Speculation: Hasbro Looking to Acquire Takara Tomy

If it happened, that would be the end of the Masterpiece line.

So to all the lugnuts complaining of skyrocketing prices.........Takara is still hurting and bad!Buy at retail or they die.

If Hb does a friendly take over, well who knows what happens next? They are friends I hope.

At least this gives the uninformed some idea on why or how the prices are at times waaaaaaaaay out there or why the plastics are hollow, molds reused etc etc.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand the Japanese aren't making anymore babies , well, not enough to be the future targets for Takara's products. It's probably US adults who are the main consumer base (the Japanese adults especially) and some in the international community now who are giving Takara ACLS.

fenrir72 wrote:If Hb does a friendly take over, well who knows what happens next? They are friends I hope.

I would imagine two possibilities, one being that TT essentially ceases to exist with Hasbro making any determination on what happens to the personnel and capital resources. The other would be something like what happened with Kenner, where the branding might get used on selected items (hi there, Movie Masterpiece!)

One thing for certain is that if anything happens, it'll be complicated. Mergers and acquisitions are often the most complex corporate reorganization events, and just the legal process to determine what happens with the underlying securities comprising companies can take months. As this is two companies on different sides of the globe, it gets even trickier!

I love all this ridiculousness. End of masterpiece, end of retools in Legends etc. it reminds me of when Disney acquired Marvel and when Disney acquired Lucasfilm and people freaking out thinking things were just gonna get worse and it didn’t.

If Hasbro acquired Takara tajara woudlnt disappear or lose stuff. They would just be able to have Hasbro’s backing and funding on stuff to sell their stuff. That’s what happens with a lot of these things.

I love it when people say Hasbro doesn’t care about fans while 95% of 84-87 has been remade with modern day engineering and 3 two foot tall city bots that have been made. It’s just sad and embarrassing

Im down with a one size fits all worldwide deco if it means "platinum" style figures for everyone and the death of the el cheapo Has-deco. No more off white and grey plastic and non painted hubcaps are a good thing. No more ridiculous prices for 50 cents worth of extra paint is also a good thing. As the Franchise ages and starts to gear more towards lifelong adult fans rather than kids, Hasbro might be influenced by the Japanese to make stuff more collector oriented and gimmick free. The transformers franchise needs more Japanese influence and less influence from corporate middle America.

Rated X wrote:Im down with a one size fits all worldwide deco if it means "platinum" style figures for everyone and the death of the el cheapo Has-deco. No more off white and grey plastic and non painted hubcaps are a good thing. No more ridiculous prices for 50 cents worth of extra paint is also a good thing. As the Franchise ages and starts to gear more towards lifelong adult fans rather than kids, Hasbro might be influenced by the Japanese to make stuff more collector oriented and gimmick free. The transformers franchise needs more Japanese influence and less influence from corporate middle America.

If takara profits are down like it’s said why the Hell would Hasbro acquire them and say “hey let’s do what they’re doing and focus on grown men who don’t grow up instead of focusing on the broadest audience which kids.” There’s a reason there’s posts every year that shows Hasbro increases every year it ain’t the 20-40 fans that buy toys.

Does nobody here have kids or shop in public? Doe everyone here just click a mouse and have their stuff delivered becuase they’re too sheltered in their home and embarrassed to buy toys in public. Sorry but my best friend is 31 and only shops online becuase he doesn’t like complete strangers seeing him buy toys. I know that’s a thing.

We are not the majority. I’m sorry if you can’t comprehend that but takara focusing on collectors is probably where they got to where they are with this. Doing insanely overpriced takara Mall exclusives, only putting out 20-30 figures a year with transformers and purposely ignoring certain molds becuase they don’t have a backstory from 30 years ago -cough took 2 years to release generations skids cough-

Hasbro’s primary focus is kids. We are the bonus.

Let's seriously hope this isn't happening. If it went ahead we'd have no "not completely crap but a bit more expensive" choice- it'd be Hasbro's underpainted figures with poorly applied stickers and no elbows or nothing. The MP line would either disappear completely or go to sh!t. And if this DID happen then Transformers as a brand would probably go under fairly quickly (contrary to popular belief, the collector market is bigger than most realize; 20% of Hasbro's TF profits are from collectors, and whilst that doesn't sound like much, it is a LOT of money from a company's perspective. Collectors abandoning the line would probably destroy Transformers completely, as the sharp fall in profits would cause the imbeciles in charge at Hasbro to cut back on the kid-oriented stuff, to the point quality would fall so low that even kids would begin to get sick of it.

Fiction would probably suffer too. With the brand entirely owned by an American company we'd most likely lose out on all Japanese influence on the fiction (no chance of that Trigger-produced anime I dream of) and the fiction would probably fall in line with the likes of modern Marvel; that is, pandering to people who don't even buy the things they want to change, and excluding the existing fanbase.

On the plus side, if this did happen, Hasbro might sell the brand to someone else with an actual idea of what they're doing. And who knows, the death of collector-oriented mainline toys might mean we see a return of CHUG scaled stuff in the 3P realm again.

I mean, I highly doubt this will happen, as this is an article from July and nothing has happened since then, but if it does, the Transformers might finally shed itself of the ball and chain that is Hasbro and their incompetence.

Black Hat wrote:Let's seriously hope this isn't happening. If it went ahead we'd have no "not completely crap but a bit more expensive" choice- it'd be Hasbro's underpainted figures with poorly applied stickers and no elbows or nothing. The MP line would either disappear completely or go to sh!t. And if this DID happen then Transformers as a brand would probably go under fairly quickly (contrary to popular belief, the collector market is bigger than most realize; 20% of Hasbro's TF profits are from collectors, and whilst that doesn't sound like much, it is a LOT of money from a company's perspective. Collectors abandoning the line would probably destroy Transformers completely, as the sharp fall in profits would cause the imbeciles in charge at Hasbro to cut back on the kid-oriented stuff, to the point quality would fall so low that even kids would begin to get sick of it.

Fiction would probably suffer too. With the brand entirely owned by an American company we'd most likely lose out on all Japanese influence on the fiction (no chance of that Trigger-produced anime I dream of) and the fiction would probably fall in line with the likes of modern Marvel; that is, pandering to people who don't even buy the things they want to change, and excluding the existing fanbase.

On the plus side, if this did happen, Hasbro might sell the brand to someone else with an actual idea of what they're doing. And who knows, the death of collector-oriented mainline toys might mean we see a return of CHUG scaled stuff in the 3P realm again.

I mean, I highly doubt this will happen, as this is an article from July and nothing has happened since then, but if it does, the Transformers might finally shed itself of the ball and chain that is Hasbro and their incompetence.

Let’s travel back to 2001 when takara was primarily in control the brand. We got the Unicron trilogy. We got toys that purposely pulled back on articulation like knees and elbows and such with Hasbro asking for certain things included and ignored by takara. Hasbro had to tell takara they wanted Unicron included and takara refused until they final gave in. That was a Hasbro thing. Hasbro is the reason we got that ginormous Unicron that turns into an actual planet and holds all the Minicons.

Let’s talk about animation. Again the Unicron trilogy. Takara was in control and wasn’t wanting to work with Hasbro. The animation was a huge step back and to boot was just sending them episodes without scripts. The American team had to figure out what the hell was going on half the time and rush to get them dubbed and put out. Same thing happened with Energon and is regarded as the worst cartoon ever made becuase of how awful it was done with bad animation and story telling. Again takara not communicating or even sending scripts. Get to cybertron and takara just full on ignored Hasbro and made the show a non continuation of Energon. They just made it a new show which forced Hasbro to add animation of Unicron debris throughout to make it a trilogy and explained stuff.


You really wanna say it’d get worse with Hasbro in control? After the Unicron trilogy we got animated and the aligned universe. You know what takara did to those? They made animated a continuation of the live action movie and turned Bulkhead into Ironhide from the movies and omitted pivotal episodes out becuase japan doesn’t like western show lengths.

Same with prime. Takara just gave up in Prime. Season three and predacons rising was never released so the show in Japan legitimately ended with the autobot base being destroyed and Optimus looking like he died and the autobots lost.

Really wanna day things would be worse with Hasbro in control? Some of us went through takara leadinng the charge and it wasn’t a fun ride.

Black Hat wrote:Let's seriously hope this isn't happening. If it went ahead we'd have no "not completely crap but a bit more expensive" choice- it'd be Hasbro's underpainted figures with poorly applied stickers and no elbows or nothing. The MP line would either disappear completely or go to sh!t. And if this DID happen then Transformers as a brand would probably go under fairly quickly (contrary to popular belief, the collector market is bigger than most realize; 20% of Hasbro's TF profits are from collectors, and whilst that doesn't sound like much, it is a LOT of money from a company's perspective. Collectors abandoning the line would probably destroy Transformers completely, as the sharp fall in profits would cause the imbeciles in charge at Hasbro to cut back on the kid-oriented stuff, to the point quality would fall so low that even kids would begin to get sick of it.

Fiction would probably suffer too. With the brand entirely owned by an American company we'd most likely lose out on all Japanese influence on the fiction (no chance of that Trigger-produced anime I dream of) and the fiction would probably fall in line with the likes of modern Marvel; that is, pandering to people who don't even buy the things they want to change, and excluding the existing fanbase.

On the plus side, if this did happen, Hasbro might sell the brand to someone else with an actual idea of what they're doing. And who knows, the death of collector-oriented mainline toys might mean we see a return of CHUG scaled stuff in the 3P realm again.

I mean, I highly doubt this will happen, as this is an article from July and nothing has happened since then, but if it does, the Transformers might finally shed itself of the ball and chain that is Hasbro and their incompetence.

I really hope Takara picks a different course of action