Toy

It's still like this for us.

In contrast to most science fiction franchises, toys are the core of the Transformers brand, its original reason for being. Most Transformers fiction exists to showcase, spotlight, promote, and, in general, sell toys. Merchandise and other non-transforming "artifacts" also generally exist in support of the toy lines.

Transformers toys are generally created and marketed as part of a particular "franchise" (i.e. Beast Wars, Armada, the retroactively-named Generation 1 etc.), a whole merchandising family with associated characters and fiction. However, this article deals with the physical toys themselves, separate from their representation as fictional characters.

Since the brand debuted in 1984, innumerable Transformer toys have been designed, manufactured and marketed. An exact count is difficult due to the varied nature of the toys (for example, does a Headmaster robot and its partner mini-figure count as one Transformer or two? What about minor retools, variants and giftsets?). But even conservative estimates by collectors tend to run into the low thousands.

Design

Where the hell do you KEEP that enormous cannon, Megatron?

Design concepts for an unproduced Classics Deluxe class Cosmos.

Most Transformers are designed as a joint venture between Hasbro in America, and TakaraTomy (previously Takara) in Japan. Hasbro typically provides concepts and artistic direction, while Takara(Tomy) handles the engineering tasks of turning the designs into working physical objects. This division of labor is not cut-and-dried, however; the process involves a great deal of back-and-forth communication between the two companies, with staff members from both working in close conjunction and corresponding on a daily basis. The teams travel overseas several times a year to meet in person, alternating between Japan and Rhode Island. The relationship has grown closer and more intense over the years; the two companies now plan their futures together, compromising along the way to meet the differing requirements of their target markets; this includes not only toy designs, but associated storylines as well.^[1]

The toy design process begins with a range of character types and possible alternate modes. In the days of Beast Wars, for example, a range of about 100 animal forms was considered.^[2]

Nearly all Transformers toys have a minimum of two forms, most commonly a humanoid "robot" form and an alternate mode. This means that even a fairly simple Transformer is much more complex than the typical action figure. Multiple alternate modes, articulation, and complex transformations can multiply this many times over. TakaraTomy works out the transformation schemes; as of 2002, Takara still did this on paper. Hasbro would then overlay their detailing designs on the drawings. The entire process of taking a toy from concept to finished, mass-produced product takes approximately one year;^[3] as of 2024, the teams were working roughly two years in advance of products going on shelves.^[4]

Because of their worldwide marketing, Transformers must be designed to meet many widely-varying safety laws. This often results in certain limitations, and even changes being made before toys are sold in the highly litigious United States of America compared to their Japanese releases.

Related articles:

Components

Gone are the days when the instructions said, "Flip out rear of vehicle to form legs; pull out arms."

Transformer toys contain a "vocabulary" of working parts, joint types, and standardized design items that reappear across many figures. The vast majority are humanoid in their robot mode, and thus require a head, (at least) two arms, two legs and a torso.

The complexity of Transformers toys has grown over time, making several leaps forward during the course of Generation 2 and Beast Wars, and then again during the Movie line. G2 introduced complex posability and the notion of toys that could store or hold all of their accessories in both modes; Beast Wars made these concepts universal, and featured a number of toys with extremely complicated transformations and a maximum number of ball joints, providing a huge range of articulation. Other toy lines would revisit these levels of complexity, particularly the 2001 Robots in Disguise and Alternators lines.

Related articles:

Production/Manufacturing

Though the toys are designed in America and Japan through a collaborative process between Takara and Hasbro, most are manufactured in places like China.

The production process is complex and expensive. Before mass production can begin, a hard-copy prototype must be created. Steel-cut molds can then be made; this is by far the most costly part of the process. Once the molds are cut, one or more test shots are typically created, usually in random colors. If the molds are ready, mass production commences.

The expense of cutting molds is the main reason that retools and recolors are such common phenomena in Transformers. Redecos allow Hasbro and TakaraTomy to capture a greater return on their considerable investment.

To this day, the number of each Transformers toy produced and distributed at standard retail (as opposed to exclusives) remains a closely-guarded secret.

Related articles:

Materials

Alternators/Binaltech Tracks. The Takara version uses die-cast metal for added heft, while the Hasbro iteration is all-plastic for added being-able-to-stand-up.

The vast majority of the toys are made of plastic, held together with metal screws and pins, along with the occasional adhesive. The plastics used in Transformer construction have generally increased in flexibility and durability over the years, allowing toys to survive child-inflicted trauma that would have destroyed early Generation 1 toys.

Die-cast, used as an accessory material from 1984 to 1986, has been all but abandoned due to its excessive cost, shipping weight and design limitations, though it has reappeared in the fan-oriented Binaltech, Titanium Series, and Masterpiece sublines.

Related articles:

• Die-cast
• Plastic
• Rubber tires

Common gimmicks

The Air Military Mini-Con Team from Armada. The gimmicks: micro-size, ability to "Powerlinx" with larger toys, triple-changing, being awesome.

As if Transformers weren't complicated enough, Hasbro has seen fit to revitalize and enhance the line constantly with numerous special features, commonly referred to in the fandom as gimmicks. These may range from things as simple as a common decorative theme (such as vacuum metalizing on the Transmetal toys) to complex mechanisms that drive the entire design of a toy. Gimmicks have been a part of Transformers from Day 1 and continue to provide the line with diversity and interest today.

Main article: Gimmick

Related articles:

Decoration

OTFCC-exclusive Sentinel Maximus, a toy heavily slathered in paint operations.

Most Transformers are cast in a small number of plastic colors. To help bring them to life, paint, tampographs, and stickers are commonly used to provide additional color.

Stickers were common during the days of Generation 1, but have mostly dropped out of use due to changing aesthetic tastes and the feasibility of more complex paint operations. Today, faction symbols are typically applied via tampograph, with most other details brought out by paint operations.

Related articles:

Marketing

In the market-driven rush to production, sometimes the wires get a little crossed. This package cross-sell presents toys in color schemes that were never mass-produced. Oops!

As awesome as the toys themselves may be, they tend to sell better when they represent fictional characters. The marketing engine that promotes the toys is organized into franchises, each encompassing a range of related toys with a storyline built around them. A full-blown, flagship franchise typically features an animated cartoon, and often a comic book series as well. These fictional portrayals may also be a source of considerable income for Hasbro/TakaraTomy, but ultimately they exist to sell toys.

The toy packaging also commonly supports the marketing effort, with bios and package art of the characters, as well as cross-sell ads promoting other toys currently available. Inside the packaging, catalogs and pack-in material further market other toys.

Related articles:

Distribution and retail

Packaging! It's elegant, sleek, attractive, and lasts for about five seconds.

Some toys, like Tigertrack, are exclusive to certain markets.

Once the toys are manufactured and packaged, they are shipped from their place of birth in Asia to America. As of 1998, their first destination is a Seattle distribution warehouse. From there, they proceed to the distribution centers for the various chain stores that sell the toys at retail; at that point, control of distribution is out of Hasbro's hands. On average, it takes six to eight weeks from the time the toys ship from Hasbro to their appearance on retail shelves.^[2]

Toy retailers do their best to predict what toys will and won't sell, and order accordingly; however, it is an imperfect process, and slow sellers in one wave of toys can compel a retailer to order fewer toys from the following waves. Retailers are particularly reluctant to order large numbers from the tail-end of a toy line.^[1]

Today, the largest distributors of Transformer toys in America are Walmart and Target, though the toys can also be found at many other stores such as Meijer, Kmart, Kohl's, and Walgreens, as well as various regional grocery and drug store chains.

Related articles:

Common retailers of Transformer toys:

Secondary market

You'll need to sell your arm, your leg and your kidney to buy this guy.

In Transformers fandom, "secondary market" refers to the buying and selling of used toys. The original, stereotypical secondary market was the old-fashioned garage sale—you know, the one where your mom sold all your G1 toys for ten bucks while you were off in college.

The secondary market among fans began with internet auctions, primarily on alt.toys.transformers in the early 1990s. By the late '90s, ATT's primacy as a marketplace had been supplanted by eBay and various fan-run sites. Buyers and sellers also found a bonanza of opportunities at BotCon, with thousands of toys changing hands over the course of a weekend.

Like any economic market, the secondary market has a life of its own. Older toys can be worth hundreds of dollars, depending on their condition, rarity, and popularity, or they may be worth next to nothing. Most toys from Beast Wars and later franchises tend to be of comparatively lower value, as many adult fans were buying the toys when they were at retail, and have since kept them in pristine or even unopened condition.

Related articles:

• alt.toys.transformers
• eBay
• Fandom
• Mint in sealed box
• Toy scalping
• Toy swapping

Toy aging

Split open and melt.

Transformer toys are, to put it bluntly, not meant to last forever. They are marketed to a fleeting and transitory age group, with the notion that if they survive a few years, their work is done. Thus collectors who have retained their toys for decades can find some disturbing surprises as their toys age, regardless of how carefully the toys have been stored. Among the most common problems are:

• plastic discoloration — see Photodegradation
• cracking of rubber tires and the rubber tubing on G1 Shockwave.
• liquidy deterioration of softer rubbery plastics, such as the Pretender Monsters' rubber Pretender shells, the nosecone on G1 Cyclonus, and the tank treads on Revenge of the Fallen Bludgeon
• chrome flaking, a problem common on the Transmetal toys — see Vacuum metallizing.
• embrittlement of poorly-mixed plastics that can cause a toy to disintegrate — see Gold Plastic Syndrome.
• damaged stickers
• acid damage from keeping batteries inside them too long; this is not a flaw unique to toys, but owners of older figures with electronics should still keep it in mind

Toys and this site

It's a toy, sure; but is it a toy toy? In the "toy" sense of the word?

Articles on TFWiki.net classify a Transformers product as either a "toy" or "merchandise". For our purposes, a Transformers toy is a scaled-down depiction of a character as it would exist in its fictional universe, with the details and features of the toy meant to represent that fictional character as closely as possible. This excludes many products that do not depict in-story versions of characters. For example, the Robot Powered Machines from the Revenge of the Fallen toyline are small cars with a representation of their robot mode molded into the bottom of the vehicle. It is not meant to be a toy version of a fictional character that also has their robot mode on the bottom of their vehicle; within the story, there is no character that looks like this. Such toys are listed as "merchandise" for the purposes of the wiki.

Non-transformable Transformer representations (i.e. Super Collection Figures, Power Bots, Robot Heroes, R.E.D., ULTIMATES!, Kuro Kara Kuri, and many others) are more of a grey area, especially since becoming far more abundant after 2015 or so. In nearly all cases, these items do not depict versions of a character that cannot transform; they do not match a fictional portrayal. Therefore TFWiki.net categorizes such items as "merchandise" instead of "toys."

The main exceptions to this system - the types of non-transforming items that we do list as "toys" - are:

• Action Masters, non-transforming toys representing characters that in the fictional universe are supposed to be non-transforming.
• Non-transforming items packaged as accessories with transforming toys and meant to depict in-story interactions; for example, the many gun-mode inclusions of Megatron with Masterpiece toys so they can appear to hold him, or War for Cybertron Trilogy micro-figures that depict scale differences with larger characters.

Beyond toys and toy-like merchandise, TFWiki.net has never seriously attempted to catalogue the far, faaaaarrrrrr larger spectrum of Transformers merchandise available, such as clothing and apparel, stationery and school supplies, foods, party goods, etc. At this point, it would probably not be possible for us, or anyone, to do so.

Fiction

The prohibitions on "host selling" in the U.S. Children's Television Act means that Transformers toys cannot appear in Hasbro-controlled series. Comics and prose for print and internet are exempt, as are TakaraTomy-controlled media since no such laws exist in Japan. (As we will see, crafty cartoon writers found a way around this in the U.S.)

Marvel Comics continuity

Anthony Duranti had a toy Bumblebee. Power Struggle

Beast Wars II cartoon

Megastorm is seen playing with a Galvatron action figure (which he can't transform on his own). Who Is the Leader!?

Cybertron

Shortround was an avid toy collector. He was especially proud of his mint-condition Generation 2 Defensor and Menasor.^[6]

Animated continuity

Sari, Wreck-Gar and Bumblebee were seen playing with toy versions of their compatriots. Transformers Animated: The AllSpark Almanac II

Rescue Bots cartoon continuity

Mayor Luskey had Doc Greene make souvenir Rescue Bots made in honor of Bot Appreciation Week. Evan and Myles had several of them reprogrammed as mischief makers. All Bots Great and Small

Ask Vector Prime

Vector Prime noted that the only Transformers existing in the Quadwal cluster were non-sentient toys. Ask Vector Prime

2005 IDW continuity

"Is this another vision?"

Following a series of increasingly implausible misadventures, four of the five Decepticon Scavengers found that they had somehow been turned into toys, though they were ultimately able to reverse this effect. Some Of My Best Friends Are Autobots

External links