Lynsa
Lynsa was a Peruvian company that held the license to manufacture and market redecoed Mini Vehicles in Peru and Chile during Generation 1. These would serve 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, most of them in batches of all-new colors, and release them to markets in 1987.
Overview
Lynsa is a fairly mysterious company, with their only other major licensed foray into the Peruvian toy market being a handful of Karate Kid toys produced during the 80s. A couple of other more obscure Lynsa-branded products, such as a batch of LJN Voltron bootlegs sold under the name of "Ensembler", are also known to exist [1]. Given the seeming absence of any Lynsa-branded products on the market since the 1980s, it is presumed that they are now defunct.
As a result of the scarce information surrounding Lynsa, it's sometimes speculated that they might be an Argentinian company that only merely imported their products to Peru and Chile rather than acting as a manufacturer, 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" [2]. There is, in fact; an Argentinian company called Lynsa that was also active in the 1980s and still maintains an online presence today [3], 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. 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 also feature the same Produto Peruano identifiers, thus; unless more substantive evidence to the contrary is ever discovered, it seems more probable that all of these figures were, in fact, produced in Peru as their packaging claims.
Lynsa's Transformers 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 |  |
Note
- 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.
