Rubiplas

Our yellow plastic will burn your eyes!

Rubiplas is a Venezuelan company that obtained the license to manufacture and market Transformers toys in Venezuela during Generation 1.

They would release a small localized toyline during the mid 1980s, featuring mostly identical figures to their international equivalents save for different tones of plastic, and one particularly quirky Huffer variant (seen below).

Overview

Honestly, a South American-made Transformer that doesn't look weird is weirder than one that does.

As with other lesser-known South American Transformers licensees, very little information is known about Rubiplas as a corporate entity beyond the fact that they also manufactured G.I. Joe figures at one point, a commonality that they shared with other Hasbro-partnered companies in South America like Estrela and Comando Toys. The original Rubiplas Transformers line was incredibly short-lived, consisting of only five of the six first-year Autobot Mini-Vehicles. These toys were also considerably cheaper in production, often lacking paint operations, stickers, or chrome... but not consistently across individual releases.

Unlike most South American-original Transformers Generation 1 toylines, Rubiplas does not seem to have deviated much from the color schemes of the international toylines, save only for their use of different plastics with different shades and tones (a commonality across every other licensee brand who manufactured their own Transformers toys during this time, really). As a result, most toys are close to the Hasbro originals... While, as a product of the different plastics used, a couple of them are definitely not - particularly most of those that feature yellow as a main color (like Bumblebee and the yellow version of Cliffjumper), as Rubiplas' yellow plastic was notoriously very, very bright. As mentioned, the one big known exception to this uniformity with a toy's original color schemes is their yellow and red Huffer. A similar-looking Huffer - albeit without Rubiplas' trademark eye-gouging yellow - would be later released by Lynsa in Peru and Chile.

Presumably, the greater complexity involved in the assembly of Transformers compared to other toys (like their aforementioned G.I. Joe batch) was what led to the toyline's premature cancellation at only five releases. Sometime later, Rubiplas returned to marketing Transformers by securing the license to import Hasbro and Takara toys into Venezuela through subsidiary Faventoys.

Toys

The Transformers

Mini-Vehicles Brawn Huffer Windcharger

Bumblebee (red/black or yellow/black) Cliffjumper (red/black or yellow/black)

Rubiplas' Huffer

Trivia

• Out of all the Latin American Transformers toylines, Rubiplas is by far the most obscure one: most of the known information and images come from exactly one 2008 blog post, with very few copies of these figures being found on the secondary market otherwise (the number of total Rubiplas toys found by fans over the years might be in the low dozens!). It is, therefore, not unlikely that more odd variants like their Huffer do exist and just either remain undiscovered or have tragically been lost to time.

External links

• Robots Venezolanos: Transformers de Rubiplas (in Spanish)