User:Carry-All/Sandbox/4

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Hasbro are an American toy company, founded in 1923 in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Among the many toys and games they have made are Chasin' Cheeky, Funny Mooners, James Bond Jr, Princess Gwenevere and the Jewel Riders and Thor: The Dark World. Oh, and some tat about robots that turn into things which was out about the same time time as GoBots.

What Hasbro lacked in being able to make jets in sensible colours they make up for in financial muscle and lawyers. When the 1980s toy market began to contract they took over numerous competitors, including Tonka (and Galoob). As a result they own much of the trademarks and other apocrypha of the GoBots and Rock Lords franchise but confusingly little else.

Hasbro's GoBots[edit | edit source]

As far as can be ascertained Hasbro own everything Tonka devised for GoBots. So roughly that would include: -

  • The trademarks, i. e. the ability to use the line name and so forth. Character names are muddier as most GoBots names would be too generic to trademark, just as numerous vintage Transformers names that are just normal everyday words. However, Hasbro have definitely trademarked Leader-1.
  • Any toys created wholly by Tonka for the line - basically the Command Center and Thruster playsets, Zod, Scales and the Wendy's figures, plus presumably the cancelled playsets such as the GoBotron Fortress. In theory this means Hasbro could reissue these, but even if there was demand for them the company's record with vintage toy moulds is not great.
  • Perhaps some stake in the Rock Lords toys, which were apparently co-developed by Tonka with Bandai and thus may have had different rights to those created by Bandai alone. Though whatever stake Bandai have would mean the companies would have to cooperate for reissues, and them being massive worldwide rivals is just one of the many stumbling blocks a theoretical Rock Lords reissue would face.

Not Hasbro's GoBots[edit | edit source]

What Hasbro doesn't own, again as far as can be ascertained is:

  • Basically every other toy in the line. Bandai merely leased the licence to release Machine Robo, Winch Robo and Walking Robo to Tonka, and it is likely this licence wasn't renewed in 1987 when GoBots was cancelled. Bandai can therefore reissue Machine Robo toys if they so desire, but as yet have shown no interest in doing so. It is almost certain that they also retain partial or more likely full ownership of even the figures designed exclusively for the Western market.
  • The cartoon, which was made by Hanna-Barbera, now part of Warner Brothers. However due to it having a Hasbro trademark in the title both companies need to (and have) cooperate for home video or streaming releases of the show.
  • The likenesses of the characters. Machine Robo Rescue features a character closely modelled on his 1980s counterpart, Action Toys have made what can be seen as ersatz GoBots updates and Revenge of Cronos has been licenced twice in North America without the suits being involved.

Hasbro use of GoBots[edit | edit source]

If there's one thing Hasbro thinks highly of it's the children. The ones working in their factories. But seriously, it's trademarks. And who can blame them? No-one wants to go through the sort of gruelling brainstorming required to think of a name like Hot Shot because you didn't think you'd ever need Bumblebee again.

As such Hasbro have used the GoBots name just often enough to stop it lapsing.

It is not entirely clear if Mattel lawyers are hovering around in trenchcoats and shades waiting to resurrect GoBots the second Hasbro lets it lapse.

Fun Publications[edit | edit source]

Fun Publications were devised to get money out of Transformers fans, with various wheezes including recoloured toys that were swiftly made undesirable by better mass retail versions, print material and a web presence that was created by Wiki editors for Wiki editors.

This included the Ask Vector Prime column, which gave a chance to turn fanon into canon. It was all very meta and injokey, which of course led to Renegade Rhetoric. The conceit of Renegade Rhetoric was that Cy-Kill hijacked Ask Vector Prime and gave summaries of what purported to be a second season of Challenge of the GoBots. Technically this was approved by Hasbro but - as the columns used of a still from Challenge of the GoBots for a while before anyone realised this was a copyright problem - it's fair to imagine that this process extended to an intern scan-reading it for obscenity and hitting the "Whatever" button.

IDW's Go-Bots[edit | edit source]

IDW were started as an ambitious independent comic company in 1999 but somewhere around the early 21st century they became Hasbro's publishing arm. This also meant the company had enough rights to put out a GoBots comic, using the classic names and toy designs - the use of the latter being less legally fraught than producing toys. Tom Scioli was given the resulting 5-issue mini-series as a sandbox.

GoBots references in Transformers toys[edit | edit source]

While the Mini-Con Leader-1 remains the only Transformers named after a GoBot (unless you count Blaster) the Mini-Con for the Armada Unicron, which turned into a small planetoid, was going to be called Gobotron. However Hasbro realised the character needed to be named more fittingly after a Stunticon. More recently Hasbro looked to the eHobby G1 GoBots

Boulder

Instead GoBots characters have been homaged visually. These have been limited to peripheral recolours of extant toys, but as Hasbro love peripheral recolours of extant toys there have been several. Fracture, a figure intended for Classics but switched over to the Movie line due to the franchise becoming a major cash cow again.