Comando Toys
Comando Toys was an Argentinian company which primarily produced electronic battery-powered toys.
They held the license to manufacture official Transformers toys during the 1980s, with their two known releases being imports extracted from, ahem... more legally grey toylines.
Overview
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Not much is known about Comando Toys, with the company's history as a toy manufacturer in Argentina apparently being rather brief. Besides the Transformers, Hasbro also provided them with the license to produce G.I. Joe memorabilia at one point, with military-themed merchandise like camouflaged radios and walkie-talkies being part of their product range.
Comando Toys' two currently-known releases - the fully-fledged transforming figure "Radio AM Robot" and the non-transforming "Walkie Talkie Robot" - arrived in 1987 to the Argentinian market. Radio AM Robot was originally made by Taiwanese company Best Join, whereas Walkie Talkie Robot was manufactured by Hong Kong company Artlight... And both of them had quite a bit of IP infringement going for them, with Radio AM Robot being a bizarre mish-mash of different components of Generation 1 Megatron, Blaster, Omega Supreme, and Soundwave, and Walkie Talkie Robot having its designed ripped off the titular robot from anime Rokushin Gattai Godmars. These releases would remain exclusive to the Argentinian market, making Radio AM Robot in particular into quite a bit of a rare figure overseas these days.
Noticeably, the packaging for Walkie Talkie Robot has a similar design to that of Nasta's U.S.-released Generation 1 merchandise, even using what seems to be the same font and color for the product name, leading to the possibility that Hasbro might have intended to treat Comando Toys as a regional equivalent of Nasta (coincidentally, both of these companies primarily focused on electronic toys).
Toys and merchandise
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Merchandise |
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Notes
[edit]- It is unknown what relationship Comando Toys had, if any, to fellow Argentinian toy company Antex, as they also had the license to manufacture toys in the country (having been provided by the Brazilian Estrela rather than by Hasbro directly).
- Funnily enough, one of the walkie-talkie sets made for the aforementioned G.I. Joe license were actually the same model used for the Transformers Walkie Talkie Robots, with their arms and heads removed, their stickers exchanged, and their bodies painted in woodland camouflage (and perhaps most shockingly, they actually pass off surprisingly well as simple walkie-talkies and not amputated robots at a glance!). <ref>https://www.mercadolibre.com.ar/walkie-talkie-gi-joe-comando-toys-anos-80-en-su-caja/up/MLAU200944767</ref>