Lynsa

Lynsa was a Peruvian company that held the license to manufacture and market Transformers toys in Peru and Chile during Generation 1. These would serve as a lower-cost alternative to the original Hasbro and Takara Transformers that had been imported to the region by other companies, like HUDE / BASA in Peru and Abramowicz in Chile.

As with a number of other South American companies, they'd produce a variety of Mini-Vehicle variants, most of them in batches of all-new colors, and release them to markets in 1987.

Overview

Lynsa is a fairly mysterious company, with their only other major licensed foray into the Peruvian toy market being a handful of Karate Kid toys also produced during the 80s. A couple of other more obscure Lynsa-branded products, such as a batch of LJN Voltron bootlegs sold under the "Ensembler" name, are also known to exist <ref>A video review of some of Lynsa's Ensembler figures.</ref>. Given the seeming absence of any Lynsa-branded products on the market since the 1980s, it is presumed that they are now defunct.

Lynsa's Transformers toys frequently featured either little or no additional paint decos beyond their raw plastic colors, no decals, and no chrome components. Bumblebee and Cliffjumper also feature hard plastic tires, rather than the soft rubber tires of their original versions. Each one would get an absurd amount of repaints, with the total amount for each mold still being largely unknown: it is presumed that there might be upwards of three dozen different mold/color combinations altogether, although information and images for a good portion of these is scarce. The figures are also infamously fragile, making it especially challenging to find them loose in good condition.

According prolific Generation 1 collector Maziar "Maz" Shahsafdari's article on the toyline <ref>Peruvian Minibots at TF-1.com</ref> — one of the first on the English internet to talk about its existence — Lynsa also presumably aired a toy commercial to promote the toyline, with lyrics that'd translate to English into "Transformers, Transformers, they are not only what they seem to be, they are much more action!". Such a commercial has never been found and is now considered lost media.

Given the mystery surrounding these figures, as well as their scarcity, it's probably not much of a surprise that they're also some of the rarest Generation 1 toys on the market: sealed copies can easily go for four digits, and even loose battered up samples usually aren't much cheaper. Beyond the hidden displays of private collectors with abundant pockets, of the few places where you're able to see them is in Peru's [[wikipedia:{{#if:es|es:}}Museo Transformers|{{#if:||Museo Transformers}}]], a — as its name suggests — Transformers museum within Lima's Mall del Sur, where a selection of Lynsa figures are displayed in a cabinet oriented towards nationally-produced Transformers memorabilia.

Toys

Since, as mentioned, it's speculated that there might be even more as-of-now undocumented color variations of each mold, this section might or might not be incomplete.

Mini-Vehicles

Brawn
(olive green/cream and cream/olive green <ref>The two color schemes are inverted, with one Brawn's green parts being the other's cream parts and vice-versa.</ref>)
Bumblebee
(yellow/black, red/black, peach/black)
Cliffjumper
(red/black, peach/black)

Gears
(light blue/red, dark blue/yellow, orange/yellow)
Huffer
(light peach/blue, peach/yellow, blue/yellow, red/yellow)
Windcharger
(red/gray, blueish gray/blue <ref>Images of a presumably unique green-and-yellow version have also popped up online, but it is very likely that this is actually just a photodegraded copy of the blue and gray version rather than a proper unique version.</ref>)

Merchandise

This is the Musée du Louvre for autistic people with a hyperfixation over obscure 1980s Latin American Transformers variants.

As with many other international Hasbro licensees, Lynsa also made different Transformers-related merchandise in the 80s. Included in this assortment were lunchboxes, pencil cases, and thermoses in various different sizes. These would often be decorated with the "back-of-box battle" murals from 1984 and 1986.

Like the previously-mentioned Lynsa figures, some of this merchandise can also be found on Museo Transformers' Peruvian-made memorabilia display, seen in the image on the right.

Note

As a result of the scarce information surrounding Lynsa, it's sometimes speculated that they might be either an Argentinian company that only merely imported their products to Peru and Chile or a Peruvian company with factories based in Argentina, with one of the first instances of these claims coming from the aforementioned Maz article where he mentions how many Peruvians had never heard of Lynsa before and cites one forum user who could "only find reference to Lynsa being an Argentinian plastics company" <ref>Peruvian Minibots at TF-1.com</ref>. There is, in fact; an Argentinian company called Lynsa that was also active in the 1980s and still maintains an online presence today <ref>The Facebook page for Cierres Lynsa</ref>, however; they feature an entirely different logo and have seemingly only ever produced zippers rather than toys, making it evident that this is a separate entity. A lot of mystery still shrouds Lynsa (beyond Argentina, there are also multiple other companies with the Lynsa name, which make gathering information about this particular one all the more difficult: perhaps the aforementioned forum poster could have been talking about another entirely different Lynsa?), but their declared origin seems to be the most unanimously-accepted one: the packaging for Lynsa's Transformers proclaims that they are a Producto Peruano ("Peruvian Product", Peru's equivalent for a "Made in USA" or "Made in China") and the few other instances of known toys released by Lynsa also feature the same Produto Peruano identifiers, thus; unless more substantive evidence to the contrary is ever discovered, it seems more probable that all of these figures were, in fact, commissioned and produced in Peru.

References

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