The GoBots franchise certainly isn't the most popular fandom around today. In fact, it's not even the most popular franchise involving machine beings that can transform from things like vehicles into sentient robots, and if you're part of the younger two generations, it's possible you haven't even heard of these shape-shifting robots until recently. There's a reason for that. As SyFy Wire points out, GoBots were introduced to the United States in 1983 after previously being released in Japan as toys called "Machine Robo." The original manufacturers, Bandai, partnered with Tonka and — boom! — GoBots were filling toy stores across the red, white, and blue. Then, the competition arose.

It was a year later, according to Game Informer, Hasbro released Transformers in the U.S., and the GoBots franchise caught its first hint of serious trouble. The marketing and quality behind Transformers were leaps ahead of GoBots. Instead of simply having cheap plastic toys on the shelves, Transformers released a pretty rad cartoon at the same time their action figures were getting their price tags. Talk about getting a leg up on the competition. GoBots had a mythos you could only find by reading their toys' packaging while Transformers had one you could watch on TV. It's surprising they were able to gain a place of nostalgia at all next to the likes of Optimus Prime and Megatron, but they tried their best to adapt, and it apparently worked long enough to become a part of '80s culture.

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