I had this one as a child, a few years after the fact... my dexterity was too underdeveloped to put it together, I recall having to ask an adult for help. Lol, good memories.

@MCLegoboy:
"...sudden case of old"
...what, 28? 30? Pfft. ;)

I loved this one!

I was in high school when Throwbots came out, but they were so much fun to collect, with the transforming features and the multicolored spaceship style cases.

I collected all the Throwbots. I still don't know why. It was right before I entered into my 2nd Dark Age. I think I was desperate for anything cool looking to add to my collection. These didn't hold my interest long.

I have no memory of these dudes being known as “Slizers” (edit: I remember Throwbots but I’m not sure why we needed the distinction between the two). I have fond memories of them and consider them as a sort of forerunner to Bionicle.

This car go turbo

@GSR_MataNui:
Throwbots also used a single bent limb combined with a gargantuan straight throwing arm, which resulted in awkward poses. Bionicle added a longer, straighter limb that allowed a more human-like profile. Roboriders also kept the collectible macguffin idea, with launchable wheels. The thing is, I didn’t find out about the Throwbot discs or Roborider wheels until Bionicle had launched, because they seemed to only be available through direct sales. And if I had, I doubt I would have cared about them. The Kanohi had an aesthetic quality to them, where the discs and wheels were purely functional. I’ve used Kanohi in System MOCs, as well as Bionicle
MOCs, and I don’t remember ever using the discs or wheels.

@PDelahanty:
Excluding even a single copy of the disc pack, I collected all of the Throwbots, and I can tell you exactly why. I got a few early on because I thought they looked interesting, but quickly changed my mind after building a few. The rest I picked up at retail, only _after_ I’d started to build Bionicle MOCs, because they included a range of colors for socket joints, well beyond what we’d see in early Bionicle sets up to that point. I had skipped the Roboriders entirely, and I think I was able to collect all of them (again, excluding even a single copy of the wheel pack), also to raid for parts.

@MCLegoboy said:
"Also, he's just got a fantastic voice. "Here me Krabs! You'll take this Krabby Patty from me when you pry it from my cold, dead, [Indistinct chatter] Aaaaaaaaaaaaah...""
Fun fact, the "indistinct chatter" is actually a recycled line from the "Plankton's Army" episode later in the season, but sped up to be incomprehensible.

(It's the "Felicitations, malefactors" line fyi)

my boy. My sweet baby boy with his pretty colors and back problems. keep on zoomin'.

(i love him)

@unclghost said:
"These were really pretty fun. I remember really liking that the plastic case they came in was supposed to be some kind of vehicle"

I got the entire first wave by chance in a few Bionicle ebay lots in 2010, including Amazon/Jungle's canister which I still use for spare change to this day for some reason.

See, I think the US got the better individual names for these guys (Turbo instead of City, Torch instead of just Fire) but overall I think we come out on top with the theme name; Slizers is way cooler than Throwbots even if the latter is the more accurate description!

"Hé Paul jonguh, k*t, gooit die Turbo d'r 's in dan!"

@GSR_MataNui said:
"You know, my Slizers lore is SUPER rusty, but if I remember right there were two different versions of the story. One where the Slizers lived on a planet split into a number of elemental regions, and one where each Slizer had their own elemental planets. Also I'm pretty sure some of the combiner models were bad guys who landed on the planet in a meteor? Something like that."

The Slizers were, at least according to one UK catalogue, split into 'good' and 'evil' factions; Fire/Torch, Ice/Ski, Sub/Scuba and City/Turbo (this guy) were the good guys; Judge/Jet, Energy/Electro, Jungle/Amazon and Rock/Granite where the villains. The planet was split into seven regions, one for each 'element'; with Judge being the exception as he, instead, ruled from the central arena of the planet. The Slizers fought each other, as well as fighting elemental monsters within their regions - e.g. the demon building in today's box-art - and within their factions could form into powerful combiners.

To this day I have no idea what made some of them "good" and others "bad"; if I wasn't so used to thinking of them that way, the split would seem pretty arbitrary.

On the new year's eve leading into the year 2000, the Millennium Meteor hit Planet Slizer, blowing away a full half of the planet, and the bad guy Slizers along with it. Out of the ruin emerged new Slizer mutants: 8521, 8522, 8523 (and, arguably, 8520, the Millennium Slizer; the catalogue describes him as their leader even though he isn't actually pictured in the scene) who began to terrorise the surviving Slizers in a bid to seize control of the planet. One theory I've seen is that the new Slizers were formed from the remains of the bad-guy silzers who were killed in the impact, but I've not seen any canon to corroborate that.

As far as I'm aware, the lore never progressed beyond this point; at the time, Lego often liked to leave their theme storylines open-ended so that kids could make up their own endings instead. A double-page spread in the then-current Lego World Club magazine depicted Millennium and Blaster duking it out with each other in an arena before an audience of technic figures, but I've no idea if that factors into canon or was just to show off the sets' cool features.

-

@B_Space_Man - the difference between Slizers and Throwbots is purely marketing; this was back in the times when America and Europe often had different lore and character names for the same theme, and these were a prime example. They were Slizers in Europe, Throwbots in the US.

Personally, I always liked the 'Slizer' name better, it felt more exotic and suited to the alien world of the setting. But that could just be nostalgia bias xD

-

For myself, City here was one of the last of the original-wave Slizers I got. I had got three of them new, plus Blaster from wave 2, and had bought a fourth from a friend when he was losing interest in Lego; and while I was low-key on the lookout for the rest of them because I loved the aesthetic of the world and the characters - even such as it was - and saw in them potential for the same type of world-building as Bionicle had, I hadn't got to the point of committedly searching for them.

And then, a few years on, I found several Slizers, including the four I didn't have, in a local charity shop, all complete with their original (albeit in rather tattered condition) boxes and everything. Naturally, I leapt on the opportunity to pick up the rest of them; and the original eight still have a place in my Lego collection even to this day.

@ThatBionicleGuy said:
"One theory I've seen is that the new Slizers were formed from the remains of the bad-guy silzers who were killed in the impact, but I've not seen any canon to corroborate that.
"

I think that's because 8523 Blaster from 2000 has a faceplate that is half the design of 8504 Jet/Judge's and half the design of 8505 Jungle/Amazon's. Considering the color scheme is the inverse of black and yellow of Judge and the head section is built like Amazon... And considering 8522 Spark basically has the same power as 8507 Electro/Energy.
That just leaves 8520 Millennium/Millennia (which is already an outlier, and has two forms) and 8521 Flare. What element 'flare' is isn't clear, but it could be related to rocks considering the background of the set's artwork has many smaller meteors.
That's all there is to substantiate this theory. It isn't much but at least there's something.

Oh, and there's the 8 pip disk from Jet/Judge that also appears as a standard inclusion with Millennium/Millennia. It has a picture of cosmic radiation or something descending on to the slizer planet. Maybe the big gold-headed one got it from the small yellow and black one?

That's the fun part about Slizers/Throwbots. There is no canon, but the world seems to have just enough to feel like there's more to it than meets the eye.

Yikes, my White whale in Terms of Slizer.

I have everything from this Line, except for His damned 7 Lights disc. And prizes for it have gone Up 10 Times since 2010 (I'm talking about the oil canister disc in real from 8508).

Does anyone Else have the Problem that even fresh from the Box teal throwing Arms have Like Zero friction in the Ball Joint?

@Binnekamp
The 'theory' is actually officially confirmed in the German catalogue of Winter/spring 2000.

The New slizers are called the 'Slizer Mutants' who basically replaced the 't-rex combiner' faction, that the UK Canon called the 'Evil Slizers'.

Slizer did have a lore Canon, but Like Most 90s themes there were 3 different Versions of it, confusing both Fans and TLG's Marketing alike...

Also were the disc Packs (8508) really Not Sold in retail in the US? I can Not Imagine the Line without them... Back in my school days everyone my age was buying those Discs in february-april 1999.

Speaking of the second-wave Slizers... when I was checking the details for my lore post, I looked back at the catalogue page where I first saw them (https://images.brickset.com/library/view/?f=catalogues/c00uk&p=51) and realised why it was that as a kid I thought Blaster was separate from the Slizer Mutants.

The mini-story section states specifically that "THREE new Slizer mutants were born" out of the rubble, despite the wave containing four characters; and later refers to the three as "the new Millennium Slizer and Buddies". Despite the picture showing Blaster as one of the silhouettes, as a kid I took that description to mean that Millennium, Spark and Flare were the new villainous mutants; and since that one Lego World Club feature showed Millennium and Blaster fighting each other, I went on to assume that meant that Blaster was the 'good guy' to Millennium's 'bad guy'.

When I started talking to people online about Slizer lore, some years after, I found that the more common fan interpretation was that Blaster was the villain and Millennium was potentially a hero maybe; which made me wonder why I'd ever assumed the other way. But looking at that catalogue again, I think I understand now what child!me was thinking, even if it isn't accurate.

Still, I do wonder what that means for the origin of the fourth new Slizer, if only three of them came out of the meteor's devastation.

@ThatBionicleGuy said:
"The Slizers fought each other, as well as fighting elemental monsters within their regions - e.g. the demon building in today's box-art - and within their factions could form into powerful combiners."

City Slizer also battled a giant tanker truck, as shown on one of the discs.

@Atuin:
I don’t remember ever seeing them, but we didn’t get a LEGO Store in Michigan until
2010 (even then it’s 45 minutes each way). When Bionicle came out, TRU was often the only store that carried the mask packs, albeit with prices jacked up 50%. Meijer had one shipment of the first pack, which sold out very quickly, and never got another mask pack in again. I ended up having to buy a case from LEGO.com (my first direct purchase ever) to complete my set.

Two possible reasons I can think of for why retailers skipped them are builds and theft. CMFs are still a target of choice for some people, as about 50% of the opened sets I spot are CMF packets. Retailers may take as much as 50% of MSRP, but most of that goes to cover their own expenses. Theft puts a huge dent in their bottom line, so if a product line is particularly vulnerable, it either has to be kept locked up, or not sold at all. And these packs had no build associated with them, so purchasing agents probably didn’t see any chance that they’d sell.

One thing that I did appreciate about the Throwbots / Slizers was that they had some varied styles, from bugs to humanoids, and Turbo / City as a car was a fun concept. The build isn't terribly complex compared to modern Technic, but it was one of my favorite Throwbot characters.