Simba Dickie Group
From Transformers Wiki
The Simba Dickie Group is a German toy manufacturer. Originally born as the product of a merger between Simba Toys and Dickie Toys (two relatively small companies which primarily released budget toys), they have since become a major international conglomerate, acquiring many other famous toy companies in the European market like French die-cast model manufacturer Majorette in 2010, German railway model manufacturer Märklin in 2013, and eventually expanding abroad with the acquisition of American model car manufacturer Jada Toys in 2019.
Simba Dickie has released various merchandise for the Transformers brand through its Dickie Toys subsidiary, starting with tie-ins to 2015's Robots in Disguise and continuing up to The Last Knight and Bumblebee. Although Dickie no longer produces Transformers merchandise, Jada Toys began making die-cast vehicles for the franchise in 2017 and have continued doing so since Simba Dickie acquired them in 2019, thus; the group remains affiliated with Hasbro and the Transformers brand.
They also released a staggering amount of Transformers knockoffs before starting their collaboration with Hasbro, so oops.
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Overview
One of Simba's longest-spanning toylines is Planet Fighter, a series of cheap rebranded toys developed by other manufacturers (mostly of the Chinese variety) with an overarching sci-fi theme. These included laser blasters, "laser swords", a multitude of toy robots and inevitably, by extension, a lot of transforming toy robots. You could find amongst the latter an oversized version of Armada Megatron (also released in the United States by Happy Well), oversized versions of the Energon Saber Mini-Cons, a handful of dinosaur-based Transformers toys which share their engineering with Beast Wars Dinobot (the same toys that would also be later released by Estrela in Brazil), and many, many, many variants of the Jumpstarter molds [1], plus possibly countless others whose records have simply been lost to time.
You might have expected Simba to try and sweep this under the rug as they entered the 2010s and gained more legitimate partners in the toy industry like Hasbro, but surprisingly, they've kept the Planet Fighter series of toys going throughout the following decades, and although it has been mostly stripped of bootleg figures, they are still to this day manufacturing copies of their Jumpstarter clones (seemingly having been heavily retooled in-house over the years) and selling them on their own website [2] - the same website where you can also buy legitimate Transformers-branded Jada Toys products from!
Merchandise
Dickie Toys
Robots in Disguise
Dickie Toys released a large volume of Robots in Disguise merchandise, a lot of which infamously shelfwarmed European stores for years to come. These toys were primarily centered around the vehicle modes of the shows' characters, with the the Robot Warrior figures (or Robot Fighter in Sideswipe's box, or, simply, Warrior in Grimlock's - they really weren't very consistent with naming) also having the ability to transform into very rough robot modes. Some of the die-cast vehicles were also packed with die-cast figurines of the characters' robot modes. A notable quirk is that all of these toys had their faction insignia molded into their hubcaps.
Die-Cast
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RC Turbo Racer
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Robot Warrior / Robot Fighter / Warrior
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Playsets
(with Sideswipe) (with Steeljaw) |
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The Last Knight
As with Robots in Disguise, Dickie's offering for Transformers: The Last Knight was primarily centered around vehicle modes. Yet again, all the die-cast vehicles have their faction insignia molded into the hubcaps. A large remote-controlled and auto-transforming Bumblebee toy was planned and priced at a hefty 155€, but it appears to have never been released. [3]
Die-Cast
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Robot Fighter
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Bumblebee
With Bumblebee having a significantly smaller roster of main characters compared to other Transformers movies, Dickie also had far less to offer this year, with the only few toys they released being centered around the titular character. For whatever reason, they also stopped doing molded insignia hubcaps.
Die-Cast
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RC Bumblebee
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Jada Toys
Notes
- Even before their bootleg streak, Simba had already tried to capitalize on the success of the Transformers franchise multiple times, often to legally questionable extents:
- For instance, at some point in the early 90s, they released their localization of the MC Toy Motorized Robot line of small transforming robot toys - also sometimes known as the Moto-Bots, or the DynaBots, or the Playbots, or by any other number of names (they were redistributed by a lot of different companies during this time) - and, rather than making up some other title for the toyline in the same vein, Simba simply called them "TRANSFORMER" toys in large green lettering on their blister cards. Keep in mind that this was before the internet era, thus; it is very likely that more than a handful of European kids in the nineties were fooled into thinking these were genuine Transformers toys.
- These were supplemented by a wave of smaller Micro Machines-sized figures also bearing the same title, each releasing in packs of four with the added subtitle of "Micro-Robots", pretty obviously in an attempt to compete with the Micromasters. Again, the fact that these were labelled as "TRANSFORMER" toys and featured very similar designs to the concurrently available Hasbro figures to boot made them easy pickings for clueless kids and parents alike, so much so that, even decades later, it's not uncommon to find a Simba Micro-Robot or two shuffled in amongst bulk lots of original Micromaster figures in the European secondary market.
- About a decade later in the early 2000s, Simba also released a few transforming robot toys under the Space Transformer name, amongst them being a blatant knockoff of the Brave Great Fighbird.
- For instance, at some point in the early 90s, they released their localization of the MC Toy Motorized Robot line of small transforming robot toys - also sometimes known as the Moto-Bots, or the DynaBots, or the Playbots, or by any other number of names (they were redistributed by a lot of different companies during this time) - and, rather than making up some other title for the toyline in the same vein, Simba simply called them "TRANSFORMER" toys in large green lettering on their blister cards. Keep in mind that this was before the internet era, thus; it is very likely that more than a handful of European kids in the nineties were fooled into thinking these were genuine Transformers toys.
