Insecticons! Big, nasty, Decepticon bug scum!
Insecticons! Ravenous, pesty little beasts that make up the reserve underbelly of the Decepticon army, Insecticons were some of the more popular almost-forgotten characters from the classic Transformers series. When I say almost-forgotten, I mean it in that almost no one will name you 'Shrapnel' if you ask which TFs they remember. Instead, they'll say 'Jazz' and then comment on how he really did look like a big orange tape player, causing you to slap him for the blasphemy and a lot of general ill-will to spread. If only people remembered the Insecticons, retroactive conversations would be so much better off.
They weren't on the show too often, but they made a pretty big impact on fans by chomping on metal and sounding really grating. They were bugs! Little known fact by casual watchers: the Insecticons were basically a forced concept character, since Hasbro had decided to use older molds from a different toyline in their new venture. Same with Jetfire (Macross), and a handful of other figures. Many of the original toys you played with were really from the older Diaclone & Microman lines of toys. This also explains some of the stranger points of the action figures, like the little yellow pop-open chest boxes the Insecticons had. They didn't just give them these features and then decide to mysteriously ignore them forever - it was just easier buying rights to little-known old toys than designing and molding new ones. The customers really lucked out with this little slice of business, since almost all the 'repackaged' figures were some of the best the line had to offer. And in many cases, the most expensive nowadays.
I loved these figures as a kid - they were priced low enough so that you could con some family member into buying them for you without the fallback reason of a birthday or other holiday. And no matter how small the TF was, if you could get one on no special day, it was a pretty big event. Usually 'casual' toy store runs only got you a small, cheap G.I. Joe figure, or if you were lucky, one of those little trash cans full of M.U.S.C.L.E. figures. Transformers were different - even if they were as cheap as the other stuff, they looked like they cost more money. And they certainly were a lot more fun to play with.
 
The ad spot, which I somehow remember watching back in the day, kicks off with a farmer and his son looking inquisitively towards the giant horde of Insecticons headed for their farm. See, the Insecticons were robot pests, so obviously, they'd go straight for the crops. Millions of years worth of advanced technology couldn't kill that basic instinct. I hesitate to theorize why they'd be given orders to 'flame the farm,' but Megatron made a lot of questionable decisions back in the first season. Namely handing whatever Autobot was in hearing range a direct tutorial on how to foil his latest plot. If you go back and watch most of these types of 80s toons, you'll soon notice how much better the villains would've done with a big piece of electrical tape over their mouths.
Anyway, the farmer & son stare vapidly at these oncoming insects, curious but unflustered. Maybe they took up reading old, shitty philosophy textbooks and adopted Socrates' idea of fearing nothing of which they don't know. For all intents, that incoming legion of robots might be there to drop off a special gift for them. No reason to panic. Just stand there and stare till they run you over. By the way, didn't these robots come crawling out of the woodwork in the mid-80s, basically in the middle of a metropolis? What's with the farm?
 
Up above, my favorite Insecticon and the one people recall the most - Kickback. He's a grasshopper, see. These figures were amazing little monsters - Kickback was no more than 4" tall or so, but had more going on with his body parts than the combined guests of the Stroker Ace premiere party. Kickback, for example: aforementioned weird chest box, movable chrome wings, movable antennae, movable double-arm limbs, double-leg limbs, insect parts and other forms of tomfoolery. His purple insect legs could be outstretched in his robot form to make him look like The Fly after he wigged out and started meshing his body with folding chairs and vacuum pipes. Kickback also had wheels, so the bug-version of the figure doubled as a parade float from an arts college.
Hey, back to the farm...
 
The Insecticons make their true intentions known by blowing up the farm and sending it's owners scurrying away like little rats. But they show them doing this in such a direct, formulaic way that they were definitely specifically told to travel to the midwest just to blow up this one stupid farm. Really makes you wonder what kind of secrets went on inside there. Maybe that's where Prime stashed all the Autobots who disappeared for 85% of the episodes. Sunstreaker was probably throwing chicken eggs at Hoist inside before the bugs blew the place up.
 
They only chose to advertise two of the three popular 'basic' Insecticons in this commercial, for reasons only known to Hasbro and the fine children they cast in the commercial. They left out Bombshell, who I'm guessing was supposed to be some kind of beetle with a really long piece of silver metal protruding out of it's head for no readily apparent reason. The one up above is Shrapnel, some...uh...other type of bug. I think part of the reason these have become so popular amongst collectors is that they're so offbeat and irregular when compared to the other bots and cons. The brunt of the first-series Autobots were cars, with Decepticons getting the air army. There were some exceptions, but those were usually reserved for semi-major characters who had enough personality to warrant their unique qualities. These guys, on the other hand, were just a bunch of weird bugs who's entire faction's greatest claim to fame is being able to say that there's a 50% chance one of them ended up turning into Cyclonus. Other than that, pretty standard fodder guys.
Oh, another Insecticon fun-fact: these three just represented the pack - there were hundreds of Insecticons running around. You may remember hundreds of Decepticon jets flying around in the earlier eps, but at least these guys had doubles who were actually acknowledged, while in the case of the extra jets, the Autobots would just blow them up and act like you weren't supposed to see them do that.
 
The spot closes out with the standard shot of a weird kid with green eyes screaming his head off (see every other Transformers commercial out there) while a good-natured Autobot storms in to save the day. This time, they picked Swoop, otherwise known as the Dinobot Nobody Wanted Until White's Guide Said He Was Rare.
There were other Insecticons toys too, but to my knowledge, their characters never appeared on the series. These were also remade from older toylines, and definitely don't look like your standard Transformers....
  
Chop Shop, Barrage, and Venom: the deluxe Insecticons. I don't remember seeing these once in the stores as a child, so either they were too cool to stay on the shelves long, or they were only out there for a real short time. I'm betting that they didn't make any more of these after the initial batch was sold - by that point they were already making many new figures, using more plastic and less metal for a lower cost. While they don't look like most TFs, they're some of the best looking figures I've come across. And I've held a 70s Mego John Travolta doll in my hands - what I'm saying here is a pretty distinct compliment. (there were actually four deluxe figures - Ransack was the last one)
Oh, what the hell - click here to view the original Insecticons toy commercial. (3.5 MB, .MPEG) If you're a new TF collector, I'd recommend picking these up as a starting point - not too expensive, and definitely work well as computer monitor decorations given the right shade of fluorescent lighting. They're bugs - but they're pretty damn cool bugs.
PS - how you guys liking this new Quickies section? My only problem is differentiating what deserves a full post and what deserves a Quickie. Send me some feedback on it!
- Matt
matt@x-entertainment.com
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