Talk:Monogram
Okay, I've long had a theory about these kits.
Firstly, while I acknowledge Alex's expertise for the most part I'm not sure http://www.toyarchive.com/Gobots/Fakes/TurboPullback.html are really KOs. They have a copyright stamp - which is unusual for KOs - and having owned a couple of Dashbots and a couple of Gobot model kits I know which is the better quality. Secondly, the Cy-Kill and Leader-1 ones are blatant Macross moulds. Thirdly, Tonka would have given hookers the Gobots branding if they'd ponied up; their absolute lack of quality control when faced with what seemed like a licence to print money in 83-85 is legendary. Fourthly, at the time there were an absurd number of transforming toys being made and the same rough contemporary alt modes would crop up surprisingly often - things like the Harrier, dune buggies, sportscars, etc. This was partly due to mimicking the successful lines but also because it's an obvious thing for robots to turn into.
Now, one of the quirks of American companies haphazardly hiring out batches of figures from Japanese manufacturers meant there was all sorts of crazy stuff that would look mad next to the lawyer-heavy IP stuff of the present day. The most notable example is Macross/Dorvack/Beetras, where Bandai bought out Takatoku and leased the moulds to Hasbro for Transformers. At the same time Mark, who made the cheapo pocket money versions of the toys from Macross/Dorvack/Beetras and didn't go bust when Takatoku did were able to legitimately lease said moulds to Select for Convertors, with both the Convertors and Transformers being in stores at basically the same time. Plastic model kits in Japan at the time were also often put out by a different company to the one making the toys - most famous is probably Clover thinking they had the lucrative toy licence for Gundam while Bandai actually made the money from the model kits.
So what I theorise is that the Dashbot/Robotron figures were the toy version of a line and the kits were the model kit version, one of which was licenced by Up-Right/Buddy-L and the other of which was licenced to Monogram. Monogram then signed a licence deal with Tonka to name the kits as Gobots and then just slapped the name of whichever was closest to the extant kit on the box.
The only slight problem is Spay-C, where it actually looks like the figure. It's possible this was a pre-existing Machine Robo model kit, though I'm not aware of any pre-Gobot MR kits. But there's definitely something more to the rest of them than Monogram being unable to copy some fairly simple Gobots.
