When I was a kid, like, a little little kid, I was way into dinosaurs. They really captured my imagination. I can remember in first grade doing dinosaur coloring pages while we were learning about them, and visiting the natural history museum that used to have giant life size-ish T-Rex and Triceratops statues on display outside (sadly no actual dinosaur skeletons in their collection, I wouldn’t get to see real bones until decades later when I visited the Field Museum in Chicago). I knew all the names, it was a somewhat brief but very intense obsession that faded into just a general love of dinosaurs.
So when one of my favorite toy/comic/cartoon properties introduced dinosaur characters in 1985, you can imagine my excitement.
Previously we covered their leader Grimlock, but today I’m going to share the surliest and second strongest of the Dinobots and my very FIRST Dinobot acquisition, the mighty triceratops…Slag!
Slag
Company: Hasbro
Acquisition Year: 1985
Acquired via: Purchase (Toy Chest)
Years In Possession: 35
During the period of my life where I was heaviest into Transformers, my dad and I would go over to his grandma’s house (his mom’s mom, my great-grandma) to do handy man type stuff for her. Sometimes afterward, I could talk him into going to the toy store on a Transformers run. The “toy store” at the time of course was Toy Chest. I’ve talked about this place before but Toy Chest was a local store that only had 1 location that I’m aware of. Before Toys R Us or Children’s Palace moved in, Toy Chest was where it was at. I have so many fond memories of that place.
Anyway, on this particular day I was able to get my dad to take me on a toy run. The Dinobots had just been introduced on the cartoon and I’m not sure I was even aware they were making toys of them yet. When we rolled through the Transformer aisle, I dug through the boxes on the shelf and was floored to find Slag right in front of me. Of course the coolest of the dinos was the T-Rex but the Triceratops was a close second. I had never seen a Dinobot toy in the store and it was the only one they had so obviously I snatched it up.
In my opinion, of all the Dinobots, Slag has the most aesthetically pleasing robot form. The intricate engineering of each moving part on a lot of the early Transformers always fascinated me. All the parts always seemed to fit just right.
An example of this would be Slag’s lower jaw that flips down into his chest to reveal his robot face. The shape of the jaw is visually interesting to me, the chrome angles create interesting reflections, and the jaw itself fits into a cutout in his chest that leaves it almost completely flush.
Unfortunately my Slag suffers from a loose jaw joint, so in Dino mode he’s always a little slack jawed. Like all the Dinobots he is portrayed as pretty dumb, so it’s fitting I guess.
He also has one of the more interesting transformation features in that the dinosaur’s legs curl up and its haunches each rotate 180 degrees to form his giant robot legs and feet. And one of the hallmarks of all of the original 3 Dinobots is his rib cage that opens out into “wings”
Slag is easily my sentimental favorite of the Dinobots. Grimlock may be the better character, but in my opinion Slag is the better toy.
Well, that’s all for this edition of Fitz’s Toy Chest, I hope you enjoyed this window into my childhood. Come back next time for more well-loved blasts from my past!
AND!
Don’t forget on 4/16/2020 (that’s tomorrow unless you’re reading this in the future) we’ll be dropping the 4th Anniversary NerdBlitz pod super show!
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