Editing Simba Dickie Group

[[Image:SimbaDickie-logo.png|right|300px]]
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 merchandise for the ''Transformers'' brand through its Dickie Toys subsidiary, starting with tie-ins to 2015's ''[[Transformers: Robots in Disguise (2015 franchise)|Robots in Disguise]]'' and continuing up to ''[[Transformers: The Last Knight (franchise)|The Last Knight]]'' and ''[[Bumblebee (franchise)|Bumblebee]]''. Although Dickie no longer produces Transformers merchandise, [[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 [[knockoff]]s before starting their collaboration with Hasbro, so oops.

==Overview==
[[Image:Simba_Jumpstarters.jpg|thumb|If Simba Dickie is shameless enough to sell this alongside legitimate Transformers merchandise then you're also shameless enough to ask your crush out.]]Simba Toys was first founded in 1982, whereas Dickie Toys had already existed as far back as the 1970s. They merged in 1993 but remained relatively small up until their mass streak of progressively bigger brand acquisitions in the 2010s, with the company's products being primarily relegated to budget toy aisles in Europe throughout most of the 90s and 2000s.

One of Simba's longest-spanning toylines is ''Planet Fighter'', a series of cheap rebranded toys developed by other manufacturers (mostly of the Chinese variety) with an overarching sci-fi theme. These included laser blasters, [[Lightsaber|"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 (Armada)/toys|Megatron]] (also released in the United States by Happy Well), oversized versions of the [[Energon Saber]] Mini-Cons, a handful of dinosaur-based Transformers toys which share their engineering with ''Beast Wars'' [[Dinobot (BW)/toys#Beast Wars|Dinobot]] (the same toys that would also be later released by [[Estrela]] in Brazil), and many, many, many variants of the [[Jumpstarter]] molds <ref>[https://imgur.com/a/9nS7uAg A gallery featuring a multitude of Transformers bootlegs released by Simba during the 2000s]</ref>, plus possibly countless others whose records have simply been lost to time.

You might have expected Simba to try and sweep this under the rug as they entered the 2010s and gained more legitimate partners in the toy industry like Hasbro, 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>https://www.simbatoys.com/simba_en/categories/kids-games/action-games/pf-space-bot-pro-6-ass-103572535-en.html?wse=1</ref> - the same website where you can also buy legitimate Transformers-branded Jada Toys products from!

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==Merchandise==

===Robots in Disguise===
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===The Last Knight===
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===Bumblebee===
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===Jada Toys===
{{main|Jada Toys}}

[[File:JadaConvertingOptimusPrime.jpg|thumb]] As previously mentioned, Jada Toys was acquired by Simba Dickie in 2019, but they had been making Transformers merchandise since 2017. Jada's offerings are, thus, covered [[Jada Toys|in their own separate article]].

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==Notes==
[[File:MicroRobot_Simba.jpg|thumb|"Eeeehh, but is it ''really'' copyright infringement if you just remove the last letter?"]]
*Even before their bootleg streak, Simba had already tried to capitalize on the success of the Transformers franchise multiple times, 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. Keep in mind that this was before the internet, 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 a wave of smaller Micro Machines-sized figures also bearing the same title, each releasing in packs of four with the added subtitle of "Micro-Robots", pretty obviously in an attempt to compete with the [[Micromasters]].
**About a decade later in the early 2000s, Simba also released a few transforming robot toys under the ''Space Transformer'' name, amongst them being a blatant knockoff of the [[Brave]] Great Fighbird.

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==External links==
*[https://www.simba-dickie-group.com/en/home/ Simba Dickie Group's website]
*[https://www.simbatoys.com/simba_en/home/ Simba Toys' website]
*[https://www.dickietoys.com/dickie_en/home/ Dickie Toys' website]

==References==
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[[Category:Companies]]