E-HOBBY
e-Hobby (officially spelled that way) is a Takara-affiliated online store owned by Part One, Ltd. Even though the e-Hobby Shop sells all sorts of toys manufactured by Takara, it's best known for offering exclusive redecos of Transformers toys. Because of this, pre-orders for regular mass retail toys listed at the e-Hobby website are occasionally mistaken by Western fans as a confirmation that a toy is either exclusive to e-Hobby, or that an e-Hobby exclusive redeco is planned.
History
Part One, Ltd. was founded over 25 years ago and has provided various kinds of services to Takara ever since the days of the Diaclone line, among them products planning, packaging design, character design and promotional planning. Among other things, Part One is responsible for designing the packaging for the Binaltech toyline.
The e-Hobby Shop was launched in early 2001. Even though the address e-Hobby.co.jp was used from the get-go, the site was also available under the (now defunct) URL http://e-hobby.sputniknext.com/, but eventually permanently moved to its current location in May 2003.
In 2001, Takara would release the first exclusive toys through the e-Hobby Shop, reissues of the original Generation 1 Ironhide and Ratchet that were part of the store/convention exclusive "Collector's Edition" series from 2001. In Ironhide's case, this was actually the first time the toy was officially available in Japan in its Transformers colors, whereas the Transformers version of Ratchet had previously only been available in Japan via mail order.
The e-Hobby website would later also start to offer extensive bio profiles and story content written by Hirofumi Ichikawa.
List of e-Hobby exclusive toys
Reissues
Exclusive redecos of reissues
- Black Starscream and Ghost Starscream (available as a set)
- Fire Guts God Ginrai
- Chromed Jazz
- Chromed Bluestreak
- Megaplex
- Clamp Down and Deep Cover (available as a set)
- Road Rage and Crosscut (available as a set)
- Road Hauler and Sunstorm (available as a set)
- "Insectron Clone Army" (Zaptrap, Salvo, and Shothole)
- Reissue Twincast with Flip Sides
- Magnificus with Ga'mede
- "Dimension Exploration Researchers" aka "Gobots" (Bug Bite, Bad Boy, Treds, Small Foot, Pathfinder, and Road Ranger)
- Detritus
- Galvatron II
- Laser Ultra Magnus
