For safety reasons

This article is about why you can't have that awesome toy. For the Autobot from Operation Combination, see Safety.

In your dreams, American fans.

The United States is a very litigious society. If a child is injured or (heaven forbid) killed by use or abuse of a toy, that child's parents are very likely to sue the toy manufacturer. Plus there is the cavalcade of bad press and word-of-mouth that will accompany the suit, ruining a toymaker's reputation. On top of, of course, injured kid. That's bad.

As such, Hasbro puts its toys through rigorous testing, for safety reasons. Sometimes, a Transformers toy has to be altered from the original design in order to maintain safety standards, which vary from country to country.

Safety testing

Stubbimus Prime

Hasbro has several tests that come up frequently. One of the more famous ones is the "drop test." As its name implies, this involves dropping a toy from great heights in order to ascertain whether or not said toy will break, and if any of the parts which may have broken loose could potentially injure a child (sharp edges, swallowable/chokeable bits, etc.). This is often cited as the reason Fortress Maximus has not been reissued in the United States, as well as the reason for the shortened smokestacks on the shoulders of various Optimus Prime toys (it's a common mistake to assume this started in 1988 with the Powermaster version; however, it was actually the Japanese Super Ginrai version that had the shorter stacks, not the Hasbro Optimus Prime version). This test is also used to determine the durability of a toy's packaging, making sure that only the packaging is damaged should it be dropped.

Other tests have similar goals, generally concerned with breakage issues. Hence, the Japanese version of Vector Prime has hard plastic wings, but the U.S. version uses a rubbery material less likely to accidentally snap off or gouge out the eye of a child (or a particularly clumsy adult). Even as early as 1985, Jetfire and Swoop were altered to have blunted nosecones, and the Seeker jets had rubber nosecones instead of hard plastic. Again, this was likely to prevent trauma from a thrown or jabbed toy.

Safety standards

File:G1Thunder clash toy.jpg

I'm a choking hazard!

File:MachineWarsPrime.jpg

I'm not!

Besides the safety testing, Hasbro (and other toy manufacturers) try to make sure their products conform to certain standards. Some of these standards are self-imposed, while others are mandated at the state or national level. Most notably, these laws include choke laws, which are designed to prevent small parts (especially projectiles) from being lodged in a child's windpipe, the use of toxic materials like lead-based paints (which was an issue with the short-lived Mexican The Transformers line)...

...Aaaaaand toy gun laws which are designed to prevent scenarios where police mistake a "realistic" toy gun, like say, the original Megatron, as an actual firearm and shoot or arrest the person carrying it. U.S. law requires that toy guns have either an orange plug in the barrel, or a barrel made out of unpainted orange plastic.

If you thought orange plugs were bad enough, well...

Some states have even more stringent laws, which require that toy guns must be brightly colored and must not resemble real-world firearms (such toy guns are almost exclusively water guns, Nerf products, or resemble real firearms but have neon colors and cartoonish proportions). Some retailers won't even carry realistic toy guns anyway, so that's a double-whammy in some places. Which is why Titans Return Sixshot doesn't have a "gun" mode, but he does have a "submarine" mode that totally isn't the exact same configuration just turned upside-down how could you even think that.

Note that the major federal toy gun law was enacted in 1988, and applies to all toy guns manufactured after May 1989. As such, it is entirely legal for dealers to sell original G1 Megatron figures, as they are grandfathered in; but any later American release of the toy WOULD have to meet these standards, hence the "Safety/Lava Bath Megatron" toy, which STILL failed to meet these guidelines, as the entire external surface was not (and likely could not be) made from a single color of plastic. As a result, an American reissue of G1 Megatron has never happened, yet he gets reissued like crazy in Japan, which has very different toy safety laws and doesn't have any restrictions on toy guns.

Also note that there's no size limitation anywhere in the legal regulations. As a consequence, even the recent 2010 Transformers Legends Class Megatron has to sport an orange barrel, despite his tiny size.

Articulation and safety

Ball joints are safer?

During the time Hasbro started to make its own molds to represent characters as toys instead of importing from other toy lines, the company noticed that the safety standards of a toy had to withstand a pulling force of 20 pounds to deem them safe. Because most toys in those days had little to no outward movement in their legs or arms, they would rather quickly break with little force, so most figures were made with fused legs, preventing kids from pulling the legs apart. Because of this, most of the toys dropped articulation to make the figures stronger, turning a large amount of them into "bricks". During the time Takio Ejima started working on the brand, he noted that they could make the toys safer by the use of ball joints, making it easier for the toy to pass the test, and still have the full range of motion. This idea would even change the standard of articulation outside the Transformers brand.

Safety standards are still changing

File:Megatronclassicstoy.jpg

Acceptable in 2006... and not a day later.

Note that changes to previously released toys to conform to modern-day safety standards aren't limited to reissues of Generation 1 toys: For the Universe (2008)/Revenge of the Fallen Superion giftset, Hasbro retooled the nosecone of the Energon Treadshot/Windrazor sculpt to be less pointy—a sculpt that had originally been released a mere five years earlier.

Similarly, a Generation 1-era sculpt that could previously be reused in its original state may unexpectedly need to be changed within the space of a few years. Movor's toy from 2001 is a redeco of Blast Off, with no detectable physical changes, but in 2003 another redeco of the same sculpt had to be retooled to round off the nosecone.

Classics Megatron, released in 2006, turns into a weapon heavily inspired by a Nerf N-Strike Maverick blaster with a bright orange cap on the end of both the scope and the barrel. With Hasbro's ever-more-conservative legal department, even this deco was not deemed sufficient for long. This figure would not see release again in the U.S. for ten years, and when it finally did come out again it was almost entirely stop-sign red. Considering what color schemes actual Nerf blasters released at retail in the interim time have sported, how much of this is really due to genuine safety concerns and how much is just down to Hasbro's concern for the public perception of the Transformers brand is anyone's guess.

Safety standards in other countries

The USA isn't the only country with rigid toy safety standards that affect Transformers. In fact, some countries have safety standards that are even more rigid than anything the USA has. Examples:

Awww come on, Italy.

• In Italy's Trasformer [sic] line by GiG, many toys' missile launchers didn't have their springs removed, but the missiles did have comically-huge giant rubber balls attached to the tips. Some of the subsequent, officially-licensed-by-Hasbro Transformers re-releases of those toys still featured the same kind of missiles. Makes those elongated Commemorative Series missiles seem not so bad after all, huh?
• Whereas European toy gun laws are more relaxed, hence making the import of Generation 1 Megatron reissues and Masterpiece Megatron less of a legal hassle, Australia actually has harsher regulations than the US, officially classifying MP Megatron as a "firearm replica". Some Australian states even consider the possession of the toy illegal, even if it was painted in bright orange or sported a permanently glued on orange plug. In the state of Queensland the only way to circumvent this problem requires joining some kind of registered firearms Collectors' Club.
• Members of the European Union don't consider American safety regulations sufficient, but require their own safety tests, with the toys having to adhere to the European standard EN 71. As a consequence, toys that are perfectly fine to be released in the USA might occasionally not be considered suitable for the European market. And since Hasbro has long since abandoned producing international "variants" of toys beyond mere packaging differences, that would mean those toys simply won't come out in Europe at all. (However, while specific examples are unconfirmed, it's highly doubtful that this affects a large number of toys.)
• Conversely, Japan has comparatively lax toy safety regulations. The Japanese toy safety standard is called "ST", which can be applied to toys aimed at children under the age of 14; however, that doesn't mean that a toy can't be sold if it doesn't sport the "ST" seal. The only difference is that parents will receive a compensation if their child gets injured by playing with an "ST"-approved toy, therefore parents are more likely to buy toys that are "ST"-approved than toys that are not.

Notes

Yeah, if only..

• At one point Hasbro apparently considered selling the Commemorative Series reissues as "adult collectables" to avoid having to adhere to US toy safety standards. Stock photos for the Series III figures Thundercracker, Silverstreak and Autobot Jazz depict sample packaging labeled as "adult collectable", as does a Toys"R"Us print ad published in issue 6 of Dreamwave's first The War Within mini-series, while the final packaging has those labels covered with stickers containing choking hazard safety warnings, in addition to stickers containing "Ages 5+" recommendations.
• According to Hasbro, toys that represent flying characters are given more stringent drop tests and rounded/collapsible pointy-bits, as children (and the kind of adults who buy Transformers) are more prone to throwing these figures around or ramming them into things (or people).
• You know how the original Megatron turns into a realistic-looking handgun? And how there are various laws prohibiting the sale of realistic-looking toy handguns? Yeah. C'mon, you knew it was bound to happen sooner or later.
• The Generation 1-era sparking gimmick was assumed to be permanently abandoned after a Barbie doll with a similar action feature reportedly set a child's underwear on fire. While sparking eventually returned in the form of the Age of Extinction Dino Sparkers, those toys kept the sparks contained within the clear-plastic toys rather than spewed out, preventing possible pyrotechnics.

External links

• Page featuring articles on the genesis of the choke-gate test, due to a missile-firing Battlestar Galactica toy.
• CFR Title 15, Part 1150, the official federal law on "realistic" toy guns and the markings thereof.
• Overview on toy safety standards in the UK
• Pages five and six of this article give a brief summary of the federal safety guidelines regarding breakability testing. (PDF format.)
• The Onion's slightly snarkier take on the subject, for those who like their snarky snark snarkiness.
• Canadian ruling that Masterpiece Megatron does not constitute a "replica firearm" for importing purposes.
• One comical way to get around customs as demonstrated by Lil Formers

See also

• Unpaintable plastic