“We destroy you with Giant Robots Love!”
You are here because you love the giant robot in all its forms and know the truth of its utter dominance. You cannot restrain yourself from acquisition. Kanji scrawls its way across your forebrain when you sleep. Styrofoam inserts arouse you. You know your mail carrier by name. You have too many YJ bookmarks. You are barely tolerated by your spousal unit. You face the ridicule of other villagers. You have a shelf…THAT YOU DUST.
If this sounds familiar, relax and drop your harkens…This is home.
Origin Story
It is 1998. From the smoldering wreckage of a brilliantly imploded gaming co, designer Alen Yen lashes his meager skills to the uncontrolled bucking of his giant lust to take a one-way suicide plunge into the sordid void of japanese robot collecting. Armed only with a rudimentary knowledge of HTML 2.0 and a throbbing desire for the Popy GA-05, he flings chunks of tawdry self-expression at the so-called Internet, utterly shocked that the thing talks back.
After months of weightless yammering, a serendipitous and historic transaction rattles the nascent market of international robot commerce as he docks with professional localization droid Matt Alt, forming feet and legs, forming arms and body, ultimately stopping the free-fall, but inadvertantly igniting a dubious collaborative that has pretty much blown up in their faces ever since.
Together, their utter lack of taste and porn-star-like predilections for extroversion buff disparate balls of “content” into the website known finally as ToyboxDX.
Team
On the way to Reflex Point, strange and wonderous heroes emerge:
- Roger Harkavy, master of mecha and connoisseur of rubber erasers, who conceives of the HCM Datafile, setting the stage for what will be our Gift to Humanity. He goes on to summon the first ever Chogokin Summit, often imitated and almost always certainly surpassed…
- Robert Duban, wise sage of the Datafiles DX and Everything and its Manufacturer and its Box, with his obsessive-compulsive passion for clarity and completion. He is the beacon under which the roaches of ignorance flame to nothingness.
- Tim Brisko, with his cybernetic eye and superlative skills, who sets the new standard for visualization, shaming us all into buying large pieces of colored paper which we hopeless slide beneath the feet of our chintzy little toys everytime we want to snap a Polaroid…
- Big Science Dsri, the analytical crushing machine, information designer extraordinaire, and the most loyal friend you could ever have. They’re the technical bedrock upon which our shoddy structures pitifully sprawl…
- Josh C-10 Fraser, our Lil’ Bishonen, Mr. square-corners and custom cases, who fired up the Facebook group one day and kept the dream alive, and now lurks behind an 8mm lens with a plan to document our madness and store us all in acrylic boxes…
They and other mighty champions coupled their energies to morph this humble site into a towering prong of robot love!
Honor Roll
This site has been plastered together from the sweat and discharge of brave souls. Some served solely as inspiration, and others gave ToyboxDX their all. We honor and salute them:
- O.G. TBDX BBSers Mason, Hillsy, Jerilock, Sanjeev, Josh B, and NekroDave who are now family…
- All the contributors from the past decades, in no particular order: Carlos Z, Chi Wah Louis Law, COOP, Corey and his Freakish Head, Darren Pierce, Drifand, Harvey “H-man” Kung, Tom Floros, Michael Evans, August Ragone, Ted Terranova, Lemel, Sjoen, Marc Sparagen, Tom Vigneau, Yappy, Mario…
- Dave Morton and John Eaton who launched the earliest documented sites on Godaikin and Shogun toys respectively…
- Tom Franck, the roto-molded towering Jumbo of our cult who broke ground on the Internet with CJT and showed us what it meant to be GOAL ORIENTED…
- Sean Bonner, Mr. Jumboland, who could not keep out of the news or out of trouble…
- Marc Raley, whose stint as webmaster saw the creation of the astonishing Popy Datafile…
- Warren Schwartz for showing us The Way…
- …AND YOU!