Review by Iain Delaney: Big Guy and Rusty, the Boy Robot, began life as a comic book by Frank Miller and Geoff Darrow. In 1999, the Fox Kids network produced an animated TV series for Big Guy and Rusty, the Boy Robot, and they made 26 episodes, although they originally aired only six on the Saturday morning line-up. The rest appeared a year later in the daytime afternoon rotation.

The series takes place in the near future and the show has a retro-futurist style. The Big Guy is a giant armored robot designed to defend New Tronic city against other robots and aliens. The company that built him, Quark Industries, has also built their next generation robot in the shape of a small boy and named him Rusty.

Quark’s secret is that Big Guy is not a real robot; his artificial intelligence never worked. Instead, he is piloted by Lieutenant Dwayne Hunter, who pretends to be Big Guy’s mechanic. A select few, including senior executives and Big Guy’s crew, are aware of this embarrassment to Quark. They keep the secret from Rusty for two reasons; the first is that Rusty idolizes the Big Guy and the truth could overload his emotional grid, and the second is that Rusty isn’t good at keeping secrets.

The Deluxe Big Guy toy is one of a range of spin-off toys produced by Bandai, but since the show never really reached a mass audience, the toys are rather rare.

The packaging is a very attractive cardboard box with a plastic window showing all the pieces of the toy. (Apologies for the water damage to the box.) Inside is a red plastic tray holding the robot and his accessories. Interestingly, there are only three accessories: Dwayne, Rusty, and a ray gun. All the other features are built into Big Guy, and there are a lot of them.

Pressing a button in the chest lights up the eyes and the robot speaks one of four phrases: “This is serious business”, “For the luvva Mike!”, “Fire in the Hole”, and “Candygram”. (The last one is my favorite; it’s Dwayne’s ‘battle cry’ when he unloads all the weapons at once. It’s nonsensical, but it works.)

The ray gun fits in his left hand and the left hand comes off so that Rusty attaches to the left arm for … reasons. The robot’s back opens up in three segments to reveal the highly detailed cockpit. Of course Dwayne fits inside the cockpit, and the cockpit periscope display lights up when you press the talk button. You don’t normally see this level of detail in a mass production toy.

Finally, with a little wiggling and coercion, the right elbow opens up to reveal a barrage of weapons. This is usually the ‘Candygram’ attack seen in the show.

This is a terrific toy for fans of the comic or the animated series. Unfortunately, it is now pretty rare and mint in box copies are expensive, running a few hundred dollars on eBay. Still, highly recommended.

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Iain Delaney was born in the UK but moved to Canada at an early age. The UK heritage explains his fascination with British TV SciFi, including Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, UFO, and, of course, Dr. Who. After fumbling through high school, he fumbled through university, emerging with a degree in physics. With no desire to pursue graduate studies he discovered that a bachelor’s degree had little to no job prospects, so he took up a career in computer programming. In his off time he reads, watches TV and movies, collects toys, and makes attempts at writing. To that end he has a small number of articles published in role-playing game magazines and won two honorable mentions in the Writers of the Future contest. He is working on an urban fantasy YA trilogy and entertains delusions of selling it to movies or TV.