Simba Dickie Group
The Simba Dickie Group is a German toy manufacturer. Originally born as the product of a merger between Simba Toys and Dickie Toys (two relatively small companies which primarily released budget toys), they have since become a major international conglomerate, acquiring many other famous toy companies in the European market like French die-cast model manufacturer Majorette in 2010, German railway model manufacturer Märklin in 2013, and eventually expanding abroad with the acquisition of American model car manufacturer Jada Toys in 2019.
Simba Dickie has released various Transformers merchandise through the Dickie Toys brand, starting with tie-ins to 2015's Robots in Disguise and continuing up to The Last Knight and Bumblebee. Jada Toys began making die-cast vehicles for the franchise in 2017 and have continued doing so since Simba Dickie acquired them in 2019, thus; the group remains affiliated with Hasbro and the Transformers brand.
They also released a staggering amount of Transformers knockoffs before starting their collaboration with Hasbro, so oops.
Overview
[edit]The bootleg extravaganza era
[edit]
Simba Toys was first founded in 1982, whereas Dickie Toys had already existed as far back as the 1970s. They merged in 1993 but have continued releasing products labelled under the separate "Simba Toys" and "Dickie Toys" logos since, with Dickie's catalogue primarily focusing on play-oriented toy vehicles while Simba serves as a more general all-purposes toy brand. The joint company was comparatively small up until their mass streak of progressively bigger brand deals and acquisitions in the 2010s, with Simba Dickie's retail presence until then being primarily relegated to budget toy aisles—mostly only in Europe—throughout the remainder of the 90s and 2000s.
Beginning somewhere in the mid-2000s, one of Simba's longest-spanning toylines is Planet Fighter, a series of cheap rebranded toys often produced by other manufacturers (mostly of the Chinese variety) with an overarching sci-fi theme. These included laser blasters, "laser swords", a multitude of toy robots and inevitably, by extension, a lot of transforming toy robots. You could find amongst the latter an oversized version of Armada Megatron (also released in the United States by Happy Well), oversized versions of the Energon Saber Mini-Cons, a bizarre four-member combiner made out of Armada Payload, Runway, Waterlog and Ransack, a handful of dinosaur-based transforming robots which share their engineering with Beast Wars Dinobot (the same toys that would also be later released by Estrela in Brazil), multiple Brave knockoffs like individual blister card versions of all three God Max members, grey versions of Battle Bomber and a Happy Well-derived Great Granbird,<ref>Considering the massive amount of Brave knockoffs produced by Happy Well under the Galaxy Defender label and given the similar grey color scheme, it is actually entirely possible that the Battle Bomber set could have also originated from them - however; given the ambiguity regarding these knockoffs, it might as well be the case that Simba Dickie was the original manufacturer, or that either company just sourced these bootlegs from a third unknown company. So far, no one really knows for sure: we're just erring on Happy Well as the most prominent manufacturer to have handled these molds at the time.</ref> and many, many, many variants of the Jumpstarter molds, plus possibly countless others whose records have simply been lost to time. Indeed, Simba released so many Transformers bootlegs during this time that there still isn't a comprehensive list with all of them, just a tentative approximation based on the ones we know to exist.<ref>An article that attempts to document every Transformers knockoff released by Simba on transformersnotejo.blogspot.com</ref>
The legitimate company era
[edit]Eventually, as the 2010s came and Simba Dickie expanded its operations towards acquiring other manufacturers and engaging in legitimate licensing deals with companies like Hasbro, their bootlegs became less prevalent. As of today, Simba Dickie is a reputable multinational toy manufacturer that no longer engages in such dirty practices like bootlegging... Mostly.
You might have expected Simba to try and sweep all their old knockoffs under the rug as they gained more legitimate partners in the toy industry, but surprisingly, they've kept the Planet Fighter series of toys going throughout the following decades, and although it has been mostly stripped of bootleg figures, they are still to this day manufacturing copies of their Jumpstarter clones (seemingly having been heavily retooled in-house over the years) and selling them on their own website<ref>"PF Space Bot Pro" on the Simba website</ref>—the same website where you can also buy legitimate Transformers-branded Jada Toys products from!
Merchandise
[edit]Simba Toys
[edit]While most of Simba Dickie's offerings would be released under the Dickie brand (see below), a couple of Robots in Disguise-branded sand buckets with a handful of accessories would also be sold under Simba instead.
Bucket Sets
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Dickie Toys
[edit]Robots in Disguise
[edit]Dickie Toys released a large volume of Robots in Disguise merchandise, a lot of which infamously shelfwarmed European stores for years to come. These toys were primarily centered around the vehicle modes of the shows' characters, with the the Robot Warrior figures (or Robot Fighter in Sideswipe's box, or, simply, Warrior in Grimlock's - they really weren't very consistent with naming) also having the ability to transform into very rough robot modes. A notable quirk is that all of these toys had their faction insignia molded into their hubcaps.
They also announced a lot of quirky retools for each of their die-cast vehicles, a handful of which seem to have gone unreleased <ref>Simba Smoby 2017 Transformers: The Last Knight And RID Toys Official Images And Details on TFW2005</ref>. Most of these - alongside with the Robot mode die-cast figurines - would come bundled in giftsets with others figures, rather than being sold as standalone items like the standard die-cast Vehicle toys.
Die-Cast
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Light Up Racers
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Playsets
(with Sideswipe) (with Steeljaw) |
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| Mission Racer
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RC Turbo Racer
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Robot Warrior / Robot Fighter / Warrior
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The Last Knight
[edit]As with Robots in Disguise, Dickie's 2017 offering for Transformers: The Last Knight was primarily centered around (now licensed) vehicle modes. Yet again, all the die-cast vehicles have their faction insignia molded into the hubcaps. A large remote-controlled and auto-transforming Bumblebee toy was planned and priced at a hefty 155€, but it appears to have never been released. <ref>Transformers: The Last Knight Remote Controlled Ultimate Bumblebee on TFW2005</ref>
Die-Cast
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Giftsets
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Robot Fighter
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Radio Control
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Bumblebee
[edit]With 2018's Bumblebee having a significantly smaller roster of main characters compared to other Transformers movies, Dickie also had far less to offer this year, with the only few new toys they released being centered around the titular character and the remaining being repackages of Last Knight material. For whatever reason - perhaps due to Volkswagen's involvement requiring greater vehicle mode accuracy? - they also stopped doing molded insignia hubcaps.
| Die-Cast | Giftsets
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RC Bumblebee
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Jada Toys
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As previously mentioned, Jada Toys was acquired by Simba Dickie in 2019, but they had been making Transformers merchandise all the way back in 2017. Since Simba's acquisition, they largely took on the mantle of producing die-cast cars, metallic figurines, radio-controlled toys, and other mostly vehicle-centric products for the Transformers brand that was formerly occupied by Dickie.
To avoid an arbitrary split between what Jada Toys material should and shouldn't be covered in this page, all of their items are catalogued in their own separate article instead.
Notes
[edit]
- While Simba wasn't as invested in bootlegs during the 90s compared to their later streak of counterfeits during the turn of the millennium, it is interesting that they nonetheless still tried to capitalize on the success of the Transformers franchise multiple times with otherwise legitimate toys, often to legally questionable extents:
- For instance, at some point in the early 90s, they released their localization of the MC Toy Motorized Robot line of small transforming robot toys - also sometimes known as the Moto-Bots, or the DynaBots, or the Playbots, or by any other number of names (they were redistributed by a lot of different companies during this time) - and, rather than making up some other title for the toyline in the same vein, Simba simply called them "TRANSFORMER" toys in large green lettering on their blister cards <ref>Galaxy Transformer - Simba on the-liberator.net</ref>. Keep in mind that this was before the internet era with its ease of being able to check what is and isn't an official toy through wikis and fan listings, thus; it is very likely that more than a handful of European kids in the nineties were fooled into thinking these were genuine Transformers toys.
- These were supplemented by localizations of the "Mighty Minis" from the ES Toys Formulator Force toyline, a series of smaller Micro Machines-sized transforming figures which were pretty obviously made in an attempt to compete with the Micromasters, featuring very similar transformation schemes and even a few chest designs clearly copied from their Hasbro counterparts <ref>Rob's Pile of Transformers: Micromaster Knockoffs on builtstlouis.net</ref>. Simba released them across Europe also again bearing the "TRANSFORMER" title, each releasing in packs of four with the added subtitle of "Micro-Robots"... All of this while the official Micromasters — also predominantly sold in packs of four — were concurrently available in stores. Again, the fact that these were labelled as "Transformer" toys and featured very similar designs to the Hasbro figures to boot made them easy pickings for clueless kids and parents alike, so much so that, even decades later, it's not uncommon to find a Simba Micro-Robot or two shuffled in amongst bulk lots of original Micromaster figures in the European secondary market.
- Sometime in the early 2000s, Simba once again returned to borderline-copyright-infringement, releasing a few transforming robot toys under the risqué Space Transformer name. Among these was the previously-mentioned, presumably Happy Well-manufactured Brave Great Granbird knockoff, and a grey bootleg of Generation 1 Quake packed alongside a generic robot, a set also sold by Happy Well in other territories. <ref>Ebay listing for the Flywheels bootleg</ref>
- For instance, at some point in the early 90s, they released their localization of the MC Toy Motorized Robot line of small transforming robot toys - also sometimes known as the Moto-Bots, or the DynaBots, or the Playbots, or by any other number of names (they were redistributed by a lot of different companies during this time) - and, rather than making up some other title for the toyline in the same vein, Simba simply called them "TRANSFORMER" toys in large green lettering on their blister cards <ref>Galaxy Transformer - Simba on the-liberator.net</ref>. Keep in mind that this was before the internet era with its ease of being able to check what is and isn't an official toy through wikis and fan listings, thus; it is very likely that more than a handful of European kids in the nineties were fooled into thinking these were genuine Transformers toys.
- At some point - most likely during the mid-to-late 2000s - Simba also released a couple of Happy Well Roadbot toys <ref>A Hummer H2 Roadbot with Simba branding on Ukrainian online toy retailer kidsmall.com.ua</ref>, famously known at the time as the most direct competitors to the Transformers Alternators / Binaltech toyline. This, combined with all the other previously-mentioned Transformers and Brave bootlegs made by Happy Well and sold by Simba, suggests that the two companies likely had very close business relations at one point.
External links
[edit]- Simba Dickie Group's website
- Simba Toys' website
- Dickie Toys' website
- "Cataloging Simba's Transformers bootlegs (and other Transformers-like toys)" on transformersnotejo.blogspot.com