The Energon Pub

So you know, I am talking G1 here

Take Shockwave, Omega Supreme, and Jetfire. From what I know, these toy designs were licensed from other companies. So why did Hasbro and Takara use designs such as these characters...weren't they competition for Takara?

mosh wrote:So you know, I am talking G1 here

Take Shockwave, Omega Supreme, and Jetfire. From what I know, these toy designs were licensed from other companies. So why did Hasbro and Takara use designs such as these characters...weren't they competition for Takara?

The Jetfire mold at that time was not too popular, so Takara managed to get the license. However, the toy company which originally owned the mold got purchased by Bandai, one of Takara'a rivals. Bandai rebranded it into Macross/Robotech. Hence, Jetfire could only be sold in everywhere except Japan.

mosh wrote:So you know, I am talking G1 here

Take Shockwave, Omega Supreme, and Jetfire. From what I know, these toy designs were licensed from other companies. So why did Hasbro and Takara use designs such as these characters...weren't they competition for Takara?

The only "foreign" mold Takara used was Shockwave, only Hasbro used them all, since they never saw a US release.

JelZe GoldRabbit wrote:

mosh wrote:So you know, I am talking G1 here

Take Shockwave, Omega Supreme, and Jetfire. From what I know, these toy designs were licensed from other companies. So why did Hasbro and Takara use designs such as these characters...weren't they competition for Takara?

The only "foreign" mold Takara used was Shockwave, only Hasbro used them all, since they never saw a US release.

He's right.All the TF's that were from other companies were secured by Hasbro and not Takara.G1 Omega,Jetfire,Skylinx,the Delux Insecticons,Roadbuster and Whirl were never released by Takara as part of their Transformers toyline....only Shockwave got a Japanese Takara release.

The upcoming Skylinx reissue will be the first time that Takara releses that mold for the Japanese market.

To answer the OP's other question....Hasbro aquired the rights to use those figures because Transformers became such a hit that they wanted to increse the amount of toys on shelfs and as well ask get in figures that werent just a repaint of exsisting figures.

I also believe that they wanted Takara to work out a better deal for the original molds to the diaclone toy line.The original toy molds were part of a few different Diaclone toylines and if Hasbro wanted to use the molds they had to pay a good amount of cash to do it.So I think that Hasbro went to the other companies and bought a few molds in an atempt to get takara to work out a better deal for their molds.
But thats just a theroy not a fact.But it is the only one fits some of the facts.