Review – Kellogg’s Starbot Shuttle (1984)

Last week I shared a cereal box from 1984 that offered these Kellogg’s Starbot cheap transforming robot toys to kids. Awesome box design and artwork, and today I get the pleasure of sharing the Starbot Shuttle with you guys. In two different colors!

Shuttle Mode

I unfortunately do not have the toys in their original form (plastic sprues waiting for the parts to be snapped off and assembled), but we can at least enjoy these two beaten and loved toys in both their shuttle and robot modes. The shuttle is roughly 2.5-inches long, and even though it looks like both of them are missing a tailfin the toys appear to be complete; I think the design is simply minus a large and obvious tailfin.

Since these two toys were clearly played with back in the eighties it is no surprise that the stickers are so frayed and worn. Still, there’s enough here that we can see each toy had a separate sticker sheet. Okay, that’s more effort than I had expected we would find was applied to making the Kellogg’s Starbot transforming robot toys. Kudos to the original designers for sinking energy into making the blue and gray shuttles slightly different!

Robot Mode

When I call these Kellogg’s Starbot toys “cheap transforming robots” it is meant in only the kindest way. They’re bad, yes, but there’s such an adorable charm to the robots that they are fantastic little additions to the robot shelf. And looking at these two little guys only reinforces how popular transforming robot toys were back in 1984. Why else would these have existed if kids didn’t want every single transforming robot toy that was produced?

Transformation is simple, with the head extending up, the wings folding down to form feet, and the arms swinging up from the sides of the shuttle. The robot stands about 3-inches tall, and since the “feet” and “arms” are two single pieces of plastic moving one wing or one arm moves the opposite side at the same time. Hey, I said these are cheap transforming robot toys and I mean it!

Closing Thoughts

The cereal box post last week + this review means that everyone now has all the info they’re likely to ever need on the 1984 Kellogg’s Starbot toys. That doesn’t mean I won’t share more about the toys in the near future — hey, we need to make sure all of this stuff is collected together, right? It’s not as if someone else is going to be dumb enough to assemble information and snap pics of these terrible old toys. Don’t worry, I’ve got it handled.