SFXB Forum

I imagine that some of you will remember Zoids, and the Marvel comics that came out when they first arrived in the 80s. With the arrival of the new cartoon shows, the toy line has been relaunched over here and I've had an email from the marketing company with the details.  Here are a couple of the new Zoids:This one I had first time round - now known as a Gordosaur, in my day this was the Great Gorgon and one of the earlier big, battery powered Zoids to come on the market.This one is a Zaber Fang - not sure what its original name was, but I believe it came out as part of the later range when there was more of a backstory developing.The Tomy homepage with details of the cartoons and toys is here:http://www.tomy-zoids.co.uk/The originals were quite satisfying to put together, and you can swap weapons etc which gives them a bit of longevity.  More exciting than Lego, but also a little trickier to construct - it's well worth cutting the parts off the framework as cleanly as you can.

Of course, in some parts of the World they never really went away:http://www.hlj.com/cgi-per....h&Dis=2I bet everyone had a friend who had one of those huge battery powered ones that your parents could never afford... There has been a new Zoids anime in Japan for a couple of years now, a lot of the designs in the link above came from (or starred ) in that. I'm a bit puzzled, actually, as I've been expecting to see the new designs and show over here for a while and the ones being released here now appear to be just re-issues...

Darn, that link hasn't appeared correctly.Go here then: http://www.hlj.com/ and look under "Science Fiction".Another strange Zoids fact; the UK comic artist went on to work on "Zenith" for 2000AD - something of a career change!

Geoff Senior, better known perhaps for his work on Transformers, also did some artwork for the annual which I had until relatively recently - I imagine he also did some of the issues. From what I can see on the Tomy site, there seems to be a mix of re-issues and some genuinely new designs (for the UK at least). Nice to see the Trooperzoid back - if you got really close to it you could pretend you had ZoidZilla! Redhorn the Terrible was the most impressive one I owned.

Zoids were very cool. I still have an original annual.