Word: hasbro
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...early 1980's, Rhode Island-based toy company Hasbro hit upon the idea of releasing toys that transformed from vehicles into futuristic robots, essentially doubling each toy's play value. The line was a smash success, heavily buoyed by a popular television cartoon and comic book series. Despite succumbing to the fickle whims of popular taste, the line managed to rebound and, like a sort of Star Trek for children, has maintained its popularity through various incarnations over the years up to the present...
...listen. A used Fortress Maximus fetches $500, a gold-plated Optimus Prime, $3000. Three months ago, a seller on Ebay offered an almost complete mint collection of the original run. The asking price? A whopping $30,000. Joe Millionaire could live off that for a year. The Transformers toys, Hasbro's bread and butter, are even celebrities unto themselves. Fans whisper on newsgroups about the latest Optimus sighting in a remote Walgreens, and leak unauthorized photos of a nude (well, unpainted) Ultra Magnus to the web. Needless to say, cosmetic alterations to their beloved toys are greeted with the revulsion...
...about half of the action figures are based on real soldiers. They wear the same fatigues, they carry the same weapons and even have the same dog tags as real troops. In fact, Hasbro, the maker of G.I. Joe, goes through no small effort to recreate the detail of historic soldiers in its Luftwaffe, NVA, and Soviet Union soldiers. It also includes more recent soldiers, such as those who participated in the first Persian Gulf...
...Hasbro earns money by making the dolls as lifelike as possible, but the real threat that hundreds of thousands of American soldiers faced from chemical and biological weapons in the first Gulf War—and will face in the Second Gulf War—seems to be outside the scope of Hasbro’s realism. Unfortunately, this reflects a larger problem: Americans don’t fully appreciate the danger posed by these weapons, and even when they sense the danger, they don’t understand its imminence...
...crash, thanks to an innovative design. The Power Air Surfer's two 32-in. wings and double propellers make it ultrastable at altitudes up to 100 ft., and it always glides in for a feather-soft landing--no matter how hard you try to make it crash. INVENTOR Hasbro AVAILABILITY Now, $75 TO LEARN MORE www.hasbro.com...