Birthday Robits!

For my birthday this year, Meg surprised me with five pretty awesome not-Transformers:

Love the packaging on these.

Now, I say "not-Transformers" because they're unlicensed toys made by Fansproject, a third-party company, and not Hasbro or Takara. I've really gotten into the third-party toys because they're making some awesome stuff that Hasbro/Takara never would due to cost.

Extinct animals.

Back when elbows were a luxury.

They're designed to look like toys from the heyday of the original Transformers toyline: chunky, limited articulation, and fairly simple designs. Here's a shot of one next to an official Transformer of similar design.

These were the pinnacle of design in the late '80s.

The real hook for these is that Fansproject went whole hog in giving them a very retro feel - like they were toys that you must have missed when they were on shelves in the '80s. Even though they're brand-new, the packaging is designed to look like it's faded, torn, and taped.

Notice the stains, taped rip, and scuffed edges; all printed detail.

Even the sticker sheet is partially applied.

The marketing for these was incredible. You've got the retro designs, the retro boxes, heck, they even drew up fake animation cels for the packaging. But this is far from the best part.

They were even in the cartoon? Must have been episode from overseas...

You may have noticed in the first picture in this post, one of the boxes didn't match (hint, it's the lower left box). As I mentioned early, the idea was that these were found toys from the '80s. They were shipped out one at a time to people that ordered them online. When it came time to ship out the last figure, Fansproject posted on their blog that, unfortunately, the entire shipment of that figure had fallen off the boat and was lost.

A few days later, Fansproject made another post claiming that all hope wasn't lost. During the closing of an old warehouse overseas, workers found unopened cases of the Korean version of the figure. Luckily, everyone would get the figures they ordered!

This is why you want all five!