Every successful toy line begins somewhere and either evolves with new ideas or dies out. Transformers is one of those toy lines that has weathered the test of time. It is rapidly approaching it’s 40th birthday! For those of us who are not familiar with, “More Than Meets the Eye,” or “Robots in Disguise” here is a great Transformers article.
Tranformer Toys – G1:
Early on in the 80s, kids were still mainly playing with toys that had been around for a long time. Granted, some of these toys were newer like the re-invented G.I. Joes, Cabbage Patch Kids, and He-Man. However, the children of this generation were moving away from a lower tech toy, to a toy that required a little more ingenuity and imagination. Enter the world of, “The Transformers!” This is the classic struggle between good and bad, light and dark, the peace loving Autobots and the evil Decepticons!
The original toy line was offered by Hasbro and Takara that blended the Diaclone and Micro Change toy lines under the same name. The original toys started with 18 Autobots lead by Optimus Prime, while the Decepticons are lead by the maniacal Megatron.
Tranformer Toys – G1 Optimus Prime:
Even though these toys were state-of-the-art at the time, now-a-days they are often referred to the, “brick” Transformers due to their lack of articulation and posibility. Let us take a quick look at one of the most popular charaters. The first Optimus Prime transformed from truck to robot and back.
The toy started out looking like this:
Fast forward to the 21st century era when he received the masterpiece treatment and much more accurate to the cartoon:
Tranformer Toys – G1 Megatron:
Sometimes the Transformer toys looked nothing like their cartoon counterparts. This was the case of Megatron. In the cartoon, he looked like this:
But the toy, um looked like this:?
SMH, I think that this was one of the worst early transformer toys, until Megatron got his own masterpiece treatment:
Tranformer Toys – G1 Jetfire/Skyfire:
Other times, the G1 Transformers was used from other toy lines. Case-in-point is the G1 Skyfire or Jetfire. I am not going to discuss the cloud around this figure right now, but here is what the G1 character Skyfire looked like:
And the version of Skyfire/Jetfire that we received in 1985, a re-colored Bandai Super Valkyrie from Macross:
Fans of this toy would wait almost 40 years to have a proper Skyfire toy that paid hommage to the original G1 version:
Conclusion:
Here are three examples of how this toy line has evolved over the years. Let me know in the comments what is your favorite Transformer and how he/she has evolved.