These are not the most desirable G1 toys in existence. They're arguably among the worst ones produced. But, I'm completing my collection, and after spending a big chunk of change on some Detolf shelves, I wanted to go after some less expensive toys this month, so here we are.

The idea behind the Battlechargers was clearly to develop a Decepticon equivalent to the Autobot Jumpstarters. Just like the Jumpstarters, the Battlechargers came in two styles, shared the same engineering with slightly different physical features, and both were meant to spring up into robot mode automatically. The Jumpstarters weren't exactly the most popular toys, though, and the Battlechargers didn't fare much better.

I mean, the idea was simple enough. The Jumpstarters transform when a motor releases the hook and sends the heavy, spring-loaded robot feet swinging forward, theoretically resulting in the robot jumping up into a standing position. The Battlechargers flip the script, using the same pull-back motor system, and also release the hook holding the robot parts in place, but this time the robot springs up when the rear chunk pushes the car up onto its front bumper. The idea of a car hood forming a robot's feet and the hood forming a chest was certainly not new (we had already seen it with Wheeljack, Sunstreaker, Bumblebee, etc.) but somehow automating this transformation left a lot to be desired.

The more working parts a mechanism has, the more chance there is of it breaking down. Where a Jumpstarter had a single spring-loaded moving part (the legs unfolding), a Battlecharger had two. The wheel base was responsible for pushing the robot upright, and there was also a second spring-loaded part that extended the length of the robot legs. When the legs extended, internal tabs were designed to push the arm flaps out. The robot feet unfolding, and the back of the car flipping back to reveal the robot head, were accomplished through kinetic force, and these were all loose parts with no springs to speak of.

However, the Battlechargers just didn't work reliably. Where Jumpstarters frequently failed to stick the landing, falling on their faces, the Battlechargers wouldn't always reliably spring open at all, or would only spring open partially. The springs simply weren't strong enough to push the parts open with sufficient force, especially after repeated transformations.

The hook that latched the wheel base to the car chassis was absolutely vital. If the latch the hook was designed to grab onto was bent, even a little bit (perhaps through impatient kids forcing a transformation), the plastic knob designed to lock the legs in place would not properly align, and the toy would never stay in car mode.

Also, their robot modes left much to be desired. The Jumpstarters were designed with an emphasis on the robot styling, and their vehicle modes were clearly nothing more than folded-up robots. With the Battlechargers, they were styled specifically to resemble authentic Earth vehicles, but their robot forms looked less like robots and more like cars pretending they were Transformers.

A great many of the early Transformers toys, at least, had articulated arms and clearly-definited robot feet. Even the toys whose legs were immobilized by pins (Sideswipe, Prowl, etc.) at least had clearly delineated individual legs. The Battlechargers did not. The hood of the car became, essentially, a massive stump. Also, the robot arms on the Battlechargers had no clearly-defined fists, and were simply the flaps formed by the sides of the car mode. They each came with guns, but the guns had to be laughable slid over top of the shoulders, as the characters were incapable of holding their own weapons.

(What's awful is that somebody at Hasbro ended up recycling this same basic transformation scheme six more times for the Throttlebots in 1987. Same pull-back motor, same stupid flaps for arms, but with a neutered auto-transformation.)

I also strongly hate the consumer-applied stickers that the Battlechargers came with. Where many of the early labels included graphics of circuitry or detailed panels that made the toys look a lot cooler, many of the 1986 sticker sheets were designed in-house at Hasbro and lacked a certain je ne sais quoi. Runabout's stickers were red stripes that were slapped hapazardly all over the toy, while Runamuck got some plain gold stripes. But both sets of stickers made the sports cars look ten times uglier, and the stickers applied near the arm hinge also negatively affected the arms' ability to swing open. (When I got my Battlechargers on eBay, I specifically hunted down toys in good shape that had no stickers applied, because they're so much prettier this way.)

The Battlechargers did eventually make it into the G1 cartoon, with Runamuck helping Blast Off to terrorize the Autobots in the third season episode "Chaos" and both Runamuck and Runabout were haunted by Starscream's ghost in "Ghost in the Machine" (both voiced by Roger Behr, who effected the same uncultured yokel dialect for both characters). But, they appeared in media much later than their toys appeared on store shelves, and their cartoon designs were a poor representation of the actual toy designs. The characters were drawn with normal-looking arms and legs, which was practically false advertising. The characters also got a feature story in Marvel Comics, in TRANSFORMERS issue #23, in which they tangled with Circuit Breaker, and showed up much later as part of Shockwave's motley crew along with other "forgotten" Decepticons like Ravage.

RUNABOUT

So, there's not much to say about these toys individually that doesn't apply to them both. Runabout transforms into a Lotus Esprit, a sports car from England that was made popular in the public eye by James Bond films like The Spy Who Loved Me, in which the car famously transformed into a submarine.. If they had sold him in Runamuck colors, it would have been a much closer tribute, but perhaps it would have been a little too close for Hasbro's liking.

The car is extremely angular and wedge-shaped, and Italian car designer Giorgetto Giugiaro (who also worked on the DMC DeLorean) described it as a "folded paper" design. He's got a prominent Decepticon badge on the hood, which would have to split in half if the hood actually separated into his feet.. But, of course, it doesn't separate, so the insignia remains intact.

The shiny black veneer and the bright red windows create a really ominous, evil-looking car. Like, if Darth Vader drove a sports car, this would be it. It's a more effective look than Wildrider, who is grey with red windows, but the high-contrast look for Runabout is more visually striking.

When he springs to robot mode, he has grey as a secondary color (the assembly to which his head is mounted, as well as the undercarriage part containing the motor) but he's still mostly the same gorgeous black and red. His head sculpt is also black with red eyes. In the cartoon and comics, he was drawn with individual eyes, but the actual toy just has an optic visor.

Since Runabout's arms don't work, he comes with a red weapon (a high-energy particle beam rifle) that plugs into the top of his shoulder.

The character's personality is essentially an Autobot, only inverted. Since the Autobots are focused on protecting Earth and its citizens, Runabout likes to shoot parked cars and gas stations and watch them blow up. In-universe, he's described in his TRANSFORMERS UNIVERSE profile as being able to transform in less than a second, suggesting that it takes much longer for "normal" Transformers to transform (perhaps even as long as it takes a person to physically manipulate the toys, which can easily take 30 seconds or more).

RUNAMUCK

So, Runamuck transforms into a Pontiac Firebird Trans Am, the same type of car as K.I.T.T. from Knight Rider. He's off-white, or maybe a light grey, with black windows. Once again, if you swapped Runamuck and Runabout's colors, Runamuck would be the spitting image of the Knight Rider car. I'm thinking the characters were probably conceived as more direct homages, but then somebody at Hasbro legal got nervous and made them swap the colors. (For Toy Fair 1986, when they were initially going to be called the Battlespringers, Runamuck was actually shown in dark grey in vehicle mode. Another Runabout served as a stand-in for Runamuck in robot mode.)

These toys were one of Hasbro's first forays into making Transformers without paint applications. The front and rear windows are separate pieces of plastic from the rest of the car, and the side windows are factory-applied stickers. I'm not one hundred percent sure, but I think the eye colors were accomplished with stickers as well.

As a robot, Runamuck's secondary color is a garish orange, used mostly for the undercarriage parts but also for the chunk to which his robot head is mounted. (Some tribute toys, like the BotCon version from 2012, really leaned in hard with the orange. It was far too much.)

Runamuck carries a black friction rifle, which makes the kinetic energy build in his targets until they burst into flame or melt. A kinetic weapon seems eminently appropriate for a toy with a pull-back motor! It's almost a tongue-in-cheek reference to the way the toy operates. So, too, I think, is his fear of heights. I honestly wonder if Bob Budiansky came up with that one after watching a Battlecharger toy tumble off a desktop at the Marvel offices one too many times!

Personality-wise, he's similar to Runabout, but different—he's generic in his Decepticon ways, enjoys spreading fear and mayhem, etc. He loves a good car wreck in the same way Runabout loves pretty cars (so he can smash them). They're two halves of the same coin.

On Monday, August 29, 2022 at 4:37:18 PM UTC-6, Zobovor wrote:

> But, now I have a couple of extras, so I can play mix-and-match if I want to try to improve their motor functions or swap out any of the springs.

So, I noticed while trying to piece together a good-looking unit that my two Runabout guns are different!

https://www.reddit.com/r/AltToysTransformers/comments/x3jqnk/got_another_g1_runabout_on_ebay_and_discovered_a/

To my knowledge, this specific variation hasn't been documented anywhere. It's possible nobody knows about it. Or, maybe everybody already knew about it, and I was the last to find out. Either seems possible.

(By the way, my camera really severely exaggerated the difference in color between the two guns. They are essentially the same shade of red, but for some reason my phone camera perceived one of them as being super orangey. It's really not that orangey.)

Zob (had an orangey kid once, but it was just because he ate a lot of sweet potatoes as a baby)

On Thursday, September 1, 2022 at 7:20:28 PM UTC-6, Zobovor wrote:

> So, I noticed while trying to piece together a good-looking unit that my two Runabout guns are different!

After diving down the rabbit hole a bit further, I see now that both Runamuck's and Runabout's guns come in a large-slot and a small-slot flavor. Furthermore, they did actually modify the arms slightly at some point during production. They made the arms slightly thicker. So, while the large-slot guns will fit just fine on either the thick arms or the thin arms, the small-slot guns will not fit properly on the thick arms, because the gap in the gun isn't quite big enough. You can still sort of wedge it in there, but it's not a good fit.

This means that if you're trying to piece together complete Battlechargers second-hand, you can't just buy yourself a bot and a gun and call it good. You have to know which versions you've got so they will properly match up. It would be like getting a Targetmaster gun for Blurr but then trying to put it in the regular 1986 Blurr's hand. I got lucky when I got a Runamuck gun that actually matched my Runamuck—I had no idea there was basically a 50% chance they would be incompatible.

Zob (might get a sharp-looking bunch in the mail today)

On Monday, August 29, 2022 at 3:37:18 PM UTC-7, Zobovor wrote:

> So, I spent $7.50 on Runamuck and about $12 for his gun. Then, on a whim, I spent another $30 on a complete Runabout, despite owning two of them, because I really wanted one without stickers. The stickers are the ugliest thing ever.

OMG you already had two. Why didn't you just desticker one of them.

> The Earthrise versions of these characters are much, much, much better in pretty much every conceivable way.

Except availability. It's cheaper and easier to track down a G1 Runabout than the Target exclusive one.

> There is no reason for any sane person to track these toys down in 2022.

'Sane' cannot be used to describe anyone in this hobby.

On Monday, September 5, 2022 at 11:38:57 AM UTC-6, evil.king.m...@gmail.com wrote:

> OMG you already had two. Why didn't you just desticker one of them.

Well, because when I got Runabout as a kid, I was already aware that the stickers were problematic, so I super-glued them on. True story. I could remove the stickers, but there would be a lot of ugly super glue reside underneath. I kind of ruined him. But, as they say, it seemed like a good idea at the time...

The other one will not stay together in vehicle mode at all. I don't know what his problem is. I even took him apart, thinking I could fix him up and that he would be the one to inhabit my G1 display, but it just wasn't happening. It's like the hook that latches him together is just slightly too long, so the knob on the leg assembly won't stay in place. It's weird.

Zob (buying Jumpstarters and Sparkabots this month)