Rubiplas
Rubiplas is a Venezuelan company that obtained the license to manufacture and market Transformers toys in Venezuela during Generation 1.
They would release a small localized toyline during the mid 1980s, featuring mostly identical figures to their international equivalents save for different tones of plastic, and one particularly quirky Huffer variant (seen below).
Overview
As with other lesser-known South American Transformers licensees, very little is known about Rubiplas beyond the fact that they also manufactured G.I. Joe figures at one point, a commonality that they shared with other Hasbro-partnered licensees in South America like Estrela and Comando Toys. The original Rubiplas Transformers line was incredibly short-lived, consisting of only five of the six first-year Autobot Mini Vehicles. These toys were also considerably cheaper in production, often lacking paint operations, stickers, or chrome... but not consistently across individual releases. Notably, the roster of five molds that they released - with the addition of Gears - are the same that'd be later made by Lynsa and sold in Chile and Peru.
Unlike most South American-original Transformers Generation 1 toylines, Rubiplas does not seem to have deviated much from the color schemes of the international toylines, save only for their use of different plastics with different shades and tones (a commonality across every other licensee brand who manufactured their own Transformers toys during this time, really). As a result, most toys are close to the Hasbro originals... While, as a product of the different plastics used, some are definitely not - particularly most [1] of those that feature yellow as a main color (like Bumblebee and the yellow version of Cliffjumper), as Rubiplas' yellow plastic was notoriously very, very bright. As mentioned, the one big known exception to this uniformity with a toy's original color schemes is their yellow and red Huffer.
Sometime later, Rubiplas returned to marketing Transformers by securing the license to import Hasbro and Takara toys into Venezuela.
Toys
The Transformers
Mini Vehicles
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External links
- Robots Venezolanos: Transformers de Rubiplas (in Spanish)
References
- ↑ Strangely, while Brawn also features an orange-ish yellow torso, he uses a dedicated tone instead of that seen in Bumblebee and others - thus suggesting that Rubiplas also had access to plastic with this more accurate shade of yellow, but just didn't use it on other figures for... Reasons.
