by Editor » Tue Nov 09, 2010 9:07 pm
- Motto: ""I'm not even supposed to be here today!""
- Weapon: Shotgun
Sabrblade,
Yhea you have the basics the only bit you are missing/ not quite correct with is the pre-80s.
As I touched on before, and as most of us know, GIJoe goes back a long ways. All the way back to 1964 when it started as a 12" line of action figures. This line was additionally licensed out and made available in England as Action Man, and Japan as Combat Joe.
In 1972, Takara spun out a new line based on Combat Joe called Henshin Cyborg, and starting in '74 that line was relaunched in a much smaller scale called..... Microman.
That series of Microman would run until 1984/85, and would be important in North America for A) becoming the Micronauts toys released by Mego, B)a subline called New Microman which developed into Microchange, C) another sub-line called Inch-man which developed into Diaclone.
It is from the Microchange line (toys which are beings from another dimension, the scale of the toys is their actual height) that we got the toys that would become Megatron, Soundwave, Perceptor, Blaster, the cassetticons, and the original 6 (7 if you count Bumper) Autobot minicars.
From Diaclone we received all the piloted transforming mecha, which would become the bulk of the original Autobots, the Dinobots, Insecticons (the aforementioned Waruder units) and Seeker jets. The end of the line as Diaclone would see the creation of the Constructions (Devestator) and Trainbots (Raiden). In '85 the Diaclone line ended and the Microman line was placed on hold while they relaunched the same toys under the Transformer brand name.
GRL8806,
Yes Transformers is quite popular in Japan, in fact for a number of years it was much more popular there than it was in America. Do they see it as their own? Hard to say, that is rather subjective, but there are many aspects of the transformer mythos that Japan is responsible for, and they have published more shows than America has, so they can take credit for many aspects that could be debated, and a few that no one would. (Kissplayers)
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