Harmony Gold vs. Hasbro

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Harmony Gold vs. Hasbro

Postby Rylen » Wed Jul 24, '13, 9:05 pm

tformers.com/transformers-and-gi-joe-sd ... /news.html

It was bound to happen sooner or later. Hasbro decided to release a non transforming figure as a homage to Jetfire (also called Skyfire) which was based on Macross's main jet fighter. Early Gen 1 figures were pretty much a combing of several toy lines across several companies.

Honestly I'm surprised Harmony Gold is still around.
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Re: Harmony Gold vs. Hasbro

Postby Tweeg » Thu Jul 25, '13, 3:34 am

Correct! The "G1" TransFormer toy JetFire was actually a repackaged Robotech/Macross Veritech Fighter and was manufactured by Bandai, not Hasbro. In fact, I got one for Christmas the year it was released, whenever that was, and it actually came with two different sticker decal sheets; one with Robotech decals and one with Autobot decals.

And as a kid I never understood why the toy was blatantly a Veritech Fighter when Jetfire looked nothing like that in the cartoon series. Quite shocked the comic artist made such a huge mistake when drawing that comic book, guessing whoever he was never watched the cartoons, and clearly was unaware of the huge copyright infringement battle that took place between Harmony Gold allied with the Japanese rights holder, FASA Corporation, and Hasbro a good twenty years ago over this exact same robot! Well, in FASA's case more than just this one.

Back in the 1980's FASA Corporation, which was an independant company then, completely ripped off nearly every mech unit that appeared in Robotech, and a few other cartoons of the time, and used them as "Battle Mechs" in their wildly popular BattleTech franchise, which consisted of a table top strategy game, an immense Role Playing game series, and computer RPG's. FASA Had clearly violated international copyright laws, but it took them loosing the lawsuit in court in the early 90's to make them cease utilizing those mech designs. Thus in the mid-90's they re-introduced the BattleTech universe with all new original mecha designs.

This has got to be a nightmare senario for Hasbro's legal department.
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