El Greco
El Greco was a Greek company that held the license to manufacture and market Transformers toys in Greece during Generation 1.
They released a handful of toys from the original toyline, some of which bear a few - albeit mostly minor - differences in tooling and colors. These featured the original Greek names for the characters on the packaging, rather than the ones used by their US counterparts. In the early 90s El Greco also re-released a handful of Generation 1 toys as pack-in gifts with Easter candles - a surprisingly common thing for toy manufacturers in the European market at the time!
Toys
[edit]There isn't yet a fully-comprehensive list for the easter candle giftsets, with the ones documented below being only based on currently available secondary market listings - thus; it is very possible that more might exist.
1986
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1990 | 1991
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* - Indicates toys with known differences compared to their original Hasbro / Takara versions
Notes
[edit]- Interestingly, El Greco also produced Greek releases for a number of other Transformers-related franchises, like G.I. Joe (under its Action Force European name) and Micronauts (under the new name of Oi Astpomaxhtes).
- El Greco's Devastator uses GiG's Trasformer logo on the packaging (a good couple of years after GiG themselves had retired it from their own Transformers imports), likely stemming as a result from El Greco's packaging being based on that of GiG's 1985 Devastator giftset.
- It appears to have been a running mistake to sometimes place Huffer in Brawn blister cards, as multiple instances of this have been found on the secondary market.