 "Why is my Tracks blue and yours red?" "Why is there Hasbro copyright on my toy and who are these Takara people?" The above are questions a lot of people will have when taking a closer look at many of their toys. If you're lucky enough to get your hands on another copy of a toy you already own you can be taken for one hell of a surprise when you notice that it just isn't the exact same thing as your other one. The origins of Transformers or "It's all about the big bucks." A long time ago in a Hasbro office far far away a few evil captains of enterprise hatched an evil scheme. They would trick a few Japanese companies to sell them to rights to a few lines of innovative transforming robots and sell these along with a well thought out story to the masses inhabiting the america's. They would call these robots Transformers and the big trick of it was that they were split into two warring factions and were actually alive! Well we all know what happened from that point onwards. Transformers grew to be one of the largest mainstay boy's toy lines in the world and is still going strong close to its 20th anniversary. Now, way back when, they didn't know this idea of theirs was going to take of in such a way. Hey of course they had good hopes, but this was something else! New factory plants had to be put to use to fill the enormous demands! The problem however was that Transformers were now everywhere and no single factory would be able to take on such a enormous task on its own. So it came to pass that factories all over the world were set up to manufacture those great little toys. Alas, distance time and language barriers caused a lot of small "anomalies" along the line. A lot of people have confused these things with conspiracy theories involving old Diaclone and Microman stock from the original Takara lines. Alas, one just doesn't keep several thousand Cliffjumper feet spare in case the Japanese market suddenly explodes. What one does have left are .. molds. Yes molds. Those damn expensive things to make. Now copyrights are very very nice, and so are adjustments to the toy for American market releases, but those molds are still there! Good to make several hundreds or thousands of perfectly good little robot parts. Any sensible company would use those molds if they had them instead of just letting them go to waste. And thus it happened... So if you ever find a nice Takara logo with a big circle around it, congrats! you just found one of the first waves of toys out there. :) So ehh what about things like purple nosed Skywarps and red Tracks'? Yes, what about those eh? Well when you're providing half the world with tiny robots things can and do go wrong on occasion. Not all parts of the world will get the same update at the same time, or EVER. Some countries start of later, but they don't get the actual latest design notes! Sloppy and lazy yes, but in the grand scheme of things not that big a deal to those who see the dollars coming there way. :) It does leave a lot of us with variants top hunt down though with leftover design qualities which had been removed for release in most parts of the world. There's also this thing about looking at a color map. This can go wrong from plant to plant and one can easily mix up the colors for say, two nearly identical mini cars. Surprise, we had that going on as well. :) Hell we even have characters that got totally inverted on a worldwide scale. Try picturing your Galvatron with (most) of the purple and gray reversed once and you'll see what I mean. all in all one can be happy we didn't get toys with two left arms or...wait, we had those as well (Wacky mexicans). :) basically anything can and will happen when the main goal a company is going for is making profit. So where does this leave us? Well it leaves us with me making nice articles from time to time and others with nifty stuff that looks a lot more like the toys in the original catalogues to hunt down! Others have taken to documenting all those little changes out there. Be they cost induced or just a periodic adjustment of the general design of a mold. (Take the Grimlock mold which was heavily adjusted for late G1 Europe and Japan releases.) Want more info? Want to see what's out there? Take a look at the following two sites: |