Tuesday From The Future Toybox - Holy Grail Figures - Rom Spaceknight

http://www.retroist.com/

 

This is a great look at the fantastic ROM-SPACEKNIGHT toy from 1979. I love all the lighting effects that could be achieved by pressing different codes into the buttons on his back. That is pretty sophisticated action features for the late 70s. Go to the Retroist to see the entire articles.

Rom - Spaceknight

 

For a comic book based on a toy Marvel Comics got a surprisingly amount of mileage out of this concept.To build interest in the toy, Parker Brothers licensed the character to Marvel Comics which created a comic book featuring Rom. The comic expanded on the simple premise that Rom was a cyborg and gave him an origin, personality, set of supporting characters, villains, and one other vital ingredient -interaction with the rest of the Marvel Universe.

 

Rom was a member of a group of humanoids who gave up their humanity and bodies to be reborn as space robots with the power they needed to rid both their solar system and others from the vicious DIRE WRAITHS; a shaped shifting alien species. He was armed with two devices - An ANALYZER to identify the hidden wraiths and a NEUTRALIZER to banish them all to LIMBO. He also had a convenient UNIVERSAL TRANSLATOR. This simple concept allowed Rom to move around the planet and interact with all the characters in the Marvel universe. This all led up to his eventual reuniting with the other space knights and his quest to regain his long lost and lamented humanity.

I actually have a letter published in an issue of ROM that was read by a Vietnam vet who was spending his last months in a V.A. Hospital in Michigan. We wrote to each other (in the days before the Internet) and talked comic books and life and after he died I received his last letter in a package that contained the first 35 issues of ROM. I had mentioned in my letter to the comic that I was searching for back issues of ROM and I guess he chose me to give that part of his collection to. The hospital told me that he had a storage locker full of comic long boxes and much of his collection went to hospitals and orphanages overseas.

http://www.retroist.com/2013/04/09/rom-the-strange-journey-of-a-space-knight/#comment-129966