Tales From Storage: Web Warriors Enkrypticon Virus
My dad, not unlike myself, is forever in a state of organisation. Putting things into boxes and databasing them, and then downsizing and putting the stragglers into different boxes to be databased, ad infinitum, until maybe he finally gets around to doing what he wanted with those things in the first place. I’m much the same, except the entire pipeline’s on hold because I just got too lazy. Why work when I can do other things? Such as… I’ll get back to you on that.
I wrote the bones of this post back in October 2021 after the surprise uncovering of the WEB WARRIORS ENKRPYTICONS VIRUS boxed model kit from da’s shed… and it’s taken this long to get to print because I misplaced the fucking toy before I could photograph it. It’s almost like storage and organisation is just a euphemism for voluntarily losing things!
The model kit was surprisingly published by AirFix, a toy company best known in the UK and Europe for their fanciful scale models of airplanes and other vehicular geekery. Articulated transforming robots are not exactly in their wheelhouse, but the choice of product, paired with its vaguely cyber-inspired vernacular, suggest it was designed to target a different demographic, one who thought Y2K was gonna be the hypest shit. Don’t get your hopes up, lads. The 1999 eclipse shoulda put your expectations in order.
The price sticker is still attached, but I can remember where I bought it without the reminder — Toy Town, a small toy shop (well, it felt small in the wake of Toys R Us, but was probably pretty robust compared to what’s out there now) on the border of Abbeycentre. It was a constant sight on the drive to school, and its signage always stuck out to me for its caption, “open to the public” — I assume folks might’ve thought those lots were just warehouses.
I know I went there a few times, but this is the only toy I can distinctly recall buying there. I can verifiably credit Toy Town with where dad procured his collection if Conan the Adventurer action figures, which are still knocking about, by the way. He may have made sacrifices to his geeky collections over the years, but I don’t think he’s ever going to give up those figures, even if none of us can remember what the horses are called. We used to pride ourselves on trivia like that.
(they weren’t kidding with that “shown larger than actual size” caption, there is no reason for the box to be that bloody big to begin with)
Anyway, Web Warriors Enkrypticon Virus is not a good toy, and I recall getting that notion immediately after taking it out of the box. I entrusted dear ol’ da with assembling it, and we all gathered around — my dad, my friends and I — hoping that at some point in the process it’d manage to spark joy.
That, uh, didn’t happen. We unanimously agreed it kind of sucked. I had not even seen a Transformers toy in-person at the time, but I think we knew there were better ways of doing transforming robots, surely. Alas, Virus, we barely knew ye, because you made a piss-poor showing for yourself.
To its credit, it is made entirely from snap-together pieces with no glue required. It’s got a satisfying amount of moving parts once it’s done, even if it is fiddly and doesn’t hold together all that well. It is admittedly pretty bland without its stickers, and its design isn’t nearly as striking as bigger-name super-deformed robots, but it’s got some charm to it.
The stegosaurus transformation is pretty woeful, though, with a frog-like gait and requiring you swap the arms and pluck his hands off for the stompers to fold down (and the fists are such tiny pieces that the hinge snapped off from the tension after just two conversions). Again, there’s an undue charm to it, and having to assemble it does give you a certain pride in its creation; it’s an ugly cretin, but it’s my ugly cretin. That, and leaving his tail deployed in robot mode and thinking he’s got his willy out. Look, when you get a crap toy, you have to take your jollies where you can get ’em.
Airfix is still a big name with rabid collectors and exhaustive communities dedicated to it, so this is an unusual outlier among their works, both being weird robot things, and the fact nobody can be bothered to document them, it seems. In hindsight it should come as no surprise is that the Web Warriors line was not an original creation, but a rebranding of the Japanese Omoroid line of super-deformed transforming robots, simply given a new coat of paint for sale in the UK and France.
The Japanese side of the franchise is well documented, with a colourful official website and some charming little fansites (that even acknowledge this overseas import!… but for English language resources, good luck finding more information than that.
I can at least confirm based on Virus’ box that these fellows were all renamed; Virus was originally Darth Boss, submarine Crash began as Subron, stag beetle Bug was once V-CLE, and dinosaur(?) Glitch was originally Tricky.
I apparently found a database site when I first drafted this post, describing it as “some vital statistics, maybe a tiny thumbnail of the box if you’re lucky, and that’s your lot — it’s documentation, not preservation,” and I can’t even find that now. Sites that point to eBay listings are the closest you’ll get to dedicated coverage now, it seems!
And that weighs on my mind, don’t it. So much of the stuff on this website in the past few years has been tackling the prospect of stuff just… disappearing. Manga that nobody on this hemisphere has bothered to research; assembling scraps of knowledge for mobile games that have since delisted without a trace.
Sometimes there’s no hope of ever truly preserving the thing, or getting a complete picture of its scope. I’ve assembled a whole lot of resources on the B-Daman Bakugaiden franchise, but as someone who’s never set foot in Japan, nor was even cognitive of this stuff as it was happening, there’s only so much I can do to document it years, decades after the fact. The Bakugaiden anime will be turning 30 in a couple of years. isn’t that nuts?
Exhausting is more like it. To be a sucker for history is to become increasingly weary of its foibles, be it the lack of documentation; resources and references fading away or expiring; or even just how this shit doesn’t hold up sometimes. Does anyone else give a toss about Legend of the White Lion? Do I give a toss about it? I’ve no idea, honestly, but I bought the VHS on a whim and tracked down some tie-in materials just to learn its context, so I guess I ought to put that research out there… when I get around to it. I don’t know who else wants to!
Do not take that as a teaser of upcoming attractions or anything, that’s just what was on my mind at the time. I hope to stinkin’ goodness to get around to tackling all the crap I want to do, whether in a timely manner or not. In the meantime, we’ll have to make do with getting needlessly existential over dodgy stegosaurus toys. Don’t even get me started on the screen saver, which is almost surely lost to time. Not that I care or anything, but it’s the principle of the thing.
