How About That Thing?

Ah, Bots Master. If ever there was a cartoon I hold near and dear to my heart, it’s definitely in the top three. Bots Master is a show that is somehow equal parts a product of its time, and ahead of its time at the exact same time, if that makes any sense.

It’s definitely behind the times for the obvious fact it assumed we’d have fully functional robots by 2025. We definitely have the software, thanks to assholes like Open AI and Google, but the hardware definitely hasn’t progressed past the tablet phase. In the last thirty years, the closest we’ve come to fully functional, autonomous robots so far is either roombas, or the remote control R2 unit I got to build at the Droid Depot out in Galaxy’s Edge in 2021. In both cases, you still need a cell phone, and they’re both pretty brick stupid if you leave them to their own devices.

Also, the show relied a little too hard on 3D. I don’t care what anybody says: 3D is, and always will be a gimmick. It was a gimmick in the 1980s, it was a gimmick in the 1990s, it was a gimmick in the 2010s, and it’ll remain a gimmick.

“You’re just saying that because you only have one functioning eye.”

Well… Uh… Okay, fair enough. Only having one eye tends to render 3D glasses useless. In the past, it meant that I was left with what my broken-ass eye sight interpreted as paper sunglasses with red lenses. At worst, you had those 2010s era 3D glasses that not only didn’t work, and weren’t all that comfortable to wear for two to three hours, but they didn’t even LOOK cool. At least those old timey 3D shades with one red lens and one blue lens looked cool.

So yeah, relying heavily on 3D during “laser time” is another unfortunate example of how this show has aged.

Finally, the whole thing definitely reeked of being a thirty-minute toy commercial. There were so many members of The BOYZZ Brigade that I can barely be bothered to remember all of them. As a result, I can easily see a show like this generating a shit ton of action figures in its prime. Back in the day, I wouldn’t have minded having a Ninjazz figure back in the day.

Oh, and I’m pretty sure someone thinks these guys are racist.

I’ll own up to liking The Street BOYZZ as a kid… But consider the act I was, like, nine or ten when this show was on. If it fired lasers, and looked like a robot, I was probably on board no matter what.

There’s definitely a lot working against this show in retrospect… And yet, I still hold this show in high regard despite it all. Sure, nostalgia is definitely a large part of it. However, in a weird way, I’ve looked at this show off and on throughout my adult years, and found that a lot of its themes of corporate greed, political corruption, and fighting the good fight still hold up. In fact, there are actual times when this show seems a lot smarter than it’s leading on. I mean yeah, it’s no Batman: The Animated Series, but there’s a lot of usage of propaganda, media manipulation, and corporate politics involved that most shows for this demographic would probably glaze over.

Let’s look at some of the players involved in this little war, shall we?

This is Ziv Zulander, or ZZ. He’s the main hero of the series, and the man who figured out that The RM Corporation’s newest product, the crang chip, does nothing but give The RM Corporation remote access to every robot on Earth with it installed. Realizing what RM Corp is doing, he redesigns his various side projects, known as BOYZZ, and turns them into fighters.

BOYZZ stands for something, but I forget what. However, I’m pretty certain that it was a massive stretch to get the combination of words they wanted to use in order to get BOYZZ as the acronym. Also, BOYZZ resent being called bots.

This is Blitzy. I am at least seventy-five percent positive that’s a nickname. I mean I could buy Ziv as a person’s name, but Blitzy seems like kind of a stretch.

In any case, she’s ZZ’s kid sister. In terms of kid sister characters, you could definitely do worse. I mean yeah, she does tend to get captured every once and awhile, and she’s not COMPLETELY without her obnoxious side from time to time, but she’s not COMPLETELY useless, or even counterintuitive.

It’s the Zulanders, and a fistful of BOYZZ, against the evil RM Corporation.

This is Sir Lewis Leon Paradim: the CEO of The RM Corporation. He sounds like Tom Kayne doing his best Clint Eastwood impression, which is ESPECIALLY weird, because he’s voiced by Dale Wilson, for what that’s worth. Ominous music with a danceable beat always seems to follow this guy around wherever he and his cronies go. You know, just in case you had trouble remembering he was the bad guy.

This is Paradim’s personal assistant: the unironically named Lady Frenzy. Yes, someone actually named their character this, and expected to be taken seriously.

She’s basically the personification of hotness. Or at least what 1994 considered hot: skinny, blonde hair, breathy voice, probably paints her toenails pink , etc. In exchange for being as beautiful as she is, she’s also treacherous, and more than happy to backstab anybody who gets in her way. Including…

Last up, we have Dr. Hiss. Lady Frenzy is an idiotic name, but Dr. Hiss feels like something that was given to him by a school bully for having a very obvious speech impediment. They probably gave him that name seconds before giving him a swurly, and as a result, he went down the rabbit hole of mad science.

So yeah, he has a lethal case of what I call Cobra Commander Syndrome. IE, all of his S and Z noises come out as long hissing sounds. It’s especially bad in his case, because on top of effecting his ability to pronounce the letter S, hissing noises tend to be his idle noise. There are times when he’s just standing around, and you can still hear the hiss noise.

Dr. Hiss also developed a lot of the bots that end up being combatants against Zulander and his BOYZZ Brigade: greenbots, beast bots, humabots, MDbots (mass destruction bots), etc.

Funny enough, if this show had come out just a decade later, he probably could’ve called them weapons of mass destruction.

Where as The BOYZZ Brigade are all individuals with their own unique design and personality, RM Corp’s various robots are all uniform, they all speak with a voice that really puts Steven Hawking’s screen reader tech into perspective, and all of them move stiffly and predictably. Hell, a lot of them need a guy in the booth to type in commands just to get them to do their job.

I’d call this a monster of the day sort of show, except much like The Centurions, which I wrote about over a year ago on this very site, there’s rarely if ever anything beyond the usual greenbots, MD bots, and police bots. Which probably doesn’t matter too much, once laser time is declared.

Oh yeah, I forgot. “Laser time” is what they call it when you’re supposed to put on your 3D shades. Once “game over” is declared, you can take them back off. Everything in between… Well, hope you like lasers.

For all the shit I talk about this show, I still love it. And, perhaps, in a weird way, it ended up being pretty instrumental in shaping my political beliefs. Especially here in 2025, where in every single corporation on Earth seems to be pure lovecraftian evil. There’s always a new CEO to add to my shitlist, doing shitty things, and seeming to have no interest in how it affects anybody under them. Paradim could just as easily be a stand-in for Elon Musk, or Mark Zuckerberg, or that asshole who founded Open AI, just to name a few examples.

I definitely wouldn’t say this show aged like fine wine, but I ALSO wouldn’t say this show aged like milk. If anything, I’d say this show aged like… Oh, I don’t know. A twinky, maybe? Like, you probably aren’t in the biggest hurry to eat it when you find it, but it ends up being better than you thought after a couple of years of being in the back of the pantry. I’d say Bots Master is definitely worth a look.