Yonezawa Toys
Yonezawa Toys (米澤玩具) was formerly one of the largest toy companies in Japan, before being purchased by Sega in 1991 to merge into Sega-Yonezawa and finally rebranding into the still-active Sega Fave Corporation.
Their interaction with the Transformers franchise is relatively brief, producing three pre-Transformers toys that were only released once under the Transformers brand in Brazil - however; when it comes to the broader history of transforming robots as a toy genre, there's more to them than meets the eye.
Overview
Yonezawa was founded in the 1950s, arising out of the ashes of a Japanese economy devastated by the Second World War. They quickly established themselves with a major presence in the then-emerging Japanese toy market, being one of the first manufacturers to pioneer electronic and radio-controlled toys. Eventually, a lot of their products would get exported globally, both through other distributors and their own international Yonezawa Corporation brand.
One specific genre of toy that Yonezawa was famous for were their battery-operated tin robots, featuring all sorts of functions like walking or hip rotations. Among these was a robot called "Space Explorer", released in red and black decos, which had as its main gimmick the ability to automatically 'fold' from a robot into a box roughly approximating the apperance of a TV set... And was likely first released in 1959 [1], before any other toy robot with a similar functionality is known to exist. This means that yes, it is generally agreed that Yonezawa pretty much invented the very first transforming robot toy!
Sometime during the early 80s, parallel to the then-emerging Japanese trend of robots that transform into realistic vehicles with Takatoku's Macross and Takara's Diaclone Car Robot and Micro Change toys, Yonezawa released their remote-controlled, battery-operated series of transforming toy cars with the Remote Change Robo Series (リモートチェンジ ロボシリーズ). These featured super-deformed versions of a Nissan Fairlady Z, Toyota Land Cruiser, and Porsche 911 - respectively named into "Fairlady & Robo", "Lancru & Robo", and "Porsche & Robo" - that'd transform from their alternate modes and back with the push of two buttons on a small controller that was attached to the toys with a cord. They were re-released in multiple countries across the world, including in the U.S. by Village Toys as the Convert-A-Bots "Pow-R-Bots" (a toyline that, interestingly, would also feature a licensed pre-Transformers version of Shockwave), and eventually; arrived to Brazil through Estrela as the 1985 Eletrix figures in their regional version of The Transformers.
Yonezawa moulds released as Transformers
Remote Change Robo Series
- Esporte - "Fairlady & Robo", identical besides minor sticker changes
- Jipe - "Lancru & Robo", identical besides minor sticker changes
- Porsche - "Porsche & Robo", identical besides minor sticker changes
Notes
- Beyond the Remote Change Robo Series, Yonezawa manufactured a handful of other transforming 'bots during this time which have a slight bit of interaction with other pre-Transformers toys. These included "Jet & Robo", a battery-operated robot that auto-transforms into a jet (which has a pretty similar head to Omega Supreme, leading to the yet unsolved question of who exactly plagiarized who!); "Daijim", a manually-transforming toy with a walking motion that converts into an offroad truck, and "Safari Robo", a manually-transforming toy that surprisingly lacks any battery-operated functions and also transforms into an offroad truck. All of these would be featured in the British pre-Transformers Grandstand Convertors toyline - releasing alongside an early Omega Supreme and multiple Diaclone figures - with Jet & Robo earning the name of "Deltatron" and, keeping in line with the Greek alphabet motif, Daijim and Safari Robo earning the names of... "Betatron" and "Sigmatron". No, this is not a joke [2], and no, no one will get why it's funny in any decade past the 2020s, so cherish this moment.
See also
- Asahi Corporation, another Japanese company whose toys were adopted by Estrela as part of the Brazilian Transformers toyline
References
- ↑ There are multiple conflicting presumed dates for the release of Yonezawa's Space Explorer, ranging from 1956 to somewhere in the late 1960s - nonetheless; 1959 seems to be the most commonly-cited date on auction and antique websites. Notably, his "first-transforming-toy-robot" status would still remain even if the later dates are correct, as the next second-oldest known instance of a transforming robot toy is Popy's Raideen all the way in 1975 - so, Yonezawa was very early to the genre!
- ↑ Grandstand Convertors catalogue at Retromash.com
