Quote Originally Posted by Jellico View Post
I knew a guy at school who said he had one when he was in the States.

My understanding was Predaking's selling point was size. Biggest and baddest etc.
Sure, but the greatest inhibitor was price - especially considering that almost all TF collectors in 1986 were kids (like us!) without disposable income. Boxed Transformers were always trickier to collect because we often didn't have the pocket money for them or it was harder to convince mum and dad to splash out and buy them for us. Boxed TFs for most kids were typically gifts for occasions like birthdays, Christmases etc., or if we were especially good or someone was feeling especially generous. But most of the time smaller and cheaper carded toys were easier to collect than boxed figures.

This is what made Devastator and Monstructor so ridiculously easy to collect. Teams comprised entirely of cheap carded toys that you could buy with your pocket money or convince mum/dad to buy them. The Scramble gestalts were trickier - while the limbs were easy enough to collect, the bodies were harder. And as a result, we often mixed and matched teams when we didn't yet have the body robot. You've all seen that photo of me taken in 1988 holding "Defensutron" -- I didn't have Scattershot at that time so I mixed some of my Technobots with my Protectobots.

The problem with Predaking was that every member was an expensive boxed toy. The individual toys were brilliant, and Predaking was awesome to behold. As a kid I knew kids who owned individual Predacons, but I didn't know anyone who owned all of them. We would get together to form Predaking, but when we all had to go home then Predaking would was disassembled. The set was only ever collectively owned but never individually owned.

And of course, Transformers in the USA are roughly half the price that they are here, so they would be cheaper for Americans to collect.