ToonTown
ToonTown is a South Korean company that apparently 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. Both of these manufacturers would eventually go on to produce their own Transformers-branded toys and merchandise, releasing them under the Generation 2 banner.
We say apparently because the story of ToonTown is shrouded in mystery and very little firm info is known about them. They're so obscure that we don't even have a logo that we can stamp on this opening paragraph! In the early days of the online fandom, people who lived or traveled in east Asia would exchange reports on mailing lists or Usenet groups of having seen official-looking, Hasbro-branded toys in strange colors or sizes, and the community would then debate whether these were legitimate Transformers products or high quality, very bold knockoffs. Decades later no decisive answers have surfaced, or seem likely to do so.
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! The boxes for the bigger toys prominently display "Hasbro International", "Permission of 3D Licensing International", and the logo styles and faction insignia routinely seen on legitimate Transformers product (and routinely not seen on knockoffs, especially not in the 1990s). Smaller toys would sometimes omit these, with the licensing label being shortened to "3-D Licensed by ToonTown".
LALA apparently even had enough budget to air their own animated commercials, as seen here. All of these releases feature a note on the packaging saying something akin to "Scheduled to broadcast on TV", which might suggest that these were meant to be tie-in products to a local airing of the Generation 2 cartoon... Or, maybe, they could just be referencing the aforementioned commercials, like the traditional "Seen on TV" in American goods. 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 | Watches
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Pencil Cases
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Erasers
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Toys and merchandise without a known manufacturer
A handful of extra ToonTown-licensed, Hasbro-labeled toys seemingly do not have any physical manufacturing company labeled on their packaging. These include a handful of reissues of Kabaya Transformers Gum kits [3] and - oddly - a rebranding of an old Diaclone Optimus Prime knockoff with a number of extensive molding modifications (which, 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. 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 with a similar story: a gifset of high-quality and massively oversized Combaticons, released in both the original and Generation 2 color schemes, 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.
