ZOD was released by Tonka as part of the Gobots toy line and unlike most of the Gobots was not originally part of the Japanese Machine Robo Series created by Bandai.
ZOD is a design oddity. One could be forgiven for thinking someone was trying to design a Masters of the Universe monster motorcycle, thought better of it and removed the handlebars. Regardless of that, it's a solid toy with great action, sound and the deactivate button being part of the play value adds a lot. ZOD's significant presense in the Challenge of the Gobots cartoon and follow on positive sales saw it also released in Europe and Australia for their regional, related toy lines.
Does it fit in with the Japanese, fine sculpted toys that make up most of the Gobots line? Not really, however that in no way means it's not a lot of fun.
Region Codes Used: US United States / CA Canada / AU Australia / EU Europe - Location codes only shown where items were known to be released. This list is accurate yet likely to be incomplete.
Gobots US/CA Tonka 1984
Robo Machine EU Bandai 1984
Machine Men AU Bandai 1984
Zod was issued with the pack in mini-comic book, 'Escape to Planet Earth' that interestingly depicted Zod in the concept colours of the prototype and not the production toy.
The Robo Machine and Machine Men releases both came in a solid, non-windowed cardboard with a card supporting insert. The pack in mini-comic book was not included with the either of these releases; likely due to the effort required to remove references to 'Gobots'.
As with many EU / AU Bandai products for these line the Robo Machine box was very basically modified with the Machine Men logo placed over the top of words Robo Machine where needed. The Machine Men instruction sheet was particularly poorly modified by clearly having had coloured paper / card used to obscure the Robo Machine logo while preserving 'ZOD' in the Robo Machine text styling.
CREDIT: Test cast prototype example images used with permission from Chris Ingledue.
