Bandai
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Bandai Co., Ltd. (株式会社バンダイ, Kabushiki-gaisha Bandai) is Japan's largest toy company, founded in July 5, 1950, headquartered in Taitō, Tokyo, and Takara's biggest rival. Currently, Bandai is a subsidiary under Bandai Namco Holdings after the main company bought/merged with Namco in September 29, 2005.
During the 1980s, when Bandai had very little direct presence in the North American market, they not only licensed their Machine Robo toyline to Tonka as GoBots, but also licensed several other molds to Hasbro for the Transformers line that they obtained when they bought out another Japanese company, Takatoku Toys.
Since the Transformers cartoon would air in Japan, these toys were dropped from the animated lineup to avoid giving Takara's rival free publicity... with the exception of Jetfire, who instead got a name-tweak and extensively-changed animation model, probably due to Hasbro wanting some form of advertising for a very expensive item.
Notes
- Current Hasbro Chief Executive Officer Brian Goldner was an executive at Bandai's American division before joining Hasbro in 2000.
- Bandai in general, partnered with Toei to create the Super Sentai toyline in Japan, whilst in America and other countries, Bandai had partnered with Saban to produce the Power Rangers toyline since its inception in 1993. After twenty-five years on producing Power Rangers toys, Saban & Bandai parted ways in early 2018, making way for news that Hasbro would be producing Power Rangers toys starting in 2019 at Toy Fair 2018. Power Rangers would later be acquired by Hasbro themselves a couple months later on May 1, 2018 from Saban at a whopping $522 Million.[1] The deal was finalized a month later on June 12, 2018, making Power Rangers a wholly owned property of Hasbro.[2] The Super Sentai toyline is not affected as it will continue to produce the toyline through Bandai.
