Tailgate

It's Halloween time.  Soon all the kids (and adults) will be running around in the twilight with their costumes on, many of them in the guise of our favorite robot heroes.

This year, my five-year-old son who is OBSESSED with Transformers opted for the obscure G1 minibot, Tailgate.  Now, while Tailgate has had a huge resurgence due to James Roberts' Robots in Disguise storyline, even garnered himself a new Generations Line release, my son is cognizant of neither of those facts.  Here is a character who has never been in a cartoon and didn't (mercifully) make it into the blockbuster live-action movies. The boy simply loved how he looked on the shelf.

So here's the funny part of all of this. As I was fixing up his costume, which, I think turned out
a-MAZ-ing...

Show-accurate purists need not comment.
I was taking artistic liberties, okay?!

...I thought back a lot to my year as a transformer. It was 1987, and of all the 'bots, I was Pipes, Tailgate's case-mate (a toy that is shipped from the factory with another toy, usually around the same size) from the 1986 line of transformers .

I remember my dad making the arms out of baby-wipe containers from my younger brother, and sacrificing a beloved tech-spec meter reader for my visor. I was the cat's pajamas.

Has no fear of patterned linoleum. 

So anyway, a neat way for a father and son to connect through the decades.  I think we would have made great case-mates.