Generation 1 toylines in Latin America
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While most territories throughout the span of the Generation 1 Transformers toyline primarily received the original figures manufactured by Hasbro and Takara (and the few national companies that did get licensing to manufacture their own copies, like Joustra in France and El Greco in Greece, having mostly just produced identical versions save for minor variants and differences in plastic colors), a remarkable set of oddities happened past the U.S. border, as Mexico and a good portion of South America throughout the mid-80s would instead get to manufacture and market their own regional versions of the Generation 1 toyline with far less oversight on part of Hasbro.
A more elaborate description of these toylines and the circumstances behind their releases is present in their companies' respective articles, with the primary interest of this page being in providing a complete summary of all toys released within them instead.
Overview
While it's difficult to explain in broad strokes what led to this arrangement, common sense suggests that it was most likely the result of protectionism and tariffs making it difficult for Hasbro to export their products to a good portion of Latin America. As the broad consensus on the economic history of the region goes:
| “ | According to data compiled by the Fraser Institute, in 1980 Latin American was one of the most protectionist regions in the world; import tariffs across all countries and sectors – including those export sectors with no import tariffs – were, on average, 42 percent. For comparison, at that time average import tariffs were only 15 percent in the so-called East Asian Tigers nations. | ” |
—Sebastian Edwards, Protectionism and Latin America’s historical economic decline [1] | ||
As a result, the more profitable deal seems to have been handing the Transformers license over to individual companies within those countries and more or less letting them do whatever they want in terms of releasing toys under the Transformers brand, which Hasbro would then profit from through royalties. Such an arrangement was not previously unseen in the toy market - for instance; the Kenner Star Wars figures released a couple of years back were also manufactured across a few Latin American countries under a similar licensing deal - but Hasbro seems to have been far, far more liberal in regards to licensing out the Transformers across the region, handing out the brand to significantly more companies and apparently being a lot less strict in regards to how exactly those companies would have to produce and market their Transformers toys.
The result of such an anarchic and decentralized approach was a tapestry of different micro-toylines releasing across the continent, with odd toy decos, unusual marketing decisions, and inconsistent quality control and distribution practices becoming defining characteristics of the Latin American Transformers scene. Mini-Vehicles would get released in every color under the rainbow, characters would get arbitrarily renamed in the absence of any accompanying media, toys from other transforming robot toylines would get imported and rebranded as Transformers to fill in the gaps, and at one point, even a literal Transformers knockoff would be sold as a Transformers-branded toy: Truly, these were some wild times for the brand.
Despite - or, rather; because of - this, the Latin American Transformers releases have become some of the most coveted vintage Transformers toys on the secondary market, with the rarity of these figures and their frequently unusual color variants appealing to every kind of collector from casual fans interested in owning odd variants of their favorite characters to hardened completists who *need* to own all the odd variants so as to fulfil their primal toy-gathering urges... Which, inevitably, has also led to most of these toys now fetching ridiculously high prices.
Mexico
- Main article: IGA
Transformers was released by IGA in Mexico in 1985. For the most part, the toys are similar to their Hasbro counterparts, though with plenty of minor coloring and materials differences... which apparently includes lead paint. Oops. The line did not do well, and 1986's releases were little more than Metroplex and a handful of first-year Mini-Vehicles recolored roughly like their third-year retools. The line was fully canceled shortly after.
A number of these toys somehow ended up in European markets years after the line was over, which is when that whole "lead paint" thing was discovered. Oops.
- 1985/1986
Mini-Vehicles
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Autobot Cars
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(with red feet or corrected orange feet) (Trailbreaker head) (reversed arms, then corrected) (no red paint on doors) (regular and re-colored unmodified Bluestreak mold) |
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Jumpstarters
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Dinobots | Autobot Commander
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Autobot City |
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Constructicons
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(giftset, w/ red eyes and w/o on Devastator head) |
Triple Changers
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Decepticon Jets
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Decepticon Communicator
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Decepticon Leader
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Brazil
- Main article: Estrela
Easily the most well-known of the Southern-Hemisphere Transformers releases, Estrela's batch of six Mini-Vehicle molds - now renamed into "Robocars" - were the bulk of the toys released by the company, put out across Brazilian stores in a variety of colors. The mysterious "Bumper" mold was part of this assortment, under the name "Sedan", complete with packaging art and a bio, leading fans to wonder if this bio came from scrapped plans for the toy in the original Hasbro line. The line was filled out with redecoed Jumpstarters called "Salt-Man" ("salto" meaning "jump" in Spanish and Portuguese), and some brand-new non-Takara molds with the Eletrix - derived from Yonezawa Toys' Remote Change Robo Series - and Bat-Robôs - derived from Asahi Corporation's Attack Change Machine Powertron but first released in the U.S. and Europe by the the Ertl Company as the Pow-R-Trons. The line also received a number of merchandise, including a board game, and even its own unique logo as seen above.
Most coveted among the Estrela toys is a second round of Robocars redecos, the "Optimus vs Malignus" series, which split the toys into brand-new good & evil (respectively) factions. While a lot of Estrela toys like the Salt-Men, the Eletrix, and the Bat-Robôs aren't particularly uncommon, these twelve toys —particularly the more radically-changed Malignus— have become extraordinarily expensive on the secondary market, easily earning triple-digit sums for even loose samples. Still-carded toys are exceptionally rare.
Estrela would continue working with Hasbro throughout the following years, with the company shifting their focus from distributing rather than manufacturing Transformers toys across Brazil. They would end this relationship in 2007 as Hasbro shifted towards their own South American distribution chains, and a messy decade-long lawsuit would follow regarding royalties over some of the (non-Transformers) Hasbro-derived toylines that Estrela still manufactured.
- 1985
| Robocars | Salt-Man
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Bat-Robô | Eletrix |
- 1986
| Optimus | Malignus |  |
Argentina
Argentina might have received the greatest variety of Transformers toys in Latin American stores during the Generation 1 toyline, with the original Hasbro-made figures releasing across several Argentinian stores but a pair of national companies also taking on the mantle of manufacturing and distributing their own figures. A handful of Estrela Robocars would also be roughly repackaged and sold across a few Argentinan stores under new blister cards featuring the name "Invasion Galactica", with the most common running theory being that these were the product of national retailers repackaging foreign products to avoid taxation from protectionist laws.
Antex
- Main article: Antex
A bit of an odd case, it appears that Argentine company Antex got its Transformers license from Estrela, rather than Hasbro, which is kind of dubious on the "did Estrela actually have the authority to do that" mark. Antex would then release its own batch of Mini-Vehicle and Salt-Men, with the packaging being direct translations of their Estrela counterparts, even featuring their same unique Transformers logo. Most of these would feature entirely new decos... Despite the fact that the Estrela-derived art and pictures on the packaging featured them in the original, mostly unavailable color schemes.
Similar to Estrela, Antex would go on to officially distribute Transformers toys in the country throughout the 90s, with many imported Generation 2 figures arriving to Argentina with Antex branding on the packaging. Antex would also re-release their Salt-Men during this time as Robot-Man X and Robot-Man Z under Generation 2 packaging, with the toys being unchanged from their original run.
In the early 2010s, a large number of on-card/boxed Antex toys hit the secondary market, apparently due to an old warehouse find. As a product of this, and unlike with other Latin American toylines, many of these items are sold cheaper than domestic packaged original toys in the US, but still undoubtedly make a neat curiosity for collectors.
- 1985
| Robocar | Salt-Man
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- 1994
Robot-Man
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Comando Toys
- Main article: Comando Toys
Another Argentinian toy company, Comando Toys, would also later earn the rights to manufacture and distribute their own Transformers toys across the country... And their two toys would consist of a transforming radio originally manufactured by Taiwanese company Best Join as bootleg mish-mashing various disparate elements of Transformers toys and a non-transforming Godmars-based walkie talkie. Weird stuff.
- 1987
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Venezuela
- Main article: Rubiplas
In contrast with the wide spectrum of colorful Mini-Vehicle releases from all across Latin American, the tiny Venezuelan Rubiplas line is a lot more 'normal', with most figures having the same color schemes as their original Hasbro releases and therefore looking mostly identical save for a frequent lack of extra paint applications and some different shades of plastic (Rubiplas' Bumblebee, for instances, looks very, very bright and saturated as a result). The only real stand-out is their weirdly-colored Huffer, now deco'd in red and yellow.
- 1985
| Mini-Vehicles |  |
Peru and Chile
- Main article: Lynsa
Peruvian company Lynsa made their own cheaper-to-produce versions of the original Mini-Vehicle range, often with less-to-no paint applications, decals or chrome, as well as multiple different color variants for each mold, which they would then both sell domestically and also export to Chile. There are supposedly upwards of three dozen different mold/color combinations altogether, many of them unique to the Peruvian line, but the ravages of time have made samples stunningly rare and reliable information scarce. Interestingly, beyond the addition of Gears, their known selection of molds is identical to that of the previous Rubiplas.
Another pair of companies - Abramowicz in Chile and BASA / HUDE in Peru - also released Transformers toys their respective countries, but these were simply imported rather than manufactured by those companies.
- 1987
| Mini-Vehicles |  |
Legacy of Latin American toylines
Odd and inconsistent as they might be, the Latin American Generation 1 toylines were inextricable components of the success of the Transformers brand in their respective countries and are often remembered warmly by fans in these regions: the fact that many of these smaller toylines existed in place of their larger and more substantive international equivalents ultimately didn't stop them from becoming an integral and beloved portion of many childhoods, and likewise, the odd variants and marketing decisions also gave a regional identity of sorts to the brand within those countries. Unfortunately, though, these toylines and their legacy have since been mostly overlooked by modern official Transformers fiction and pretty much all but ignored by Hasbro and Takara when it comes to the modern Transformers toy market.
References to Latin American-original characters in media are few and far between. Estrela's Malignus faction would see a small cameo as a revolutionary mob in a few 2008 TransTech text stories, and later, the Beast Wars: Uprising text stories released from 2014 to 2016 would feature both the Optimus and Malignus as prominent factions in a handful of chapters. Comando Toys' Radio AM Robot would also be briefly namedropped as an in-universe musician in the 2010 "A Team Effort" Wings Universe story. All of these were part of the very niche and fan-oriented works published by Fun Publications (usually under the Transformers Timelines banner) and were usually only either posted online or, sometimes, in the subscription-based Transformers Collectors' Club magazine. On the side of media that received more "mainstream" releases, a number of cameos from Transformers Animated are also based on the Latin American portion of the franchise - Sedan, Volks, and Carrera all got brief "blink-it-and-you'll-miss-it" appearances as background characters - and later, Sedan would also get a mini-cameo in Kreon form in the Transformers Legends Special Chapter, and... This is basically about it.
Despite the fact that there have been numerous Transformers toylines (and, in a sense, a nearly two-decades-long meta-toyline!) specifically oriented around producing modern versions of older Transformers, with all of the original characters that received Latin American toy variants getting multiple new figures, and numerous obscure and forgotten characters frequently popping up across these newer toylines - often in the form of redecos and retools - it is unfortunately the case that virtually none of the Latin American Transformers have been represented in this form. There are two modern toys which can kinda be repurposed as Latin American homages, though the extent to which this is even intentional is debatable to begin with: "Puffer", a nickname given to both the Mexican IGA and French Joustra versions of Pipes which use the Huffer mold as a basis, was later canonized as an official character and released as part of the Kingdom toyline in 2021... Even though the version he's primarily based on is his lighter blue European counterpart rather than his darker Mexican equivalent. And Titans Return Twin Twist would get re-released in the 2022 Transformers: Legacy Wreck N' Rule Collection in his red and blue Diaclone color scheme, which also happens to match one of two color schemes used by Salt-Man Z in Brazil, so... There's that for all the Estrela fans out there.
Unfortunately, it seems that we're still a long way from seeing a complete CHUG Optimus and Malignus team or a Masterpiece Radio AM Robot - but until then, we can at least take comfort in the fact that, in the first half of the 2020s, there have been 200% more characters that can double as homages to their South American counterparts compared to previous years, so who knows what the future might hold!
References
- ↑ Sebastian Edwards, Protectionism and Latin America's historical economic decline, Journal of Policy Modeling, Volume 31, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 573-584 (ISSN 0161-8938)
