![]() ![]() The toys arrived inside their styro foam, complete with sticker sheets, which were slightly adapted to include Joustra’s Diaclone logo. Schilling stated that Takara simply shipped these toys to Joustra. Schilling, in an interview by Sébastien Carletti, author of the “Nos Jouets 70-80” book. This has been confirmed by a former sales employee of Joustra, Mr. The packaging and comic books were designed and printed in France, but the actual toys came directly from Takara in Japan. Now, did Joustra manufacture these toys themselves? The answer is no. So stay tuned for a future update here with a Joustra Diaclone wave 2 overview! As I do not own any wave 2 Joustra Diaclones and because of the fact that they’re so frickin’ rare, obtaining material is tough, but I am awaiting clearance for the use of several photographs of wave 2 Diaclones from some collectors that I know. ![]() ![]() I’m hoping to present a similiar overview to the one above of the second wave in the near future. But only a part of those has ever surfaced in public complete with packaging. A fairly accurate estimate exists of which figures were at least planned for release for the second wave by looking at the 1985 Ceji Revell trade/dealer catalog. So what about the toys from the second wave of Joustra Diaclones in 1985? Well, these expanded the line further and saw the introduction of a lot more pre-Transformers like the precursors to Hound, Prowl, Tracks, Sunstreaker, Smokescreen and Ultra Magnus! All of these are incredibly rare and it is only in the past couple of years that these have been popping up online. The little Diaclone drivers were most likely removed due to toy safety regulations in France, so Joustra ultimately had to come up with a story that involved independent, sentient robots. These were generally available in French, German and Dutch and detailed the background story to this line, which already saw the robots as independent and sentient beings! No Diaclone drivers were included with these toys, though this was probably not a consequence of the fact that Joustra created a mythos that featured sentient robots without the need for Diaclone drivers to pilot them. They also created a series of mini-comics that were included with all the boxed Diaclones. Joustra commissioned two talented artists, the Brizzi brothers Paul and Gaetan, to create the exclusive artwork that is featured on all the packaging of the 1st wave of Joustra Diaclones. Some of the Joustra Diaclone packaging artwork Megatron wasn’t even part of the introductory line up! The UK saw most of the series 1 Autobots, but the Decepticons were limited to just Soundwave and his cassettes and the Decepticon seeker jets. The 1984 output of the UK line was severely limited to say the least. The operation was limited to the UK only, because up until that time that’s the only presence Hasbro had in Europe. Of particular interest is that Hasbro was already active in the UK in 1984 selling Transformers, through their Hasbro UK subsidiary. Let’s look at these four operations one by one. These are generally accepted as the first occurrences of (pre-)Transformers available for sale in Europe. In blue we see Takara selling Diaclone themselves in Finland and in orange we see that Joustra has got the biggest part of Europe covered with France, West Germany and the Benelux countries. Let’s have a look at the situation in Europe in 1984.Īs you can see from the map of Europe above (click on the map for a larger version) there were four companies active in 1984 in Europe selling (pre-)Transformers: In green we have Hasbro UK selling Transformers branded… erm… Transformers in the UK, in yellow we have GiG selling Diaclone transformers in Italy. ![]() While Hasbro introduced their Transformers in 1984 in the US, several European countries got access to a lot of these same toys, albeit directly under license from Takara and under the name Diaclone. Takara sold more toys than they did in years before under the old Diaclone and Microman line! So succesful was the Transformers formula, that Hasbro ended up selling the concept of the Transformers back to the Japanese! Takara got a license from Hasbro so they could sell their own toys in Japan under the Transformers brand! And guess, what? It became a smash hit there as well. The robots were divided into Autobots and Decepticons and were given names that would become very familiar to a whole generation of kids in the 1980’s. Hasbro’s genius was that they decided to unite these two lines into one line and give the line an extensive background story, while introducing the robots as sentient beings who all had different characters! To accomplish this Hasbro called their good friends at Marvel Comics, who then proceded to create all the names and character bios for all the robots of the first year (and many years to come). ![]()
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