So I meant to post about this a week ago, but I finally found an insanely well-stocked vintage toy shop in the (more or less) Atlanta area. It’s called HD Comics and Toys run by a couple of swell gentlemen, Billy and Steve. They’re located about an hour north of Atlanta in the Pendergrass Flea Market (a kind of neat place where you can get anything from rebel flag bikinis and nun-chucks to bootleg toys and candy cigarettes by the carton.) I hadn’t been by the flea market in a couple years and I was always sort of bummed by the fact that there weren’t any decent places selling vintage 80s era toys and stuff, but on a trip a couple weeks back I stumbled into Billy & Steve’s shop (it’s actually a store inside the huge flea market building) and my jaw literally hit the floor. Filling three pretty decent sized rooms from floor to ceiling were hundreds upon hundreds of pegs filled with in-original-packing toys from the last 30 or so years.
At first I thought it was mainly superhero figures (they had all sorts of DC and Marvel stuff dating back to the late 80s, early 90s), but as I started looking closer I realized that these guys have almost every decently popular toy line that I could remember. Just some of the lines I spotted included the original Batman movie figures, Robotech, Voltron, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, the Tick, The Shadow, Indiana Jones, G.I. Joe, Bravestarr, Doctor Who, Go Bots, Star Wars, Supernaturals, Food fighters, Starriors, M.A.S.K., Lone Ranger, Thundercats, Silverhawks, Masters of the Universe, and even Welcome Back Kotter dolls in the original boxes.
It’s everything that I’ve been looking for in a vintage toy store. They currently don’t have a website, but if you’re in the Atlanta, or North Georgia area I highly suggest you stop by and check out their store. The prices are reasonable (e.g. lower than eBay), and you can’t beat the experience of finding vintage toys on the pegs. 
While I was there I picked up a couple of toys, and the one I was happiest to find was an in-box Robo Force figure…
They had four or five different robots in their original packaging, but the one that caught my eye was Enemy, the Dictator, a villain from the Robo Force line.
A couple years ago I did an episode of the Saturday Supercast podcast with Jerzy Drozd and our friend HooveR, and we got on the subject of Maxx Steele’s Robo Force. We’d all had the toys and were both nostalgic and perplexed by their built-in robot-arm-crushing mechanism, which we all sort of agreed was more of a cute hugging action. When I saw this guy I had to have him…
You can see on the packing above that the hugging action of these guys in intense. Robo Force was released in 1984 by Ideal, most likely to horn in on the coming plastic robot craziness in America. Tonka’s Go Bots had hit the shelves at the end of the previous year and were selling like hot cakes, and Hasbro’s Transformers line was gearing up as well, and even those these guys didn’t transform, my guess is that Ideal saw the trend and wanted on-board. I’m not sure if the figures were just re-issues of a Japanese toy line or if they were born and bread in America, but in playing with the figures, it sure feels like the latter.
Honestly, though these guys look cool, and I actually dig the concept behind the story, I’m less than thrilled by the playability factor. Seriously, aside from a chest plate that drops open to reveal some awesome lasers, all these guys can really do is lightly hug your finger or another small toy. They’re also kind of fragile, in particular the mechanism that moves the arms, as noted by my experiences with my original figure (I stretched out my old toy’s arms past the point of hugging), and the warning note that was slipped into the packaging…
All in all the fact that you could find these guys for about $4 back in ’84 (a huge thanks and shout out to Steve at the Roboplastic Apocalypse for putting in the hard time to collect all the great vintage toy robot ads from the 70s and 80s) must have been awesome considering that Go Bots sold for around the same price and the Robo Force figures are litterally huge in comparison. The figure in the box looks pretty darn impressive too, so Ideal managed to get that right.
Getting back to the story for a second, did you read that flavor text on the back of the box? Enemy can decimate an entire world with the laser sticking out of the back of his head! That’s stupid awesome. He doesn’t even have to look back to see the carnage he leaves in his wake, that’s how evil he is…
The figures also came with a mini-comic in the vein of the Masters of the Universe (which I hope to get scanned in and posted sometime this week.)
Long live Maxx Steele!
