Review – Moto-Bot Dump Truck

“Moto-Bot vehicle/robot units are here! Disguised as everyday vehicles each Moto-Bot becomes a robot at your command! Every Moto-Bot is powered by a pull-back motor for action-packed excitement.”
— from the front of the card

Here’s another transforming robot toy from my childhood. Like the Marchon Roadbots Loadorr toy from 1984 (review here), this robot dump truck toy kept me quite happy when I was younger. Well, not this exact toy because this is one I picked up cheap on eBay and the one I originally owned is long gone. You know what I mean.

Packaging

I have no idea what other toys the Intex Recreation Corp created in the eighties, but this Moto-Bot toy is packed on your usual blister card. With a color front — a rather dull and uninspired design — and a black and white back, the header card is nothing special or exciting. The best part of the card has to be the images of the other toys in the series; I need to find a Locomotive because it looks terrible. And terrible is exactly what I’m looking for in cheap transforming robot toys from the eighties.

Dump Truck Mode

The toy’s vehicle mode looks okay if a little blocky and the dump portion of the toy is obviously the robot’s legs. The sides of the dump truck clearly show the robot’s hands. Basically, it’s what you should expect from a low-priced toy from the first generation of transforming robot toys.

The pull-back motor feature works pretty well, even after 25 years in the package, and the truck rolls slowly across the floor. Very slowly. Be careful if you find one of these loose because the motor is the one part that is removable . . . but you’ll know more about that as we convert the truck to robot mode.

Robot Mode

Okay, I know I love cheap transforming robot toys but there’s no way that I can deny the fact that this is an ugly toy. At about 4-inches tall, Dump Truck transforms by popping the head out of the bumper, flipping the arms up, popping the motor from the bottom of the toy, sliding the bed back to form the two legs, and then snapping the motor back into the legs in order to create a stable base for the robot to lean on.

See the photo below for a sideways shot of the robot. And now you see how the robot leans on his motor. Not elegant, but it works and it allows the robot to use the motorized feature.

Closing Thoughts

As cheap as the Convertors Sport toy looked (review here), it’s actually a fantastic toy compared to this Moto-Bot Dump Truck robot. The cheap stickers, lightweight plastic, hideous face, and wooden robot mode make this one of the worst of the 1984 transforming robot toys that we’ve looked at so far at battlegrip.com.

I poked around online and information on the Moto-Bot series is seriously lacking. This page at Counter-X has a little information, and a few photos, but that’s pretty much it for online info.

I have a few more Moto-Bot toys (I won a lot on eBay) so I’ll pull these out and play with them during my Christmas break. Dump Truck — that’s a worse name than Loadorr — is cheap, pretty lame, and not at all necessary for anyone but the craziest of transforming robot toy collectors.

Philip Reed apologizes for forcing this awfully lame toy on you. He promises that the Wednesday toy review will be for something much cooler and a lot more fun. And not from the eighties.