Trivia / Challenge of the GoBots

• Approval of God: Lou Richards (Leader 1's voice actor) stated he loved a CollegeHumor video where a washed-up Leader 1 awkwardly interjects himself in a meeting between Optimus Prime and Megatron, and that he'd have gladly reprised his role had he been asked.
• Box Office Bomb: Battle of the Rock Lords did poorly at the box office, making only $1,338,264.
• Creator Backlash: Writer Michael Hill disliked the episode "Gameworld" due to its heavy rewrite done at the hand of the show's editors, Kelly Ward and Jeff Segal. The Transformers episode "The Gambler" is apparently close to the original script.
• Descended Creator: Writer and the show's associate story editor, Kelly Ward, also voiced Fitor.
• Dueling Shows: Challenge of the GoBots was infamous for competing against The Transformers, both shows being cartoons about Transforming Mecha based on a toyline and sharing a few voice actors (most notably Peter Cullen, Arthur Burghardt, and Frank Welker). Ironically, Transformers' owner Hasbro later bought Tonka, the owner of the GoBots toyline, in 1991, so Hasbro now owns the rights to what was once the main competitor to the Transformers franchise, and have retroactively placed GoBots as part of the Transformers multiverse.
• Follow the Leader: To the Transformers cartoon, although the GoBots toyline was actually older than that of Transformers.
• Franchise Killer: Battle of the Rock Lords put the franchise in remission.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • The show featured a decent state of limbo over its legal status. In which case the rights to the TV show and likenesses of characters from the TV show are now Warner Bros. (by way of Hanna-Barbera), the general franchise as a whole is owned by Hasbro (by way of Tonka).
  • The Warner Archive took over releases for the show and completed it in three sets. The first containing the original mini series and two more each containing 30 of the remaining episodes.
  • The movie is the last piece missing; Warner Archive did confirm they own it, but there are clearance issues with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (who co-own the rights to the movie due to currently owning the library of Atlantic Entertainment Group's Clubhouse Pictures, the company that originally released the movie in theaters) to be hammered out before a release can be possible.
• The Other Darrin:
  • A.J. Foster was voiced by Candy Brown in the Five-Episode Pilot "Battle for Gobotron", with Leslie Speights voicing the character for the rest of the series and the movie GoBots: Battle of the Rock Lords.
  • Cop-Tur was originally voiced by Bob Holt, but ended up voiced by Arthur Burghardt in the show's final episodes as well as GoBots: Battle of the Rock Lords because of Holt's death.
  • Sparky Marcus voiced Nick Burns for the series, but was replaced by Ike Eisenmann for the Rock Lords movie.
• Out of Order: The "Gobotron Saga" five-parter was aired late in the series' run, even though it picks up from where the Five-Episode Pilot left off and introduces many recurring characters and concepts.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: The reason the Battle of the Rock Lords movie is presently the only GoBots media to not get a contemporary home media release is because the rights to the film are co-owned by Warner Bros. (current owners of the cartoon's distribution rights like most of Hanna-Barbera's cartoons) and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (who obtained the rights to the library of the film's distributor Clubhouse Pictures after Clubhouse's parent, Atlantic Entertainment Group, went under and, like many minor movie companies of the mid-to-late 80s, wound up in an extensive library owned by French bank Credit Lyonnais before MGM ultimately purchased them from Polygram Filmed Entertainment in the late 1990s).
• Show Accuracy/Toy Accuracy: Outside the six main characters who had their faces extensively redesigned to make them more expressive and less inhuman, the animated Gobots were very close to their plastic counterparts.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Puzzler was originally solicited as a Guardian, not a Renegade, in the 1985 Tonka toy catalog.
  • Snoop, a Renegade that changed into an SR-71 Blackbird, was pulled from the toy line for unknown reasons. It was even offered and pictured in the 1985 JC Penney Christmas catalog. She did, however, see release in the respective European and Australian localizations of the toyline, Robo Machine and Machine Men.
  • A third Power Suit Combiner was planned, the Renegade Nemisis. Unlike Courageous and Grungy, the torso was a tank instead of a jet. In spite of being advertised in a 1986 Gobots catalog included with a toy boxset, it is unknown whether this was even produced.
  • The Battle of the Rock Lords film started out as a much different film. Starquest, which would've been much more integrated with the series' continuity; the Rock Lords had a much smaller role in this draft as well.

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