#53: Wide Load (1987)

I'll say this now; I like the Throttlebots. I know, I know, I said it all the way back when I looked at Rollbar, but I think it bears repeating. Mainly because although Wide Load was a good toy (for a cheap price point poicket money toy, that is), he didn't fare well in Transformers lore. Not at all, in fact. Truth be told, this guy did absolutely NOTHING of any worth in the Transformers universe. I know this, because I've looked. I've scoured. I've plumbed the depths of Transformers fiction. And nothing. At all. Nada. Zilch.

Ok, well that's sort of a lie. I mean, he did stuff. But nothing to distinguish himself from all the other Throttlebots. He just rolled with them, said little, did little. He got turned into a toy car. He evaded capture by the Decepticons. He was placed in his reconstructed Throttlebot body, only to be totalled by Starscream soon after. In the cartoons, he appeared briefly in the Rebirth. Then in the IDWverse, he was shot whilst trying to shoot Sixshot. That's it.

His Tech Spec bio doesn't help. It's a bit vague, if I'm being honest. If all it gives you is 'is a bit vain and can pull heavy stuff', then you're going to have to work hard to get any fiction of worth out there. Especially in a period when all Hasbro wanted to do is get the toys out there and be seen.

As I said earlier, Wide Load is a cheap, pocket money toy with a gimmick. The gimmick is basically pull back and go, and the toy is built around that. Which means no articulation, no intricate transformation, and serious scale issues, if you believe that a dump truck is the same size as a jeep. I mean, it could happen, but only in insano universe. Still it's a good toy, it does what it needs to very well, and is bright and cheerful. Which when you're 10 (or in my case 36), is all you want, really.

Wide Load suffers from cheap Transformer disease; because the Throttlebots weren't the most expensive toys, there was little impetus to try and build any kind of fiction around them, because they weren't the toys that Hasbro really wanted your mum and dad to buy. That was the Powermaster Prime, or Galvatron, or Ultra Magnus. So they got all the cool stories, and the Throttlebots were turned into r/c cars. Boo.