Come 1986, Tonka were in trouble with the Gobots line. Despite expanding the range with myriad other assortments, the regular figures with their $3 price point were still the backbone of the line. However, Bandai were winding down the Machine Robo '600 Series' which had provided the vast majority of regular Gobot moulds.

Tonka either had no facilities or no inclination to make new figures themselves, and so the third series of regular Gobots was made up of a handful of MR stragglers, and some aborted Bandai prototypes. These were joined by a trio of recolours - an idea for fattening the line (at minimal cost) that Hasbro had cottoned onto two years earlier with Transformers. One of these was BuggyMan - the original blue version had been discontinued in 1984.

The recolour only came out in America. Had Gobots survived into a fourth series, it seems highly likely recolours of other older figures would have become a major part of the line.

Quite why BuggyMan was chosen is a pretty good question... new schemes for the leaders made sense (a good way of getting new toys out of them without roping in new leaders, a step which Transformers was then showing to be foolhardy) but BuggyMan? My only real guess is that, with the toy out of production for two years, he could well seem like a new figure to a lot of kids who'd never seen the original (I wonder if the likes of Dozer, Hans-Cuff and Crain Brain were pencilled in to be recoloured?).

Anyway, he gets a nice bright orange paint job. It's actually not as lurid as photographs make it look, being a rather sensible deep orange. I mean, BuggyMan turns into a beach buggy, and orange fits the thing nicely. Very summery. It's not subtle, but it is just about creditable. Sadly, Tonka didn't make use of the intervening couple of years to strengthen the flimsy windscreen, but to their credit he retains not only the diecast torso section and rubber tyres, but the plastic quality's as good as on the original too.

Unfortunately, the paint matching isn't quite there - the diecast is noticeably lighter than the orange plastic next to it.

The mechanics of BuggyMan, obviously, remain unchanged - he's still very simple, but retains a fair bit of charm for exactly the same reason. The sculpting and proportions are actually rather good, coupled with a clear, sensible layout.

Sadly, the colours just don't work quite as well - the orange isn't bad, and neither is the black, but the lime green just clashes really badly... something more austere like silver or grey would have worked so much better. He does look pretty nasty, but he also looks pretty awful. The recolour does manage to strip some of the cuteness of the original away, but the neat, crisp look is lost. It's still a pretty fun figure, just a little bit hard to take seriously.

I'm guessing whichever lunatic designed this scheme landed a job working on Transformers Generation 2 after Tonka got bought out.