Robosaurus Links

Official ROBOSAURUS Monster Robots, Inc. Web Site
This is the official Web Site for Monster Robots, Inc., the company that was originally started by Doug Malewicki to finance the creation of Robosaurus. You can buy the Robosaurus T-Shirts and additional souvenirs directly from that site.

Robodude (Former Pilot Mike Ryder's cool Site)
This is THE MAN who made Robo seem ALIVE for 6 years! Mike is shown inside the Monster's cranium. He essentially wears an exoskeleton! Note his heavy duty Four-Point harness and his 2-Way communications to the ground crew. Besides the fingertip, forearm, shoulder and foot controls, Mike controls numerous other monster functions with switches along the upper right and left panels.
Piloting Robosaurus is very complex. Mike has spent countless hours of training and reviewing video tapes of shows to ponder what he could be doing better for the next show. Mike's first few shows were awkward, but he practiced hard and eventually became one with the machine! It's called homework and that continual effort keeps Robo exciting and moving in a fluid, lifelike manner.
His Robodude site gives one an inkling of the adventure, plain old hard work and occasional boredom that comes along with being the world's first monster robot pilot! Mike is also the Class 1 licensed tractor-trailer driver who hauled Robo some 200,000 miles from show to show to show. Mike spent many hours on the truck's CB radio conversing with truckers on the highways who inquired as to what was that weird thing he was towing. The happier hours were "CB"ing it with truckers and fans whom actually had seen a live Robo show and were thrilled to talk with the pilot!

FASA's Battletech
This game companies BATTLEMECHS are huge, multi-ton, humanoid, walking robots that do combat in the 31st century controlled by what else - warriors operating them from up inside the heads of the machines!
We first met the FASA game company people through Rick Loomis, President of Flying Buffalo Inc. (whom has sold my Nuclear War Game for the last 25 years). Rick was at a game convention in Los Angeles and brought the FASA people along with him one evening to see our Robo shop and join us for dinner. He correctly guessed since their fictional universe was based on giant battling robots of the 31st century, that they would love to see a precursor actually being built 10 centuries earlier!
When Robo was under construction, FASA's "Spider" was at 30 tons - just about the same weight as Robo! FASA, of course, wouldn't dream of being outdone by a real machine, so rushed out and created their 100 ton "Atlas"! They WIN!

From FASA's president, Jill Lucas: "When we visited the Monster Robot's Inc. warehouse and saw Robosaurus come to life - it made us think that the technology for MECHS couldn't be too far behind. Simply put: Robo is amazing!" (BattleTech and BattleMech are registered trademarks of FASA)

Robot Wars Web Site and Team Delta's Site
Robot Wars is actual combat using remote controlled robots. The goal of all participants is simply to totally annihilate the opposing machine in the most spectacular manner possible. The creativity is awesome. Dan, of Team Delta here in Orange County, California, has even created a robot (machine on right in photo below) named "ALEXANDER" after the great king. Dan's robot has a very evil, nasty, 6", 1000 RPM powered buzz saw built onto the end of its arm! Here it is shown winning over "STUFFY". First, ALEXANDER decapitated BARBIE (yes - a Barbie doll), who was along for the ride with STUFFIE, Dan decided to show mercy on Stuffie and was promptly booed and hissed for this kindness by the spectators! Then it was two thumbs up for a two thumbs down ending!

Currently, ROBOT WARS is an annual competition in San Francisco, but it looks like the idea is spreading to competitions in other countries. Unfortunately, spectator safety requires some rules - like no flame throwers, no launchable missiles with exploding warheads, no 100 megawatt laser vaporizers, nor other cool stuff of that nature. There are different weight classes - the biggest being 170 pounds (however, if the machine is a more complicated walking robot, rather than the typical wheel driven robot, it can weigh up to 300 pounds). I would love to enter Robosaurus, but he weighs a bit too much and wouldn't even fit inside their Plexiglas protected combat arena. Besides, Robo would be too expensive to put at risk AND I would worry that these clever psycho guys could probably come up with a 170 pounder that might just take him out, especially if we couldn't legally use our fire!!
It would be great fun to be one of the judges at the 3 day event. It would be more fun to bring our 58,000 pound, 40 foot tall toy along - if nothing else to have him stand outside to help them promote the actual ROBOT WARS!

The BigFoot 4x4 Monster Truck Web Site
Robosaurus wouldn't exist without all the previous excitement created by Bob Chandler's BigFoot Monster Trucks! No way could we have raised the money to build Robosaurus without investors seeing the proven marketing potential of such outrageous entertainment. Screaming fans of all ages just go nuts whenever BigFoot makes its appearance! Through Bob Chandler's leadership and ongoing program of continuous innovation, the BigFoot 4X4's are as popular as ever!
In our early days, we were worried his company would beat us to creating the world's first real monster robot. At the time, a giant monster transformer seemed like such a logical mental progression/idea that we seriously thought everyone else in the business would be working on one, too. Surprisingly, nobody has come close to creating a match for Robosaurus - yet!
(Also, thanks to Penny Chandler, their site's Webmaster, for sending me the latest BigFoot photos for use in our site.)