YMMV / Challenge of the GoBots

• Accidental Innuendo:
  • In the episode "Genius and Son", Cy-Kill threatens to, in his own words, let Crasher have her way with Braxis. To have one's way with someone happens to be a euphemism for rape.
  • In an infamous scene, Leader-1 is captured when Cy-Kill's minions slap a paralyzing device on his back. His struggles to escape before he succumbs look... like a different sort of assault.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Fans have jokingly interpreted the Renegades as heroics rebels fighting against an evil authoritarian regime due to some rather odd illustrations in the Command Center playset.
• Awesome Music: Gotta love that Hoyt Curtin theme.
• Cliché Storm: The show features a lot of stock 80's action cartoon plots, many of them done multiple times.
• Complete Monster—"In Search of Ancient GoBonauts": Doctor Cunningham is an archeologist who worked for UNECOM and is secretly an undercover Renegade spy. While excavating an ancient pyramid, Cunningham found a spaceship which led to the discovery of the Dark Heart, an Antimatter weapon created by the "Evil One" that nearly destroyed GoBotron thousands of years ago. After Scooter, Nick, and AJ helped him find the Dark Heart, Cunningham revealed his true intentions and gave it to Cy-Kill so he can destroy the Guardians. However, Leader-1 managed to talk Cy-Kill out of using it, as the Dark Heart had the potential to rip a hole through the time-space continuum and destroy the entire universe. Cunningham then stole the Dark Heart for himself so he can become "the loon that's going to bring the world to an end".
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The Renegades in general tend to be better remembered than the Guardians. Crasher and Cop-Tur are particularly well-liked; the former for being a fun and interesting Dark Action Girl, the latter for being a lovable Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain.
  • The Renegade Zero appears in only 2 episodes (one of which he's in for less than 1 minute) but watchers latched on to him for being a genuinely competent villain.
  • Among the Guardians, Path Finder seems to be the most popular, for being a cool girl with a unique look and a toy that pretty much blows her Transformers counterpart Cosmos out of the water.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The show really took off in France, and they imported Japan's Machine Robo: Revenge of Chronos to be its sequel, in spite of the blatant Art Shift and different allegiances for many of the characters.
• Harsher in Hindsight: This portrayed a future world where the Cold War that was still running hot, with Anya Turgonova barely trusting the Americans, only for Real Life to have the Soviet Union collapse and Russia to end up part of the United Nations. However, Vladimir Putin, in the 2020's, reignited the Cold War, meaning that, whether she's from the 80's or the 20's, she's still going to have the same prejudices...
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The fact that the GoBots toyline was originally a competitor to Transformers became this after Hasbro, owner of the Transformers franchise, bought Tonka, owner of the GoBots, in 1991 and therefore are the current owners of the GoBots franchise.
  • The entire concept of the Rock Lords (transforming aliens based on real life minerals like granite or quartz) feels almost eerily similar to Steven Universe, just done in a much sillier way.
• Memetic Loser: The GoBots as a whole have picked up this reputation, due to them being the iconic instance to many 80s kids of a Dueling Shows dynamic where one of the shows involved was very clearly the loser, along with the general "lame" feel that percolated a lot of its characters. For a while, Transformers comics made a habit of killing off random GoBots seemingly just to salt the wound, and though the outright disdain has mostly dissipated, they're still seen as a low-hanging fruit.
• Misblamed: Many people have dismissed Challenge of the GoBots as a ripoff of the Transformers franchise, which is only partially true. The GoBots toyline actually predates that of the Transformers.
  • On technical levels, the Transformers cartoon did beat the GoBots first, while in actual American toylines, GoBots came first. However, each being based on earlier foreign toylines complicate things even further. In a way, Transformer parts came first, but the first fully formed toy that would be sold as a GoBot came before the first fully formed toy that would be sold as a Transformer. You may see any example brought up in "who came first" debates involving the two franchises.
• Moral Event Horizon: Cy-Kill crosses it in "Clutch of Doom" when he crushes one of the condensed globes of Earth's population in order to coerce Leader-1 into turning himself in. While it's later revealed that the globes containing Earth's inhabitants were swapped with hollow fakes, it's still particularly vile that Cy-Kill would murder a billion people just to force Leader-1 to surrender.
• Narm: The hands in the cartoon were a little too toy accurate to take seriously.
• Never Live It Down: Scooter is generally disliked for being a coward who always complains about getting into dangerous situations even though he actually works up enough courage to save the day on more than one occasion and gradually grows out of his cowardice as the series progresses.
• Retroactive Recognition: Constable Odo is the Renegades' main human ally.
• The Scrappy: Scooter. Oh gods, Scooter. He probably would have been more popular if they hadn't made Frank Welker give him the most annoying voice possible. Also Nick - who was basically Scooter's best buddy.
  • In addition, unlike his Transformers counterpart Bumblebee, Scooter was cowardly and his first response to most bad situations was to gulp in fear. Heck, in the very first episode Leader 1 declares that he wants to launch a full scale assault to finish the Renegades off once and for all, and Scooter's reaction is to gulp and ask if he isn't being too hasty! You could argue he recognises his lack of combat skill or ability, but Bumblebee wasn't afraid to risk his life if it would help the Autobots out, despite his diminutive size.
  • The Rock Lords in general tend to get a ton of mockery. The whole idea of robots that turn into rocks is just so stupid-sounding to most people that they never really had a chance.
• So Bad, It's Good: The Rock Lords. Think Transformers, but instead becoming something cool like a car, a dinosaur, a plane, or a tank, they became rocks! You could choose between granite, quartz or shale amongst others! The movie really highlights the central issue here - there’s scenes where they transform and roll out... and proceed to slowly clump away down the road like bricks turning under their own power.
• So Okay, It's Average: The general opinion of the show amongst people who have actually watched it is that it's a decent and watchable cartoon even if some people dismiss it as a ripoff of Transformers with no other thought needed.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Steamer, a Renegade who did a Heel–Face Turn and became a Guardian, only showed up in one episode.
  • "The Third Column" ends with Zero stating that the Guardians and Renegades haven't seen the last of him, implying that he'll return to cause more trouble. His only other appearance was in a flashback in "Et Tu, Cy-Kill?", and even then he only appeared for less than a minute.
  • Puzzler, the Renegade counterpart to Courageous, never reappeared after his début episode.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Due to the female GoBots lacking feminine traits, it's very easy to mistake one for a male GoBot, at least until they speak.
• Vindicated by History:
  • In the late 80’s to early 2000’s, people largely saw Gobots as just a failed Transformers rip-off. Nowadays, in large part thanks to it being folded into Transformers, many have given the series a second look and re-evaluated their opinions, regarding it as a decent show that did the best it could at the time.
  • The toyline has gone through an even further reevaluation. For its original run, it was seen as a poor man's Transformers favoured by the least cool kids: the toys were smaller, cheaper, were linked to a lamer cartoon, and had dumb names. It didn't help that the cartoon, unlike Transformers, had pretty toy-accurate character designs, which made it all the more obvious to kids that a lot of the toys had decidedly goofy looks. Retrospectives, meanwhile, tend to recognize that the Machine Robo molds had some pedigree of their own, and often note that, pound for pound, being smaller than equivalent Transformers was really the only downside to Gobots. They had more varied vehicle modes, less partforming, were more detailed and complex than Transformers in their size class, and some even seemingly outclassed their Transformer counterparts—for instance, Puzzler was a fully self-contained combiner, something Transformers didn't manage until the late 90s. Though calling them outright superior will still often get people yelling at you, calling them decent is far more acceptable than it once was.