Rated X wrote:Once upon a time somebody created this wonderful drink called orange juice. Maybe only Tropicana should make it and all other companies that duplicate the recipe should be indicted. If you buy Minute Maid you are buying from a thief, right ?
Wow, even if I wasn't anti-bootleg... you'd have lost me there. Really? Even putting aside the grey area that is Maketoys having a right to a design of six toy construction vehicles that happen to have large similarities to the Constructicons... Comparing different companies making orange juice directly to intelectual property theft? That's... well, that's apples and orange juice, my friend.
But to go back to another thing in your post... As long as Maketoys doesn't slap Decepticon logos on their toys, actually call them Constructicons or any other associated names, or use toy designs
identical to or slightly modified from Hasbro molds, then I don't consider Maketoys a bootleg product. Rather, they'd be like Wal*Mart with their Equate brand to Hasbro's name brand. They're the generic equivelent of the Constructicons, but also an original product by Maketoys. (It isn't a perfect analogy, since in the drug world a generic is supposed to be a fairly close copy where as with Transformers, third party products should be original designs... But go with it!)
On a slightly different topic... some in this thread have been debating the quality of CHMS items... Well, I will admit I did go to the dark side once, and bought some of the
KO Seekers... They feel cheep, have sloppy paint, and I've had two of them break on me, one a pretty bad break. If I were to compare them with the Hasbro seekers I have, they are rather crap. The one Maketoys product I currently have (Battle Tanker) is a solidly built toy. (As is, I fear I have heard, it's knock off... so I would guess it wasn't by the CHMS people.) I would not want a third party producer who made toys I was interested in using the same lack of quality control I saw on those Seekers. They're good for looking pretty on a shelf if you don't touch them, but not much else.