Review – Go-Bots Lunchbox

Lunchbox, Inside and Out* is fantastic reading (reading post here) if you have any interest at all in the classic lunchbox. That book is more entertaining than I expected and the reason that I bought this Go-Bots lunchbox when I visited the Dallas Vintage Toy Store last month.

In fact, that book may be too much fun since I find myself looking at old lunchboxes more often than I should.

A Classic Design

Lunchboxes are split into a variety of basic designs — rounded top, metal, plastic, soft vinyl zippery, and more — and it’s only after years working in production and manufacturing that I understand that the reason those old plastic lunchboxes were all physically the same was that the more uses you can get out of a mold the better off you are. And this Go-Bots lunchbox looks to me like one of those basic shapes that was used over and over by the manufacturer, Thermos, since all they had to do was change the plastic color and art and they had a new product.

Go-Bots Growing On Me

I can admit that Go-Bots always felt cheap and kinda lame to me. Hell, even as recently as four years ago I wrote a short blog post titled — Why GoBots sucked . . . on my LJ — and reading that today makes me think I was judging the line too harshly. Go-Bots was never the best of the transforming robot toys, but the toys were better than I realized and it was unfair of me to say they sucked. It’s not that they sucked. No, it was that a completely different approach was taken with them than with Transformers and the toys had a different feel.

Hey, This Isn’t a Review!

Yeah, you caught me. But do any of us really want to read a review of something as silly as a lunchbox? So instead of trying to hide it any longer I’ll just do the decent thing and admit that there’s no review. Enjoy the photos! Now to find a good place to display my Go-Bots lunchbox. And maybe it’s time to look at some other older lunchboxes and see if I can find any good deals . . .

Philip Reed is positive that he’ll be buying more Go-Bots goodies. Are there any good books on the Go-Bots toys and collectibles?