Micronauts (franchise)
| This article is about the real-world media franchise. For the fictional team of heroes, see Micronaut. |
Micronauts was a toyline created by the Mego Corporation in 1976. Licensed from Takara’s Microman series, the Micronauts line was comprised of repackaged Microman figures, and later original Mego creations (though still using modified Takara parts.) The series followed a vague sci-fi premise about the “Interchangeable World of the Micronauts.”
History
The Micronauts line debuted in 1977 as Mego's first original series after finding success with licensed toys. It proved to be needed, too, as Mego had just rejected a licensing deal for a then-upcoming science fiction film. Mego pushed the interchangeability of the toys as the core play pattern, encouraging kids to build their own toys using the Micronauts pieces. This meant that kids (or rather, their parents) had to buy more sets and figures to build bigger and better creations. Micronauts ran successfully until around 1980, when Mego began to lose sales and ultimately shut down in 1983. However, there was one particular influence that the toys had: much of their engineering was borrowed by Hasbro for their G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero line.
Five years before The Transformers did the same thing, Micronauts received a comic book from Marvel Comics, written by Bill Mantlo (who would later write the popular ROM: Spaceknight series); it ran for a total of 61 issues from 1979 to 1986, even after the toyline’s cancellation. Unlike Marvel's Transformers series, Micronauts was fully integrated into the mainstream Marvel Universe, with Mantlo introducing new original characters in addition to the toy-based ones. This, coupled with the terms of the license[1] allowed for several Micronauts characters to continue being published in Marvel stories even after Marvel lost the license. Later on, other publishers such as Image Comics and Devil's Due Press picked up the Micronauts license, though neither run met with much success.
By 2009, Hasbro had acquired Micronauts and announced that they were planning a revival, with a new toyline and film series. Nothing new came of it until 2011, when the Micronauts characters were used as the key players in Hasbro’s Unit:E crossover, which sought to merge a number of Hasbro properties, including Transformers, into a shared universe. Unfortunately, for reasons likely involving the change of direction with the Transformers: Prime cartoon, Unit:E was never followed up on. However, during Hasbro's 2015 Investor Day event, the company unveiled Transformers: Micronauts under their "New Brands" slides, along with a mysterious figure that appeared to be a new toy of Micronauts character Biotron.[2] As of right now, no new information has been revealed.
Also in 2015, IDW Publishing announced plans for a new Micronauts series, which debuted in March 2016; IDW later revealed that Micronauts would be folded into their new shared Hasbro universe as part of the Revolution event, along with titles like The Transformers, G.I. Joe, and ROM. The Micronauts characters were tied into the previously established Transformers continuity in the Micronauts: Revolution one-shot, which revealed that the Micronauts' home universe of Microspace was actually created by one of the Thirteen original Transformers, Micronus Prime.
References
- ↑ Unlike the Transformers license, which gave Hasbro ownership of any characters that debuted in the comic, the Micronauts and ROM: Spaceknight licenses gave the rights to any characters originating in the comics to Marvel.
- ↑ http://news.tfw2005.com/2015/11/16/tfw2005-coverage-of-hasbro-investor-day-2015-305388
