New Transformers by jizaitoys

[Saintly]

what Pulse said

[i_amtrunks]

I'm not 100% sure but I think they're classified as "Garage Kits" (being as their scratchbuilt - I think? )

I think they're out of Hasbro's jurisdiction but TakaraTomy are aware of them & have actually given Jizaitoys the ok to produce & sell extremely limited numbers of them at the Winter Wonderfest in Japan

And ONLY at the Winter Wonderfest. Apparently, there was a problem with the weather that delayed Jizaitoys arrival to this years fest, thus they couldnt sell anything.

[Saintly]

icy train tracks prevented the trains from getting to the fest

[GoktimusPrime]

I don't think TakaraTOMY actually gives fans permission to produce/sell garage kits - I think it falls under Doujinshi (fan made comics, magazines etc) which are like fan sites - technically illegal but usually tolerated. But there are occasions where companies do decide to take legal action... remember the BotCon Japan 2000/Ichikawa controversy? (or ever wondered why BotCon Japan doesn't exist anymore) :/

[sifun]

what happened?

[GoktimusPrime]

Okay, as with typical TF conventions and other such events in Japan, we had lots of people selling garage kits, doujinshi etc. - a lot of convention exclusive manga etc are doujinshi. So anyway, people sell these things to obviously make back money spent on producing them. When it comes to garage kits and doujinshi based on copyrighted property, there's an unspoken agreement in terms of making it non-profit. Kinda like fan-sites, they're supposed to be non-profit too. As soon as you start profiteering from a fan-site then companies get narky (because then you are actually making money from their property).

So anyway, Japanese fans understand this and they pretty much stick by this "rule." The same thing happened in BotCon Japan 2000. A high profile Japanese Transfan named Ichikawa Hirofumi produced this exclusive doujinshi comic called The Cybertron Chronicles (which is where the G1 toy-accurate images of Ironhide in my signature come from ) and he was intending on selling them to attendees for a small price - again, just to cover printing costs. Everyone knew that he wasn't aiming to make a profit. In spite of this, Takara got narky and ordered Ichikawa to give away the comics for free, meaning that he would've lost out on a lot of money from printing them! (o_O)

Attendees accepted the free comic, but they knew that a fellow Transfan was financially hurting big time because of it. As a result there was a massive backlash from Japanese Transfans against Takara and BotCon Japan was shut down forever (we've never had a BotCon in Japan ever since).

Several other decisions made by Takara in 2001 further worsened their relationship with Transfans, and having just saved themselves from near bankruptcy, Takara realised that they needed to mend their relationship with the fandom. So by 2002 they'd actually enlisted Ichikawa Hirofumi into assisting them with several official projects, such as exclusives for e-Hobby, Micron Legend etc. All of the e-Hobby exclusive characters such as Sunstorm, Road Hauler etc. where written by Ichikawa. Ichikawa also wrote the entire Story of Binaltech. Ichikawa was also involved with some toy designs in Super Link and Galaxy Force. So although Takara has since repaired their relationship with Transfandom, the trouble all started over them cracking down over one Transfan selling a fan-made TF product.

And don't think that a fan backlash would necessarily stop HasTak from doing it again. Remember Tengu's (mundanely known as Rob Gerbracht) tfmultiverse.com? Or when Wonko the Sane's (aka Apelinq, mundanely known as Ben Yee) bwtf.com used to be beastwars.net? Or when Hasbro took legal action over a Transfan who had registered the name "Dinobot" as his online alias? It happens.

This is why our next Australian convention is going to be called something generic like "Transforming Robot Toy Convention" or something like that. We're intentionally avoiding using the word "Transformer" and any of their images etc.

Transformers is the legal property of HasTak. They can take legal action against people who infringe their property, and there are numerous cases of them having done so.

市川裕文 (Ichikawa Hirofumi)

[Zippo]

Cheers for that story Gok!

The jizatoys items look good, however too costly and basically they need to be status. Though I assume that our collections are anyway ..