Multilingual packaging

Typical trilingual cardback: photos of the wrong toy representing a different character, with misidentified factions and names. There is no room for characterization, function or stats, but a Franchise description longer than the Gettysburg Address appears in three languages.

Multilingual packaging is essentially the standard way Transformers toys are available in other countries outside the United States. However, for a brief time, the standard United States packaging sporting English-only texts was replaced by trilingual packaging as well.

Multilingual packaging in North America

When the original Transformers toyline was introduced to the Canadian market in 1984, the packaging was bilingual (sporting texts in English and French), using a smaller printing font to fit the Tech Specs and bios in both languages onto the packaging.

With the launch of the Beast Wars toyline in 1996, Hasbro introduced trilingual Transformers packaging, sporting texts in English, French and Spanish, for the Canadian and Mexican markets (prior to that, Mexican Transformers toys had been distributed by a sub-contracted company named IGA between 1985 and 1986, with the packaging being completely in Spanish), now also featuring abbreviated bios in addition to the already used smaller print.

With the launch of the Robots in Disguise toyline in 2001, Hasbro decided to cut costs by using the trilingual packaging for the US market as well, which meant they only had to design one kind of packaging for three markets rather than two.

In 2002, when the Armada toyline was about to be launched, someone (probably a lawyer) informed Hasbro that if any part of the packaging was trilingual, the entire contents had to be trilingual (including the pack-in comic books). Hasbro later realized this person was a chickenshit, and volumes 3 and 4 of the pack-in comic were printed in a much more eye-pleasing way: in English.

Instead of settling for "incredibly short and banal" tech-specs, Hasbro's Transformers team sent kids to the English-only Transformers.com website, where they promised-hope-to-die there would be bios for the characters. Sometimes this was true, but often it was not.

In 2005, Hasbro's Transformers team successfully lobbied the Brand Overlords to return to English-only packaging; arguing that the multi-lingual packaging was so phenomenally ugly that it was costing them sales. As a result, the launch of the Cybertron toyline heralded the return not only of English-only packaging for the US market, but also of full bios printed on the packaging. At the same time, Alternators packaging intended for the US market also became monolingual (although bios would still not be included).

Meanwhile, the Canadian and Mexican markets still have to live with trilingual packaging to this very day.

The Dark Times

From 2001-2005 Hasbro's American Transformers packaging (typically English-only) became trilingual.

In 2002 as the Armada franchise was launching, someone (probably a lawyer) informed Hasbro that if any of the packaging was trilingual, the entire contents had to be trilingual (including the pack-in comic books). Hasbro later realized this person was a chickenshit and volumes 3 and 4 of the pack-in comic were printed as God intended them: in English.

Instead of settling for "incredibly short and banal" tech-specs, Hasbro's Transformers team sent kids to the English-only Transformers.com website, where they promised-hope-to-die there would be bios for the characters. Sometimes this was true, but often it was not.

In mid-2005, Hasbro's Transformers team successfully lobbied the Brand Overlords to return to English-only packaging; arguing that the multi-lingual packaging was so phenomenally ugly that it was costing them sales.

Multilingual packaging in Europe

Europe has its own history of multilingual packaging:

When Milton Bradley started distributing Transformers toys in mainland Europe (Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain) in 1985, the packaging sported four languages, namely German, French, Dutch and Spanish. As with the trilingual packaging, that meant that instead of bios, the tech specs simply sported the characters' mottos in four different languages.

A year later, distribution was shifted from Milton Bradley to Hasbro's European branch. Possibly because sales in Germany were less than stellar, German texts on the packaging were replaced with their English counterparts (even though the United Kingdom continued to get toys in plain English-only packaging).

By 1987, Hasbro apparently realized that English as a fourth language was pointless when the United Kingdom was getting toys in different packaging, so the languages on the European toys' packaging were reduced to bilingual Dutch and French texts. Spain later got their own toys in Spanish-only packaging; although it's unclear at what point exactly that packaging was introduced, Spanish-only packaging is confirmed for the 1989 Micromasters toys (this is not to be confused with the Spanish-only packaging for the early 1984-86 toys originally distributed by IGA on the Mexican market, which were later semi-legally imported to Europe).

In 1991, after the original Generation 1 toyline had ended in the USA, Hasbro continued producing new toys for the European market. Starting with the Turbomasters and Predators, English and Spanish texts were merged into a new, bilingual packaging.

The European version of the Generation 2 toyline introduced yet another variant: The formerly bilingual English/Spanish packaging became trilingual, now incorporating Portuguese as well. At the same time, the formerly bilingual French/Dutch packaging also became trilingual, incorporating texts in German language again for the first time in nine years.

With the launch of the Beast Wars toyline, trilingual French/Dutch/German packaging remained the same (with the toyline's title being "Ani Mutants" for the French market), while the formerly trilingual English/Spanish/Portuguese packaging replaced the latter language with texts in Italian (with the toyline's title being "Biocombat" for the Italian market), thereby gradually shifting out GiG, the company that had previously been distributing Transformers toys in Italy, in favor of Hasbro's own Italian branch.

With the launch of the Robots in Disguise toyline, the two trilingual packaging variants were merged into a single, quadrilingual packaging style featuring texts in English, French, Dutch and German.

With the launch of the Armada toyline, the number of languages on the formerly quadrilingual packaging was expanded to hexalingual, now incorporating texts in Spanish and Italian again.

Finally, in the middle of the Cybertron toyline's run and with the shift of the red Alternators packaging to the bubble-style packaging, the number of languages on European packaging was doubled to dodecalingual, adding texts in Portuguese, Swedish, Danish, Greek, Polish and Turkish to the established languages English, French, Dutch, German, Spanish and Italian.

Psychology

Fans hate multilingual packaging.

While a typical child rips open cardboard packaging to free the misassembled plastic figure encased within like the sweet meat from a nut, discarding the useless shell, adult collectors store their mint-on-card Transformers unopened in humidity-controlled fireproof rooms. Because this is essentially playing with the package rather than the toy, adult fans prefer cleaner mono-lingual packaging.

This can affect the secondary market value of a toy; if there are monolingual and multilingual versions of the same toy, the monolingual version is usually worth more money.

References

From Teletraan I: The Transformers Wiki, a Wikia wiki.