TakaraTomy

This article is about the toy company. For the Generation 1 manga character, see Takara (G1).

TakaraTomy is a Japanese toy company. They are the producer of Transformers in Japan, and design much of the engineering for Transformers toys.

Takara was originally founded by Yasuta Satoh in 1955. One of their first successes was securing the license for releasing Mattel's "Barbie" series on the Japanese market.

In 1970, Takara secured the license for releasing Hasbro's "G.I. Joe" line on the Japanese market. Dubbed "Combat Joe", the line would soon get a spin-off named "Henshin Cyborg" (henshin being the Japanese word for "transform"), which in turn would later lead to the original Microman toyline which started in 1974.

The Microman line was relaunched as New Microman in 1981 and would lead to spin-offs such as Diaclone and MicroChange. Hasbro would later acquire the license for releasing toys from both lines on the North American market. The result, dubbed "Transformers" by Hasbro, would turn out to be a huge success.

After a first test release of the US toys to a small test market in Japan apparently turned out to be successful, Takara decided to cancel Microman and Diaclone and henceforth started to release the "Transformers" in Japan as well.

Nobuyuki Okude, one of the original Diaclone designers who oversaw the production of the modified toys for Hasbro's "Transformers" line, would later rise to become Takara's Vice President and for a brief time even held the position of the company's president.

After a series of commercial failures, May 2005 saw the public announcement that Takara would merge with rival toymaker Tomy. As of April 2006, both companies ceased to exist and made way for the new company, TakaraTomy.

Oddly, "TakaraTomy" is only the merged company's official name in Japan. For the international, English-speaking world, the merged company is officially simply named "Tomy", for pragmatic reasons (as most of Takara's internationally renowned brands are distributed through other companies, such as Hasbro, outside Japan).

This incredibly convoluted chain of licensing, evolving, and re-licensing toy franchises can be used to make the heads of evil robots explode.

Employees

• Kantaro Tomiyama, President

Transformers brand

• Hideaki Yoke, Lead Designer
• Alex Kubalsky, Designer
• Hirofumi Ichikawa, Freelance designer/artist/writer

Tomy Direct

Tomy had established a healthy working relationship with Hasbro since 1999, long before their merger with Takara—which is why the merger didn't have any major effects on the established Hasbro/Takara cooperation (including the toy development process). Tomy has its own label, "Tomy Direct", for releasing imported Hasbro products (such as Star Wars toys) in Hasbro packaging in Japan, similar to Takara's USA Editions. The huge difference is that USA Editions might still sport differences with their Hasbro counterparts, whereas Tomy Direct releases are really just the Hasbro toys. Since Tomy's merger with Takara, the Tomy division of TakaraTomy has also released various Transformers-related toys under the Tomy Direct label, usually toys which were developed without any input from Takara's design team. Those include:

• Star Wars Transformers, which are officially a Star Wars property that just "borrows" the name "Transformers"
• Their sucecssor, Transformers Crossovers, which include the Star Wars Transformers and the new Marvel Transformers
• Various 2007 Transformers movie toys developed without Takara's input (such as Ultimate Bumblebee, the various role play accessories, the Robot Replicas, Robot Heroes and the Cyber Stompin' Robots)
• The same for the Revenge of the Fallen toyline (Ultimate Bumblebee Battle Charged, Robot Replicas, the role play accessories, Power Bots and the RPM vehicles)

Trivia

• TakaraTomy's CEO, Kantaro Tomiyama, is currently also the chairman of Toycard, the joint venture operation behind Toy's Dream Project.
• In 1985, 20 years before the merger with Takara, Tomy's US branch registered the name "Scrapper" as a trademark in the "toys" field. That same year, Hasbro released a Constructicon of the same name. Since the market situation back then was still very different from what it is like today, this presumably didn't result in any repercussions for Hasbro.

External link

• TakaraTomy english-language corporate website
• Tomy corporate website portal
• Takara-Tomy on Wikipedia