Transformers: Robots in Disguise (2001 toyline)
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| The name or term "Robots in Disguise" refers to more than one character or idea. For a list of other meanings, see Robots in Disguise (disambiguation). |
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The Takara Car Robots toyline, brought to the West as Robots in Disguise, marked a turning point for the Transformers franchise in both markets, both as the end of the "Beast Era" and the return of more "traditional" franchise elements... though the two companies differed in just how many elements they brought back.
Both lines are predominantly filled with robots that transform into realistic (or close enough) modern-day Earth vehicles, though a significant number of villains become robotic beasts. The classic Autobot symbol made its return, but the Decepticons would only appear in the Hasbro version of the line.
Though the toyline struggled in Japan (leading to another year-long gap in Transformers product there), it was a rousing success in Hasbro's markets, continuing well past its normal retail life through a number of store exclusives.
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Takara Car Robots toyline
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At the end of the 1990s, Transformers was floundering in Japan. Though the original Beast Wars toyline had reinvigorated the franchise there just as it had in Hasbro markets, Takara's follow-ups/fillers Beast Wars II and Beast Wars Neo failed to retain its kid audience, to the point where the Beast Wars Metals series, aka "the Transmetal toys and the last two seasons of the Mainframe cartoon" couldn't gain purchase. While Hasbro would continue the Beast theme with Beast Machines, Takara decided to change direction.
A new toyline for the new millennium, 2000's Car Robots focused on modern-day Earth vehicles. The "headliners" of the line are all new-mold toys, with some redecorated toys from previous lines (most of which had not been released in Japan previously). The line is marked by an extremely wide variation in quality, complexity, realism, and posability. At one end of the spectrum were fairly simple designs from previous lines, such as the Combatrons and Spychangers. On the flip side, most of Takara's original mold designs were extremely complex, with the three Car Robo Brothers carrying on the clearest lineage from Neo in their rather fiddly shellformer designs, and the larger toys utilizing a variety of oddball combination methods.
Standard retail
Wave 1 (3-??-2000)
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Wave 2 (4-??-2000)
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| Wave 3 (5-??-2000) | Wave 4 (6-??-2000)
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Wave 5 (7-??-2000)
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(Dangar, Dolrailer, Greejeeber, Hepter, Shuttler) | |||||
Wave 6 (8-??-2000)
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Wave 7 (9-??-2000)
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Wave 8 (10-??-2000)
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Exclusives
| Daiei (8-??-2000) | JUSCO (8-??-2000) | Toys"R"Us (11-??-2000) |  | |||||
| BotCon Japan 2000 (12-17-2000)
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Multiple conventions (9-24 / 10-9-2000)
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Hasbro Robots in Disguise toyline
When the Transtech toyline concept was dropped, Hasbro needed additional time to develop a new franchise to follow the Beast Era. To prevent there being a gap in Transformers product on store shelves for the better part of a year, Hasbro ported over the ready-to-go Car Robots line, rebranding it as Transformers: Robots in Disguise. The line was filled out with other readily-available molds as new characters. Hasbro also made the classic Transformers branding more overt, applying faction symbols to the characters' vehicle modes (Car Robots kept the symbols to robot mode), and rebranded the Combatron sub-faction as Decepticons.
As sales rose and more toys were needed, Hasbro added in still more redecorated toys to pad the line out toward its end. By the time all was said and done, Robots in Disguise included molds from Generation 1, Generation 2, Beast Wars, Machine Wars, and Beast Machines—in other words, every American toyline that had been produced to that point. Several cancelled/delayed/unproduced molds from previous lines were brought out as well, such as Air Attack Optimus Primal. The line even got four Spychanger-styled figures released in the Basic Class assortment's fourth wave which were completely new molds created specifically for this version of the line, not originally from either Car Robots or any previous toyline. This demand for product from retailers also led to a big surge in store exclusive releases in a shift from the preceding "Beast Era" lines.
Robots in Disguise was the first (and thus far, only) time an existing Japanese line was brought over wholesale to the U.S. The line was met with a generally positive reception by fans (particularly those who'd found the Car Robots import prices to be more than they were willing to dish out), and more importantly the line sold well to kids, setting up the upcoming Armada line with a nice receptive audience.
Standard retail
- Basic class
| Wave 1 (July 2001) | Wave 2 (September 2001) | Wave 3 (October 2001) | Wave 4 (January 2002) |  | ||||
| Wave 5 (April 2002) |
- Tiny Tins
- An odd side-class, the Tiny Tins were actually sub-licensed releases, single Spychanger toys that came with a small tin carrying case.
| Wave 1 (July 2003) |  |
- Deluxe class
| Wave 1 (July 2001) | Wave 2 (September 2001) | Wave 3 (October 2001) | Wave 4 (November 2001) |  | ||||
| Wave 5 (January 2002) | Wave 6 (April 2002) |
- Mega class
| Wave 1 (July 2001) | Wave 2 (October 2001) | Wave 3 (April 2002) |  |
- Ultra class
| Wave 1 (July 2001) | Wave 2 (December 2001) |
- Super class
| Wave 1 (July 2001) |
Exclusives
Following the end of the Robots in Disguise line's general retail assortments and the launch of its successor, Transformers: Armada, Hasbro continued using the Robots in Disguise branding for store exclusives. While they had only been isolated occurrences under previous lines, Robots in Disguise made store exclusives a much more common phenomenon, with some of them even being available in markets outside the United States. While all the 2002 exclusives still featured the original Robots in Disguise packaging design, the 2003 releases instead adopted the overall template also used for Armada packaging (but still retained the Robots in Disguise branding), with the last batch of KB Toys exclusives even using the colors from the packaging of the Armada line's subline imprint The Unicron Battles.
| KB Toys/Target Spy Changers assortment 1 (August 2002) | KB Toys Spy Changers assortment 2 (June 2003) | KB Toys Destructicons (May 2003) | Other KB Toys exclusives
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Target
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Toys"R"Us
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Walmart | Canceled (
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Sonokong Car Bot toyline
In 2003, Takara-licensor Sonokong imported the Car Robots line into the Korean market as Jeonguiui Yongsa: Car Bot (정의의 용사 카봇, "Brave Heroes of Justice: Car-Bots"). For the most part, these imports followed the Japanese toy line, with only cosmetic changes on the boxes. At the tail end of the line, however, Sonokong repackaged several Destrons from the older Korean Beast-War line in Car Bot boxes; the toys themselves were unchanged, which meant that the figures who were sold as heroic Cybertrons still had the Predacon insignia on them. While most of these re-releases had new names, the Sonokong line also re-released Beast-War Galvatron as the Destronger "Gigatron Z", seemingly an additional version of Car Robots Gigatron/Robots in Disguise Megatron.
Cybertrons
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(J-Five, J-Seven, J-Four) (Build Boy, Build Cane, Build Typhoon, Build Clone) (w/ Braver & Plasma) |
(with "Victory Bomber") (D-17 Scoutstinger, D-18 Scoutslasher, D-19 Scoutjet, and D-20 Scoutlauncher) |
Destrongers
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Post-Robots in Disguise releases
Following the end of the Robots in Disguise line, key characters have popped up in subsequent series. Admittedly, a large percentage of these releases come from a series immediately following Robots in Disguise, when the line was still fresh in people's minds (and the molds used to make the characters in the first place were readily available).
| Super Spychanger Lottery |   | |||||||
| Universe (2003) | (Armorhide, Mega-Octane, Movor, Ro-Tor, Rollbar) |
Titanium Series | Cybertron | |||||
Universe (2008)
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Timelines | Legends
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| Unite Warriors | Encore | Legacy |
Innovations and lasting effects
- Like Beast Wars before it, Robots in Disguise also integrated the robots' weapons and accessories into their alternate modes, now applying the concept to Transformers who transform into vehicles as well.
- Robots in Disguise firmly established redecos of previously released toys from the same line marketed as the same characters as the older toys (as compared to different characters), with the accompanying fiction often identifying the new decos as the result of a "power-up".
- Robots in Disguise also introduced trilingual packaging to the United States market, which would last four years.
- While store exclusives had existed since almost the beginning of the brand, the expanded Robots in Disguise line was when the concept really took off beyond "three or four exclusives for an entire line".
Notes
- The Robots in Disguise line marked a transitional point for multilingual packaging in several of Hasbro's markets:
- In America, Hasbro decided to abandon English-only packaging for all the general retail assortments, making trilingual packaging (featuring texts in English, French and Spanish) not only the standard for Canada and Latin America (which it had been since Beast Wars), but also for the United States. The only exceptions were all of the 2002 store exclusives, some (but not all!) of the 2003 exclusives, and the Tiny Tins re-releases of the Spychangers, which were never intended to be released in Canada or Latin America, and were thus still available in English-only packaging.
- Meanwhile, in Europe, Hasbro had reorganized the specific combinations of languages for multilingual packaging: One version now featured texts in English, French, Dutch and German, while the other version featured texts in French, Spanish, Italian and German, which meant that both French and German were featured on both versions. On top of that, the wave 1 figures released in the United Kingdom were sold in trilingual American packaging (English, French and Spanish), with additional stickers featuring European age labels and contact information for Hasbro UK (though regular European packaging for these figures exists as well), while some of the 2003 exclusives (which were available as Toys"R"Us exclusives in the United Kingdom) and the Tiny Tins re-releases of the Spychangers were released after the successor line, Armada, had made a single European packaging version featuring texts in all six languages (i.e. English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Dutch) the new European standard, and thus these 2003 Robots in Disguise releases came in multilingual packaging feturing that language combination as well.
- The Transformers: Super Spychanger Lottery, sold by Takara in 2003, features the Car Robots Spychanger characters, and its pack-in catalog makes reference to the end of the Car Robots TV show, essentially making it a short-lived continuation or spiritual successor line.
- The 2008 Universe toyline includes toys marked as "Robots in Disguise series".
- Robots in Disguise is the first time realistic vehicle licenses became an issue when a licensing company representing Dodge and Mercedes-Benz happened to notice Side Burn and X-Brawn, respectively. Super Side Burn was the first Transformers figure to carry licensed car branding. In a case of turning lemons into lemonade, this led to the Alternators line, access to actual car engineering references and files, which in turn eventually led to partnerships that allowed the 2007 Transformers film to happen.[1][2]
Foreign names
- French: Robots Déguisés (Canada, "Disguised Robots"), Les Robots Mutants (Europe, "The Mutant Robots"), Robots Mutants (Europe, "Mutant Robots", Destructicons only)
- German: Getarnte Roboter ("Disguised Robots")
- Spanish: Robots Camuflados (America, "Disguised Robots"), Robots Transformables (Europe, "Transformable Robots")
- Italian: I Robots Trasformabili ("The Transformable Robots"), Robot Trasformabili ("Transformable Robots", Destructicons only)
References
- ↑ "I believe it started to be—for Hasbro, it started to come up in the RID era, right? So like I said, the Viper, and the Benz. [...] So we had to, y'know, deal with that, at the same time we were doing the G1 reissues, and I believe we were about to re-release Tracks, and it came up with Corvette at that same time, where they're like, "y'know, you've been making this Corvette for a long time and not paying anybody... why don't we come to some arrangement?" [...] So we started to have conversations with these companies, we did come to an arrangement with Corvette to reissue the G1 car. That, and the Viper deal—long-range—created the relationship that would end up in Alternators, and why the Viper was one of the first cars we did."—Aaron Archer on The Toy Armada, 2022/08/22
- ↑ "Behind the scenes, we are growing this brand, we're trying to get new deals, we're starting this whole thing in the background to talk to producers, we're getting our ducks in a row about Armada and how much business we're doing and how beloved these characters are after 20 years, now we're bringing in real licenses and real cars—you don't think that's going to be a factor when we talk to Michael Bay down the road?"—Aaron Archer on The Toy Armada, 2022/06/08
