Antex
Antex Andina S.A., formally shortened to Antex, is an Argentine toy manufacturer, first established in 1975 and still in operation today.
Presumably, they were one of the companies that held the license to manufacture and market Transformers toys in Argentina, bearing a similar line-up to that of the Brazilian licensee Estrela... Even though the extent to which they always legally had that license is debatable. Nonetheless, like Estrela, they also later became an official Hasbro distributor in the Argentinian market.
Their domestically-made toyline would consist of redecoed versions of the Mini-Vehicle and Jumpstarter molds, with most of them featuring entirely new colors not seen in their Estrela predecessors. Notably, unlike its Brazilian equivalent, Antex did not have the full monopoly on Transformers figures available in the country during the 1980s, with the regular international The Transformers toyline also releasing across multiple retailers and another Argentinian company — Comando Toys — also having obtained the licensing rights to produce their own Transformers-branded products directly from Hasbro.
Overview
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Antex's Transformers toyline
[edit]Reportedly, Antex acquired the Transformers license second-hand through Estrela instead of going directly to Hasbro. Whether or not Estrela actually had the legal right to do this is questionable, which kind of casts Antex's offerings in a weird light, but there you go. As a result, Antex's Transformers released in the same year (1985) and featured the same distinct logo and character identities as the Estrela version. These toys have different colors from their Estrela cousins... and considerably less quality control, with the plastic arbitrarily changing colors between copies and poorly-printed, poorly-sticking stickers - sometimes they'll already be peeled off on sealed figures! - which were fairly common to also be used on multiple different toys. <ref>Page for Argentinian Transformers on toyarchive.com</ref> On the flipside, at least they don't use a glue that tends to liquefy over time and eventually corrodes the stickers into a soapy mess as with some Estrela figures, so there's that one small victory they have over their Brazilian cousins.
The blister cards themselves are also just translated copies of the Estrela cards, featuring the original art and photographs of the Brazilian versions - despite the fact that these had colors that weren't actually provided by Antex. You can even tell that the "¡Se transforma em robot y de nuevo en auto!" ("It turns into a robot and back into an automobile!") text in the bottom right of the Robocar blister cards is crudely pasted over a white rectangle covering its equivalent in the Brazilian version, suggesting that, unlike Estrela, Antex did not have access to the original Hasbro-made art and graphic design assets and pretty much just fully relied on photocopying and writing over the premade packaging that they were given.
As with Estrela's first batch of figures, the Antex Robocars and Salt-Men feature no insignia or explicit faction allegiances. As a result, the assumptions regarding fiction made about their original versions also apply to these models: the Robocars are usually treated as being variants of their original Generation 1 character molds, while the Salt-Men with their Estrela-derived bios are treated as variants of those Estrela characters instead.
Surprisingly, large amount of carded Antex figures started popping up on the secondary market during the early 2010s (apparently someone found a lot of unsold ones from a warehouse), a good volume of which can still be found online for relatively affordable prices compared to their 1980s mint Hasbro - or, for the matter, Estrela - equivalents. Camaro / Windcharger seems to be the most common and therefore the most affordable of these, often costing in the rounds of two digits, whereas other Robocars usually fetch prices in the low triple digits.
Later relationship with Hasbro
[edit]Regardless of the questionable legality of Estrela selling the Transformers license to Antex, this ultimately did not seem to affect either company's capacity to deal directly with Hasbro: just as Estrela would go on to become a Brazilian Transformers distributor in later years, Antex also ended up distributing imported official Generation 2 toys in the mid-90s to Argentina, all in their original Hasbro packaging with the addition of Antex stickers indicating their distributor role. <ref name="fireflight">Carded Generation 2 Aerialbot Fireflight with Antex import sticker at Transformers At The Moon.</ref>
Parallel to this imported batch, Antex also re-released the Salt-Men in 1994, renamed into "Robot-Men" and bearing Generation 2 packaging - although, interestingly, these do not feature the Hasbro logo anywhere on the blister card (unlike the aforementioned imported figures), which again raises questions about just how much autonomy Antex had to perform these releases under the Transformers brand. Sealed Generation 2 Robot-Men are also commonly found amongst the toys that came out of the aforementioned warehouse batch, usually being priced by collectors in the two-digits ballpark.
Toys
[edit]Transformers
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Antex's Transformers offerings are significantly fewer in number than Estrela's, with half the Robocars being omitted and the Bat-Robô and Eletrix being nowhere in sight. As with their Brazilian equivalents, each toy comes in two different decos, and on top of that, there are also sticker variations, leading to a fair few combinations if you're really into getting every version of a toy. Interestingly, whereas one of the two decos for each of the first-wave Estrela Robocars was identical to its original Takara / Hasbro versions, the Antex Robocars all feature entirely unique colors - even though, as mentioned, the blister cards feature the same art and photographs as the Estrela versions.
| Robocar | Salt-Man
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Transformers: Generation 2
[edit]As mentioned, after a long gap during which they simply distributed imported Hasbro toys, Antex renamed and re-released their Salt-Men under the Generation 2 banner in 1994, now featuring Decepticon insignia on the packaging. We're as surprised as you are. What isn't surprising is that their unique offerings are from the same batch of molds as their originals!
Robot-Man
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Notes
[edit]- Sometime in 1985, a batch of Estrela Minicars also started cropping up in some Argentine regions with the bubble portion of their blister cards crudely cropped off and plastered into new ones, now bearing the logo Invasion Galactica and art of an UFO. More can be read about these releases on their dedicated page, but in short; it is commonly presumed that this was the result of distributors and retailers repackaging their imported toys to look like domestically-made products in an attempt to evade protectionist laws, rather than this being a product of Antex or some other official Hasbro licensee. <ref>https://www.toyarchive.com/Transformers/Brazilian/Invasion.html</ref>
References
[edit]External links
[edit]See also
[edit]- Estrela, Antex's Brazilian cousin
- Comando Toys, the other Argentinian Transformers licensee