1978
Daimos was another casualty of Mattel's little jihad to dumb-down really cool Japanese toys for American kids. Yeah, I understand that some of their decisions were affected by legitimate marketing and production concerns, but didn't ANYONE there have the design sense to do it right? The American Daimos is UGLY. It's really, really lopsided and silly-looking. It's also widely considered to be the rarest of the American bunch. This is supposedly due to the fact that it was sold right at the end of the Shogun series and didn't do so well on the shelves. Whatever the case, it's about a bazillion times more common than the JAPANESE Daimos, which is a literal work of art.

The list of changes Mattel instituted for their version of Daimos read like a textbook case of American toy-designers just not "getting it." Where the Japanese Daimos used seperately-molded plastic parts for detail work, the American version used stickers. And the Japanese version featured a pair of four-shot missile strips on each thigh that were dropped for the US release. But perhaps most important are the differences in the hands. Mattel, for some reason, saw the need to replace the original's beautifully sculpted, two-color hands with clunky one-color pieces. All of this would have been fine and dandy had they not ALSO added a totally extraneous elbow-joint to only only arm, meaning that the right hangs a good two inches lower than the left, Quasimodo-style. Way to go, guys.

In their defense, the Americans didn't have much for comparison -- Daimos never aired as a cartoon in the US, meaning that neither the toy-designers nor the kids had any concept of Daimos as a character to begin with. Still, I wish Mattel had treaded a bit more lightly in this case. The original was (and still is) a real eye-grabber.

Matt Alt