Lynsa

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Lynsa was a Peruvian company that held the license to manufacture and market redecoed Mini Vehicles in Peru and Chile during Generation 1, as a lower-cost alternative to the Hasbro and Takara Transformers imported by HUDE and BASA (in Peru) and Abramowicz (in Chile). As with a number of other South American companies, they'd produce a variety of Mini-Vehicle variants and release them to markets in 1987.

These toys frequently featured either little or no additional paint decos beyond their raw plastic colors, no decals, and no chrome components. Bumblebee and Cliffjumper also feature hard plastic tires, rather than the soft rubber tires of their original versions. Each one would get an absurd amount of repaints, with the total amount for each mold still being largely unknown: it is presumed that there might be upwards of three dozen different mold/color combinations altogether, although information and images for a good portion of these is scarce. Notably, beyond the addition of Gears, the roster of currently known molds used by Lynsa are the same used by Venezuela's Rubiplas.

Lynsa also made different Transformers-related merchandise in the 80s like lunchboxes, thermoses, and pencil cases.

Toys

Mini-Vehicles
Lynsa's Huffer

Note

  • It is sometimes claimed that Lynsa is an Argentinian company that only merely imported their products to Peru and Chile, with the first instance of this claim coming from prolific Generation 1 collector Maz's article on the toyline - one of the first on the English internet to talk about its existence - where he mentions how many Peruvians had never heard of Lynsa before and cites one forum user who could "only find reference to Lynsa being an Argentinian plastics company" [1]. There is, in fact; an Argentinian company called Lynsa that was also active in the 1980s and still maintains an online presence today [2], however; they feature an entirely different logo and have seemingly only ever produced zippers rather than toys, making it evident that this is a separate entity - and a quick Google search reveals that there are also multiple other similarly unrelated companies bearing the name "Lynsa", thus suggesting that this is actually not as uncommon of a name as the aforementioned forum user presumed. The packaging for Lynsa's Transformers proclaims that they are a Producto Peruano ("Peruvian Product", Peru's equivalent for a Made in USA or Made in China) and the few other instances of known toys released by Lynsa (beyond the Transformers, they also held the license to produce Karate Kid toys during the 80s) also feature the same Produto Peruano identifiers, thus; unless substantive evidence to the contrary is ever discovered, it seems much more probable that all of these figures were, in fact, produced in Peru.
  • Also mentioned in Maz's article is the existence of a toy commercial that was aired to promote the toyline, with lyrics that'd translate to English into "Transformers, Transformers, they are not only what they seem to be, they are much more action!". Such a commercial has never been found and is now considered lost media.

References