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 temporarily also available under the (now defunct) URL http://e-hobby.sputniknext.com/, but eventually permanently moved to its current location in May 2003.
In March 2001, Takara would release the first exclusive toy through the e-Hobby Shop, a black redeco of the original Megatron toy that was reissued by Takara at the same time. "Black" Megatron had previously been available for pre-order at BotCon Japan 2000, since the e-Hobby Shop hadn't been established yet by that time. The deco of the toy was based on an old variant of the original Megatron toy's Microchange precedessor.
The next e-Hobby exclusives after that were reissues of the original Generation 1 Ironhide and Ratchet toys that were part of Takara's 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.
In late 2001, e-Hobby would release more exclusive redecos of a toy available at mass retail, namely a black and a clear "ghost" version of Starscream, who had been reissued by Takara a few months earlier. In early 2002, e-Hobby then released exclusive "New Year Special" reissues of Lambor and Alert, who had originally been available as convention exclusive "Collector's Edition" reissues a few months earlier, but had been hard to find in that previous instance. The e-Hobby exclusive "New Year Special" versions would also sport slightly different stickers than previous releases of the toys.
The next e-Hobby exclusive toy after that was Fire Guts God Ginrai, a redeco of the God Ginrai toy which had been reissued by Takara a few months earlier.
With the launch of Takara's "Transformers Collection" line of "bookbox" reissues, e-Hobby would start to regularly offer an exclusive redeco of almost every toy released as part of the line, in some rare cases even two different redecos of the same toy. Many of those redecos were based on old Diaclone or Microchange variants of the pre-Transformers versions of the toys in question, but were given new names and identities, with extensive bio profiles for the characters written by Hirofumi Ichikawa. Exceptions to this rule were the "anime" and silver chromed versions of Streak (who was never given a "proper" reissue by Takara; the e-Hobby exclusive redecos were companions to the TF Collection reissues of Prowl and Smokescreen, respectively) and the gold chromed version of Meister, who were supposed to represent the same character as the toy they were redecoed from.
In cases where no Diaclone or Microchange variant of the toy existed, e-Hobby would take obscure "extra" characters or weird errors from the cartoon series as inspirations for a redeco, or even come up with an entirely new deco. This was how Sunstorm, Road Hauler and Detritus were created.
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
