they have small cameos throughout the season.
Point is, if you're expecting to hear The Rock, you won't. The whole idea here is a bit like Masters of the Universe Classics, the toy line whose premise was: what if back in the '80s, we could have used 2000s tech to make the toys look exactly like the designs? Similarly, this is: “What if we could do an '80s toy cartoon with the animation tech we have now”? So far, so decent – I'm not crazy about the crossover aspect, but it's minimal at this point, though an increase is teased for whatever comes next. Nacelle are also making Star Trek figures now, and we really don't need Edward Jellico and Weyoun palling around with cartoon mice. Power Lords, on the other hand...
Robo Force is now viewable on Tubi. All images courtesy of Nacelle.
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