Action Figures & Their Beers -- Totally Screwed

by Beedo Sookcool
on 2026-01-07, 06:29:18

NORTHERN MONK SCREWBALL

I don’t often get a chance to use GoBots in these articles, but if you really want to be pedantic – and of course you do – this is technically a Machine Robo figure, Rod Drill, as he appears in the Revenge of Cronos movie. But for those of us who grew up outside Japan in the 1980s, this the Renegade GoBot, Screw Head. Except Screw Head is black, red, and chrome. This guy is navy blue, red, and matte aluminium.

Screwball is named after the cone-shaped ice cream novelties you could get from ice-cream trucks, that have an X-shaped distribution of coloured, flavoured goo throughout them that, from the top down, makes them look like Phillip’s-head screws. And in particular, the goo in question is strawberry & bubblegum in vanilla ice cream. And, as with Stay-Puft, it’s just one ingredient too many. I’ve had strawberry beer that was quite nice, had some vanilla-tinged beers that were delicious . . . and then there’s bubblegum.

Bubblegum does not belong in beer. I do not like this beer. This beer tastes like a kindergartener tried to mix up a beer for daddy.

Moving on, this action figure is one of a number of updated Machine Robo produced by Action Toys. They produced a number of these “Masterpiece GoBots” (known to Western collectors as Cy-Kill, Leader-1, Spay-C, Loco, Blaster, Tank, Fitor, Block Head, Tough Trailer, Snoop, Buggyman, and a Deluxe Cy-Kill), and a few (including Turbo and an upgraded version of Tough Trailer) remained unproduced. The line just sort of . . . faded out. It was going great guns for a while, churning out three or four figures per wave for a couple years, then down to two per wave every other year, and then . . . it just quietly slipped out the back door and did a D. B. Cooper. Nothing since 2021.

As with all the other Revenge of Cronos figures, it comes with a black plastic display gantry with jointed crane arm that you can configure in any way you wish, a couple of adapter plugs so you can have him “flying” in robot or vehicle mode, and a character-appropriate accessory or two. Except Rod Drill comes with what look like combination pile-driver boxing gloves with attached forearm blades, and nobody can figure out where they came from, because he never uses anything like them in any media. (They’re probably like Ree-Yees’ golden rifle from 1983 – they figured they had to give him something as an accessory, so they made something up.) He also comes with a much longer drill to swap out for his head.

On the whole, it’s not a bad figure. A little overly complicated to transform in the leg department, and they went with the cartoon colour scheme, instead of the much cooler original toy colour scheme, but he poses well, and you can feel the weight of the die-cast parts on him.

But, as nifty as this figure is, I’ll always prefer Screw Head to look like this:

Drink this if you also like: Y’know, I can’t think of anything else that’s like this beer. I suppose if you like the taste of bubblegum, it might be something novel to try. But otherwise, I can’t in good conscience actually recommend this beer. It’s far from terrible, but it’s just not particularly good, either.