GoBots: Guardian Command Center

If there is one thing that gave GoBots a leg up on Transformers it was that they had playsets. They had two official, two unofficial, and one unproduced set. Playsets go a long way with me and if you've followed this blog for awhile that shouldn't be a surprise to you. Probably the most important GoBot playset was the Guardian Command Center. I never had one growing up but I did get a brand new one from Dallas Vintage Toys this week.

There is always a magical feeling when you get something brand new. It is a little bit like time travel for the emotions. Everything here was brand new but unfortunately it had water damage, as you can see in the pictures. This wasn't a huge problem but it did cause me grief in the stickers department. The entire sheet had developed a few layers of grime from dust and being in a water damaged box. I was able to clean it a little bit but some of the stickers were unusable. To compensate I ended up finding some repro stickers from various Star Wars vehicles and playsets online. I like the end result and I might work on adding some more.

The directions were in really bad shape and unsavable. I took pictures of each page before getting rid of them.

The set also included a mini comic. The story inside predates the cartoon but unlike the Masters of the Universe mini comics, this one really didn't improve on the overall story, save for the fact that it gives an explanation for why the GoBots look like Earth vehicles.

The exterior of the Command Center:

Walker mode. This guy is scaled pretty well.

Spaceship mode.

The back hatch.

One of my favorite stickers above the head.

And now the interior:

Trauma Center/Med Bay

The Interrogation Center.

The cool red screen was supposed to help identify Guardians and Renegades. It was a cool concept. The included stickers could be applied to your figures. These were some of the beyond saving stickers unfortunately.

Notice how the top row stickers became F's for Friendly and the bottom row became E's for Enemy. A pretty thoughtful add on that they didn't need to include.

The Detention Center and, yikes, De-Materializer. Guess you could only cross Leader 1 so many times.

Again, yikes, the Reprogramming Center.

Perhaps for the best, the GoBot Cafeteria sticker was damaged.

So this became a computer terminal.

The GoBot Maintenance/Refueling area

I feel like there is a lot of unused space here.

I'm going to try to find some things to add to the area.

Maybe a maintenance lift.

The Vertical Transportation Module. Again, notice the details here.

The sticker labels each floor of the Command Center. Pretty cool.

And finally, the Strategic Command/Strategy Center.

I still might add in some more buttons and computers.

All in all, a pretty cool toy. It really bummed me out to have the sticker sheet so dirty, especially because there are not a lot of options to replace them. No one has them scanned online and the only place selling replacements is Toy Hax but $66 is ridiculous. However, they do have Guardian and Renegade insignias that I might pick up.

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