LEGO
The LEGO Group (often simplified as LEGO) is a Danish toy company, famous worldwide for their wildly successful line of plastic construction bricks fittingly called "LEGO", which… ahem… "inspired" Hasbro's Built to Rule! and Kre-O toy brick lines, as well as those of Kawada Co. Ltd's Diablock and some of the releases under the Nezha: Transformers brand in China.
Despite being most famous for their trademark interlocking bricks, LEGO actually started off producing wooden toys in 1932, before their now-famous brick system in 1949, which was based on Kiddicraft's Self-Locking Bricks. These bricks got eventually upgraded and improved into the modern brick design in 1958, and the rest is history. Despite some financial woes in the late 90s and early 2000s, Lego has ultimately established itself as a major juggernaut in the toy industry, surpassing both Hasbro and Mattel as the most successful toy company in the world since roughly 2012.
Beginning in 2022, they started collaborating with Hasbro and TakaraTomy on producing Transformers sets under the adult collector-oriented Icons theme.
Overview
LEGO produces building sets themed around both their own original brandings—either of "evergreen" themes like City, TECHNIC, and Creator or more fantasy-oriented ones like BIONICLE, Ninjago, and Monkie Kid—and licensed properties including Star Wars, Harry Potter, Jurassic Park, Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog, numerous Marvel and DC properties, and Minecraft. Many of their licensed properties would later get video games developed by Traveller's Tales, through publisher Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. In 2014, LEGO ventured onto the big screen with The LEGO Movie (also released through Warner Bros.), and expanded it out into a small film franchise that included some of the aforementioned licensed properties they have access to, until the 5-year deal between LEGO and Warner Bros. was up in 2019.
Before Lego's official foray into Transformers, the Danish brand had already produced more than a few sets with transforming robots in the past: for instance, a lot of mechas in space themes like Life on Mars can convert from their robotic modes into simple spaceships through the disassembly and reassembly of individual modules, other mechas in later themes like Bladvic's Rumble Bear in Legends of Chima and Lance's Mecha Horse in Nexo Knights can convert into wheeled vehicle modes without requiring any disassembly, and perhaps most famously, the Bohrok from the BIONICLE theme can convert into spheres. Similarly, a lot of Creator sets with multiple builds have also featured robots as primary builds that can be disassembled and reassembled into vehicles as secondary and tertiary builds, perhaps the most classically Transformers-looking one being 31007 Power Mech, a lime green robot that can be transformed into either a pick-up truck or a helicopter - a little bit like someone else.
In 2022, LEGO released their first officially licensed LEGO/Transformers collaboration project, LEGO Icons 10302 Optimus Prime, designed by former Hasbro employee Joe Kyde. This was followed up in 2024 with 10338 Bumblebee, also designed in the initial stages by Joe Kyde and later expanded upon with the help of other LEGO designers like Samuel Liltorp Johnson, Nathan Davis, Ashwin Visser, and Yoel Mazur.
Toys
Icons
Notes
- If you were wondering how Hasbro and many, many other companies such as Mega Brands Inc. (now owned by Mattel) have been able to get away with making their own similar brick-building toylines for so many years (notably Mega Brands' ongoing, ever-evolving Mega Bloks/Mega Construx/MEGA brand) that utilizes The LEGO Group's brick-building system, it's because the technical patents expired in 1978. That said, this apparently hasn't stopped The LEGO Group from filing at least fourteen different lawsuits against Mega Brands in the past (spanning from the late-90s to the early 2010s), on the grounds that it violates LEGO's trademark; Mega Brands being their chosen target due to the company being LEGO's biggest competitor in the brick-building space since the late '90s. All of these lawsuits have resulted in basically the same court ruling; the system performs a technical function, and is therefore considered more of a violation of patent, not trademark, and as all of LEGO's relevant patents have long since expired, there's nothing they can do to stop other companies from using the brick-building system.
- While most LEGO-like toylines like Built to Rule! and Kre-O usually alter or create entirely new variants of more specialized existing pieces beyond the more basic bricks and plates, the buildable figures of Nezha: Transformers are almost exclusively made out of parts directly copied from LEGO's System and TECHNIC sets (with the only exceptions seemingly being the character's pre-made heads), and these were released up until 2021, just a year before LEGO's own official Optimus Prime!
- Due to The LEGO Group's strict prohibition of realistic military toys, it's very unlikely that we'll get any follow-up Decepticon LEGO sets—more specifically a Generation 1 Megatron set, as the possibility of a role-play-scaled gun mode is a most definite no-no for LEGO and most other Western toy companies in this day and age to do, and with his go-to replacement alternate mode option generally being some kind of tank, that also puts a rather large restriction on what they could potentially do with the character. As most of the other iconic Generation 1 Decepticons transform into fighter jets or other weapons, this likewise falls into the category of "military toys". Bummer.
