Biography
TakaraTomy (Takara before the merger with Tomy) is a Japanese toy company. They are the producer of Transformers in Japan, and design much of the engineering for Transformers toys. Originally, Takara created the Diaclone and MicroChange toy lines, which were later imported to the US by Hasbro and turned into the Transformers. Since then, Hasbro and Takara have been business partners. They swim in your money every time a new franchise is made. Takara (タカラ) was originally founded by Yasuta Satō in 1955 as Sato Vinyl. One of their first successes was securing the license for releasing Mattel's Barbie series on the Japanese market. In 1960 they changed their name to Takara Vinyl. Their blackface Dakko-chan (ダッコちゃん) doll became wildly successful and was the company mascot until the late 1980s. Their name would be shortened to simply Takara in 1966. In 1970, Takara secured the license for releasing Hasbro's G.I. Joe line on the Japanese market. Dubbed Combat Joe, the line would soon get a spin-off named Henshin Cyborg (henshin being the Japanese word for "transform"), which in turn would later lead to the original Microman toyline which started in 1974. The Microman line was relaunched as New Microman in 1981 and would lead to spin-offs such as Diaclone and MicroChange. Hasbro would later acquire the license for releasing toys from both lines on the North American market. The result, dubbed Transformers by Hasbro, would turn out to be a huge success. After a first test release of the Hasbro toys to a small test market in Japan apparently turned out to be successful, Takara decided to cancel Microman and Diaclone and henceforth started to release Transformers in Japan as well.
This incredibly convoluted chain of licensing, evolving, and re-licensing toy franchises can be used to make the heads of evil robots explode. Nobuyuki Okude, one of the original Diaclone designers who oversaw the production of the modified toys for Hasbro's Transformers line, would later rise to become Takara's vice president and for a brief time even held the position of the company's president. Tomy (トミー) was founded by Eiichiro Tomiyama in 1924 as Tomiyama Toy Factory. In 1963 they changed their name to Tomy. Their American branch opened in 1973, with branches following in Canada in 1981 and the UK in 1982. Two pre-merger Transformers designed by Tomy were Omega Supreme and Sky Lynx, patterned after their Plarail and Zoids toylines, respectively, by designer Junichi Ishikawa (石川順一). After a series of commercial failures, May 2005 saw the public announcement that Takara would merge with rival toymaker Tomy. As of April 2006, both companies ceased to exist and made way for the new company, TakaraTomy. Fortunately, Tomy had established a healthy working relationship with Hasbro since 1999, long before their merger with Takara—which is why the merger didn't have any major effects on the established Hasbro/Takara cooperation (including the toy development process).
Oddly, "TakaraTomy" is only the merged company's official name in Japan. For the international, English-speaking world, the merged company is officially simply named "Tomy", for pragmatic reasons (as most of Takara's internationally renowned brands are distributed through other companies, such as Hasbro, outside Japan). Indeed, Tomy is mentioned as the licensor on all Transformers toy product released by Hasbro after the merger. Despite this, the packaging for Hasbro's Transformers toys released under the Generations banner following the "brand unification" introduced in 2018, which thus far includes the Studio Series and the War for Cybertron Trilogy including Siege, Earthrise and Kingdom, features a very prominent "TakaraTomy" logo on the front side of every packaging along with a "Hasbro" logo of equal size.
