Robotix (1990 Video) User Reviews

Transformers For Dummies

[CrunchyCookie · 6/10 · 25 August 2008]

Tell me if this setup sounds familiar: an alien race of shape-changing robots -- the heroic Protectons and evil Terrakors -- locked in a battle for power. Hasbro's at the helm, Sunbow's doing the production, and Peter Cullen & Frank Welker are among the voice leads.

If you're thinking Transformers, you should. The artwork and script are giveaways; heck, half the music and 90% of the voices were lifted straight out of TF/GI Joe universe. To be sure, these elements are high-quality stuff, so Robotix does have quite a bit going for it. What it needed was a more compelling reason to exist. Every element on display feels like hand-me-downs from those series, whether we're talking the characters, the action, the dialogue, or the plot.

Still, it's perfectly watchable (not to mention nostalgic), and worth the time if you're an old-time Transformers/GI Joe fan and curious about the more obscure series in the Hasbro-Sunbow canon.

Great!!!!!!!!!!!

[vimshead · 10/10 · 12 November 2002]

As I was born in the Soviet Union. We had a really bad - not progressful time. Not many foreign movies could be seen. ROBOTIX was the first animated movie, which was made outside USSR, that I have seen. I was about 9 then. Last week I found this old tape with this movie. It knocked me out.

Really great movie.

Startlingly brutal for its time

[whamontree · 19 August 2001]

Having watched Robotix recently for the first time in years I can say I was surprised by how frankly brutal it was. The animators must have figured that, hey, these are robots so we'll be as mean as we want to them. Even shows like Transformers balked at showing too much violence done to their metallic heroes. Not so with Robotix: when one robot swings a huge pipe at another robot's back, it connects. Legs, arms, and heads are ripped off, faces are slammed into the dirt. Startlingly, most of this violence is done to the protagonists. The villains constantly get the better of the heroes and deal out vicious poundings -- even to the "female" robot. Perhaps more startlingly, the violence is dished out in fair portions to the humans. Not even the little boy, Zaru, is safe. In one scene, he is quite harshly knocked aside by the leader of the evil robots. In a later scene, the leader of the good robots slams one bad guy human into a wall with great force, apparently killing him. My favorite scene involves the leaders of the rival human forces, Exedore and Kanawk, the "hero" and the "villain" respectively. They are in a ship which has lost atmosphere. Kanawk shatters the hatch of Exedore's capsule to suffocate him. So Exedore pulls out a gun and blasts the hatch off of Kanawk's capsule! For a cartoon "hero" in 1985 that's quite a thing to do! All in all, it has its flaws but it is surprisingly well-made for a cartoon based on an unpopular and widely unknown toy.

Erm....

[trevorhart · 5/10 · 5 September 2006]

This is a great movie for the kids, with quite a deeply involving plot line but done in such a garish and immature way that it'll totally suck the little ones in and give them plenty for the imagination to work on.

The plot really isn't that important, but for summary it deals with the two warring tribes that humans are caught between on the remote planet on which they crashed. The tribes were long extinct aside from those who were lucky enough to be contained in stasis tubes for the three million year period after their planet was ravaged by a Nova star. Incarnated into giant machines by the planet's central computer system, the two tribes continued to war over ownership issues of said computer and thusly our human heroes are split into two factions respectively.

SO yeah, good film for the kids, would make an excellent live action movie!!¬