During the Eighties, the Transformers toy line had already invaded the US toy market. Yet after several years, they gradually died out and nowhere to be found during the early Nineteen Nineties. But in recent times, this popular toy line from Hasbro is now back to prominence due to the nonstop media attention from the recent Transformers’ film series.
The Transformers is a line of toys created by Hasbro, a US-based, multinational toy and board game company. Actually, these action figure toys are 3-D, plastic objects with moving parts that is designed to transform the shape of the toy. Most Transformer toys transform from a robot into at least one other object like a vehicle, animal, tool or weapon.
At present, there are already a lot of Transformer toys that are available on the market and each of them can be divided into different eras of toy releases. And these eras include Generation One, Generation Two, Beast Wars (Beasties) and Beast Machines, Robots in Disguise, Armada, Universe, Energon, Cybertron, Kiss Players, Classics, and most recently, the Transformers movie toys that were released along with the 2007 Transformers film.
On the other the hand, Transformer toys differ greatly in price. Most of the time, it depends not only on the size of the toy, but also on the age. Older lines of Transformers are part of the collectibles toy market, and they range in price based on packaging conditions; the more complete the packaging, the bigger the price.
At the end of the day, no matter how many actions figures that will come out on the market in the future, one thing is for sure, that Transformers toys will forever be a legendary toy line in the history of toys as well as in motion pictures.
Transformers are classified into different types but the original ones created and manufactured by its original Japanese creators, Takara Tomy, were called Diaclone and Microman. When American company Hasbro bought the exclusive rights to distribute Transformer in the USA, the so called Generation 1 Transformers were born in 1994 which became the source of several off-spins of these sensational robotic toys. From the heroin Autobots, its leader became known as Optimus Prime while the Decepticon leader became known as Megatron. Much of the designs’ resemblance were still part of the original Diaclone and Microman mold designs with some robots still having the die-cast metal parts which were later abandoned for more friendly parts. Megatron could be changed into a realistic Walther P-38 pistol with stocks and barrel extensions and scope. The Constructicons were said to be the first gestalt team but consisted of six members instead of 5. The Autobot Jetfire was patterned after the Macross toy specifically the VF-1 Valkyrie which was later renamed as Skyfire due to some copyright technicalities. In 1996, the Transformer toys went through radical changes as they no longer resemble common transportation but rather futuristic vehicles due to the large scale availability of futuristic movies and themes. New sub-groups were also introduced in 1988 such as the Headmasters and Targetmasters which came with partners that could change into figure heads and weapons. The Powermasters where Omnibus Prime belong came with partners that could change into engines. One of the most debatable line that was part of Generation 1 Transformers were the Pretenders – these are a group of robotics that could pretend to be human or monster which included the series Beast Pretenders, Monster Pretenders, Classic Pretenders, Mega Pretenders and Ultra Pretenders.
