transformers

only the best toy ever if you grew up in the 80s and 90s

in 1981, honorable japanese toy company takara released "diaclone," a line of toy robots that could be twisted and folded into nifty futuristic vehicles. one of their corporate samurai got the very original idea to market a line of these car-robot toys to horrible american children (probably because tonka and milton-bradley was already doing that with gobots and robotix), and also got the bright idea to make new ones modeled on real cars such as the formidable Toyota Land Cruiser, and the Volkswagon Beetle (called "the people's car" by adolf hitler himself)

to achieve this they sold the license for these "transformers" to the execs of american toy company hasbro, who decided to advertise their new cash cow with a crappy 80s cartoon and a marvel tie-in comic. the transformers were a smash hit; through the 80s you could always tell whose parents were rich enough to afford them (or at least, had formerly been rich before buying them). naturally they were so successful that hasbro has made every effort to run the franchise into the ground with a new cartoon every decade or so, plus letting michael bay make a series of porno movies that happen to occasionally feature transformers.