[Sol Fury]

Back in the early 1990s, Tomy launched their own super robot series to capitalize on the success of Takara's Brave series. The three Eldoran series were produced by Sunrise who also produced the Brave shows, and were generally aimed at a younger audience than Brave, and mostly focused around young (6-8) year old children gifted with powerful mecha by the Earth's guardian spirit, Eldoran, to defend Earth from alien invaders.


Backstory over, let's admire some pictures of the cool robot toys!

Raijin-oh was the first series, it featured two main robots, Raijin-oh himself and Bakaryu-oh. In true mecha anime tradition Bakaryu-oh did not show at the beginning of the series, he turns up over halfway through.



Raijin-oh's components.



Here's Bakaryu-oh, a huge, gigantic dragon.



Robot modes, Raijin-oh is on the left, Bakaryu-oh with his huge cannon o' doom is on the right.

And what kind of super robot show would it be if those two didn't combine?



God Raijin-oh, this guy is pretty darn badass folks.

CM's corporation has made an updated version of this set which is more show-accurate and is a high-end collector's piece, although I personally prefer the vintage one. You can afford to be a bit more "rough and tumble" with this dude.


Next up, Ganbaruger. Watch out if you don't like robots who you have to dismantle to transform, this guy would be like your kryptonite!





The cool thing about Ganbaruger is he's made up of three smaller robots who transform all on their own. They're fun little robots too, simple but fun.



Here's the combined robot, Ganbaruger.





Later on, Tomy released two more robots. Rivolger, on the right, came first. His name's a pretty terrible pun on "revolver", which he encourages by turning into a gigantic cannon. Gekiryuger is the red dragon, a gorgeous piece in either mode, although you pretty much dismantle him to change from one to the other.



Here's the Rivol Cannon, Rivolger's weapon mode for Ganbaruger. In one episode of the series the elephant was knocked out of commission (by a giant banana no less!), so the other two mecha who make up Ganbaruger took up the cannon on their own. There was a great "Brave" moment in that scene too - "we can't do it without King Elephan / All we need is there two mecha, we CAN do it!"



Naturally, all three mecha can merge into the most gigantic robot Tomy could imagine at the time. Size wise, the Great Ganbaruger rivals the likes of Victory Saber from Transformers, you'll have to look into Shogun Warriors or a Fortress Maximus to find a transforming toy that stands bigger.

Unfortunately, he can only really move his shoulders.


And the last one. Gosaurer is my favourite of the bunch. He's smaller than the others, but it's like Tomy simply compressed the same amount of awesomeness into a smaller package. Here's the main mecha, Gosaurer, who splits up into three little dinos:





Pretty cool, no? The design is very polished, the individual dinos work nicely and the robot mode manages to avoid having too many obvious cues to the three dinos (mostly because things like the Apatosaurus head and neck come off and lay to one side)



Another cool feature of this series is how the robots could recombine into vehicle modes. The way it worked, they flew to the scene in jet mode, transformed into dinosaur form to evacuate the people etc, then go to robot mode to finish the bad guy of the week.





Here's the support mecha. Gransaurer the Triceratops is a bit bigger than the others, and comes with an awesome polearm weapon. Magnasaurer always reminds me of Grimlock from Transformers in dinosaur mode.



Gransaurer has its own jet mode, one of my personal favourite jet forms ever.





Meanwhile, Magnasaurer merges with Gosaurer to form massive back mounted cannons.



And here you've got King Gosaurer, the combined mode of all three mecha. He's the smallest of the three final combinations, but honestly I think he has the biggest pressence. It probably comes from the fact he is nearly as wide as he is tall.



The Eldoran toys are kind of hard to come by on the secondary market, unfortunately, though I believe they are still being made in Korea or at least are relatively easy to come by over there. One thing I would recommend is to try to get the ones based on the "originals" rather than the reissues. The reissues replaced all the gold chrome with flat yellow. You can see one of the reissues up above, my Gransaurer's a reissue. It's not so bad on him, but consider Ganbaruger or Gosaurer with flat yellow instead of the lovely chrome.

Still, chrome or no chrome, these are some awesome toys and if you are into Japanese mecha like Brave and want to expand your collection to another series, you can do far worse than pick up a couple of Eldoran mecha.