ToonTown
ToonTown is a South Korean company that presumably represented another company, 3D Licensing International, in licensing out the Transformers brand to multiple manufacturers in South Korea and Taiwan during the second half of the 1990s, with said manufacturers eventually going on to produce their own Transformers-branded toys and merchandise and releasing them under the Generation 2 banner.
We say presumably because, in reality, the story of ToonTown is shrouded in mystery and very little is known about them, with community interpretations often being divided on whether or not they're bootleggers rather than a legitimate Transformers licensee.
They're so obscure that we don't even have a logo that we can stamp on this opening paragraph!
Toys and merchandise released under license from ToonTown / 3D Licensing International
Toys and merchandise released by LALA
The bulk of ToonTown-branded releases are attributable to a company called "LALA Industry Co., Ltd." ((주)라라산업"), which seems to, in fact, be a legally registered entity in South Korea [1]. These include a large oversized version of the 1992 Generation 2 Optimus Prime, decoded in white and black with red accents (looking strikingly similar to a later Optimus Prime redeco), and a handful of merchandise like pencil cases, erasers, and a watch - all of them fully-transforming!
LALA apparently even had enough budget to air their own animated commercials, as seen here. Interestingly, beyond Transformers merchandise, the only other products that we can find as having been made by LALA are other generic robot toys that transform into pencil cases [2]: apparently they had one very specific niche!
Toys and merchandise without a known manufacturer
Meanwhile, a handful of extra ToonTown-licensed toys seemingly do not have any manufacturer mentioned on their packaging, with the ToonTown / 3D Licensing International markings being their only identifiers. These include a handful of reissues of Kabaya Transformers Gum kits [3] and - oddly - a rebranding of an old Diaclone Optimus Prime knockoff which features a number of extensive molding modifications (and, surprisingly, would not make this the first time that an official Hasbro licensee company would release a bootleg as a Transformers-branded toy). The kits are marked as being made in Taiwan, and the Optimus Prime toy shares its overall packaging design with a handful of other Taiwanese-made bootlegs of its time, thus; it seems that ToonTown used LALA as their South Korean branch and passed on the license to a handful of other unnamed non-Korean companies in Taiwan - which, in turn, might have simply reused whatever existing molds or batch of toys they had access to - to supplement their line-up.
"Truck Becomes Robot"
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"Easy-to-Assemble Plastic Model"
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Notes
- There's also another set of famous Korean might-or-might-not-be Transformers bootlegs that seem to have a similar story: a gifset of high-quality and massively oversized Combaticons, released in both the original and Generation 2 colors scheme, proudly boasting the official Transformers name and logo on the box. It's long-debated that these might also be legitimate licensed products - with a common rumor being that Takara themselves sold their mold to the manufacturer of these figures [4] - however, given the lack of any Hasbro or Takara (or even ToonTown!) licensing on their packaging, the broader consensus seems to be that these are, most likely, bootlegs.
