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DINOBOTS: Sludge-The Forgotten One

In 1985 the Dinobots were born. They were bigger than life to the imagination of an eight year old daydreamer. Swoop, Snarl, Slag, Sludge and Grimlock came to life via the TransFormers cartoon but they came to life in kids households via the fantastic toys. My first Transformer was one of those larger than life robotic dinosaurs. His name was Sludge and he was pure awesome! While the character of Sludge in the cartoon lent him to being less than smart, his robot design was nothing less than genius. His playability was fantastic and the transformation was fun as well. Sludge is by far my favorite even though I cannot speak about Swoop and Snarl as I never have owned them.

Where in the world is Sludge now? Is he retired? Did he change his name? Was he bot-napped? In the 1990’s the scientists figured out someone messed up, Sludge’s life model dinosaur his alternate mode was based on what was proven to actually not be real. This was the death (so to speak) of Sludge as all of the G-1 fans knew him. Did Hasbro retire him? No, not exactly. His character was resurrected in T4 sort of. Slog was the new name of the character that got about ten seconds of screen time and no lines to hear if he was lovable and dumb as his G-1 counterpart. So, is Slog, Sludge? No, not in my opinion. Will we as fans receive proper Generations style reincarnations of all five dinobots, who knows?

In the meantime, we as fans are getting our dinobot fix from third party manufacturers. Toy World has stepped up to the challenge of creating dinobots. The Toy World version of Sludge is named Muddy. This dinobot is the most toy accurate third party dinobot. The robot itself is a little bit taller than a Combiner Wars voyager class Transformer. The gimmick that the Toy World dinobots have beyond just being a transforming dinosaur, they all combine to make a big combined robot. There are several more third party manufacturers competing in the dinobot race. Fans Toys are making masterpiece sized dinosaur robots. Their version of Sludge is named Stomp. These dinobots are in the masterpiece scale. These are great versions of the dinobots. There are three other versions of the dinobots. GigaPower (the larger than masterpiece scaled dinobots), GCreations (another combiner version of the dinobots) and Planet X (Fall of Cybertron dinobot versions). All of these third party toys definitely are different in looks, transformation as well as the people they are targeting. I would suggest looking into all of them prior to filling your dinobot gap in your collection.