For safety reasons

This was deemed insufficiently safe for release in the mid-2000s. Think about that.

Toys should not hurt people. If a child is injured (or, heaven forbid, killed) by use or abuse of a toy, that child's parents are very likely to sue the toy manufacturer. Plus there is the cavalcade of bad press and word-of-mouth that will accompany the suit, ruining a toymaker's reputation. On top of, of course, injured kid. That's bad.

As such, Hasbro puts its toys through rigorous testing and design work for safety reasons. Sometimes, a Transformers toy has to be altered from the original design in order to maintain safety standards; some of these standards are self-imposed, while others are mandated at the state or national level. These also often change with the times, and vary from country to country, or even within different regions of a single country. Since Hasbro and TakaraTomy want to sell their toys in as many markets as possible, all of these standards must be taken into account when creating a new Transformers toy.

Safety issues and Transformers

Toxic materials

One of the earliest safety standards involves the banning of toxic materials in toys, such as lead-based paints. Though this predates Transformers by a considerable amount of time and was pretty much not an issue in most major markets by the 1980s, it actually was an issue with the short-lived Mexican The Transformers line, when those toys somehow ended up being dumped into various European markets years later, where it was discovered that yes, they used lead paint. Yikes!

Breakage issues

Stubbimus Prime

Obviously, toys ostensibly for children should not break easily. More importantly, they should not break in a way as to create sharp or jagged pieces that can cause lacerations. This makes what materials the toys are made out of vitally important. Long, thin parts potentially prone to breakage may end up being made with a softer, more pliable plastic than the base toy, such as the wings and sword of Cybertron Vector Prime, or the permanently-attached-to-the-roof long gunbarrels of Studio Series Topspin (which are notoriously rubbery). One trade-off to this technique is that most of these materials are "unpaintable", thus they can only be one single, solid color.

Or, those elements might be made of the normal, paintable, harder plastic, but also be shortened enough so that there is not enough leverage to "reliably" break the piece. This has been the case with many Optimus Prime toys over the years, as many of these toys featured shortened smokestacks in the U.S. (it's a common mistake to assume this started in 1988 with the Powermaster version;^[1] however, it was actually the Japanese Super Ginrai version that had the shorter stacks, not the Hasbro Optimus Prime version). Not every long/thin piece needs to be made of softer plastic, mind; most toys' weapons are not permanently attached to the toys, and are far more likely to pop out of the attachment socket than break should the toy be dropped, and many pieces not meant to be removed normally are designed to pop out of a socket rather than break, like Energon Roadblock's crane-boom.

Speaking of "dropped", Hasbro's safety testing also extends to toy packaging, ensuring that were a packaged toy to be dropped, said packaging would take the full force of the fall, leaving the toy inside intact. Thus, Hasbro performs the "drop test" on their toys both loose and packaged. As its name implies, this involves dropping a toy from various heights in order to ascertain whether or not said toy will break, where it might, if any of the parts which may have broken loose could potentially injure a child, and if the packaging is insufficient to prevent damage. Failure to pass this test is often cited as the reason the original Fortress Maximus mold has not been reissued in the United States.

Interestingly, these safety standards ultimately provided a boon to Transformers toy design, though it would be a good decade-plus before it was realized. During the time Hasbro started to make its own molds to represent characters as toys instead of importing from other toy lines, the safety standards of a toy had to withstand a pulling force of twenty pounds to deem them safe. Because most toys in those days had little to no outward movement in their legs or arms, they could rather quickly break with little force, so most figures were made with fused legs, preventing kids from pulling them apart. Because of this, most of the toys dropped articulation to make the figures stronger, turning a large amount of them into "bricks". During the time Takio Ejima started working on the brand, he noted that they could make the toys safer by the use of ball joints, making it easier for the toy to pass the test by simply allowing the limbs to pop free rather than break (and be easily re-attached), and still have full range of motion. This idea saw its first steps in late Generation 2, and come Beast Wars, would change the standard of articulation both inside and outside the Transformers brand.

Blunt force trauma

Movor got less pointy over the years.

The use of softer materials for key parts also plays into another safety concern, namely "what happens if kid A jabs toy B into person C or self A." Obviously not much can be done about a toy being intentionally used as a cudgel, but normal play accidents should not result in injury. Thus, "flying" toys in particular are subject to much greater design scrutiny than your average car-former. Even as early as 1985, Jetfire and Swoop were altered to have blunted nosecones, and the Seeker jets had rubber nosecones instead of hard plastic. The Armada Starscream toy was designed with a slight "droop" to its nosecone/cockpit component, so that were a child "flying" it around end up ramming it nose-cone-first into a wall (or sibling), that ever-so-slight droop would more easily cause the force of the impact to push the nosecone down on its transformation hinge, thus better dispersing the force of the blow.

As with many safety standards, these are always in a state of flux: Movor's toy from 2001 is a redeco of Blast Off, with no detectable physical changes, but in 2003 another redeco of the same sculpt had to be retooled to round off the nosecone. For the 2008 Universe/Revenge of the Fallen Superion giftset, Hasbro retooled the nosecone of the Energon Treadshot/Windrazor sculpt to be less pointy—a sculpt that had originally been released a mere five years earlier.

Choking hazards

I'm a choking hazard!

There are also "choke" laws designed to prevent small parts, especially projectiles, from being lodged in a child's windpipe. Easily the biggest impetus for this came in 1979, when there were multiple instances of children choking on accidentally-fired missiles from a Battlestar Galactica toy, including one death. This quickly scuppered Kenner's plans for a missile-firing Star Wars Boba Fett figure, and resulted in a change to how projectiles were developed in toys from then on out. In the original Transformers toys, this mostly meant just replacing the launchers' springs with incredibly weak springs (providing just enough tension to keep the projectiles locked in place, but not enough to propel them more than a fraction of an inch once released), as the missiles were right in that "small enough to swallow, big enough to potentially get caught on the way down" range. When all-new-mold toys began development, the issue was circumvented almost entirely by simply not giving them projectile launchers in the first dang place.

I'm not!

Come Generation 2, spring-loaded projectile launchers returned in a big way, quite literally. The missiles for these toys now measured nearly three inches in length, far too long to slip into an esophagus. Some vintage molds used in the line, like Inferno and the Constructicons, had their launchers and missiles extensively altered to remove the launching mechanisms altogether, the "projectiles" now simply pegged into place and held by friction. Disc launchers also came into play; these projectiles were made both wide enough to make swallowing them difficult, and had holes cut through them so air could pass through unobstructed just in case they somehow did get lodged in. These standards are still in effect today, and probably will be indefinitely (even though launching projectiles have been increasingly infrequent in Transformers toylines since the latter half of the 2010's).

Of course, this is mostly how the U.S. toys needed to be made. The European and Japanese markets had, and still have, considerably laxer standards for projectiles. Thus, the Takara releases of the original Transformers toys retained their full spring-launching capability, as have every reissue of those molds up to today. The European Turbomasters and Predators from 1992 (also released in Japan) had spring-fired missiles a mere one inch long. Notably, the larger Turbomasters and Predators were released in the U.S. for the Machine Wars toyline, and Hasbro took two different approaches to the un-safe missiles: the Autobot toys had their launchers heavily altered to use new, much larger missiles (likely because said launchers were integral to the toys), where the Decepticons simply had their (non-integrated) launchers removed altogether, with Starscream keeping the missiles to use the toy's non-spring-loaded "carpet bombing" gimmick.

Firearm replicas

Acceptable in 2006... and not a day later.

Aaaaaand then there are toy gun laws which are designed to prevent scenarios where police (or others) mistake a "realistic" toy gun, like say, the original Megatron, for an actual firearm and shoot or arrest the person carrying it. U.S. law requires that toy guns have either an orange plug in the barrel, or a barrel made out of unpainted orange plastic.

Some states have even more stringent laws (particularly California, which is such a huge market that it effectively makes those nationwide standards), which require that toy guns must be brightly colored and must not resemble real-world firearms (such toy guns are almost exclusively water guns, Nerf-style "blasters", or resemble real firearms but have neon colors and cartoonish proportions). Some retailers won't even carry realistic toy guns anyway, so that's a double-whammy in some places.

Note that the major federal toy gun law was enacted in 1988, and applies to all toy guns manufactured after May 1989. As such, it is entirely legal for dealers to sell original 1984 Megatron figures, as they are grandfathered in; but any later American release of the toy WOULD have to meet these standards, hence the "Safety/Lava Bath Megatron" toy pictured at the top of this article, which STILL failed to meet these guidelines, as the entire external surface was not (and likely could not be) made from a single color of plastic. As a result, an American reissue of the original Megatron toy has never happened, yet it's been reissued like crazy in Japan, which has very different toy safety laws and doesn't have any restrictions on toy guns.

The range of what is "acceptable" for a gun-toy has also gotten ever-increasingly narrow over the years. Classics Megatron, released in 2006, turns into a weapon heavily inspired by a Nerf N-Strike Maverick blaster with a bright orange cap on the end of both the scope and the barrel. With Hasbro's ever-more-conservative legal department, even this deco was not deemed sufficient for long. This figure would not see release again in the U.S. for ten years, and when it finally did come out again it was almost entirely stop-sign red. Considering what color schemes actual Nerf blasters released at retail in the interim time have sported, how much of this is really due to genuine safety concerns and how much is just down to Hasbro's concern for the public perception of the Transformers brand is anyone's guess. Though given, well, the news, this is probably for the best.

In fact, toys with "role-play"-sized gun modes have all but vanished from the modern Hasbro line. While tiny Mini-Cons and Battle Masters can turn into sci-fi gun accessories for other toys no problem, if it's feasibly big enough to be held by a child like a gun, they're going to dodge around that. While the original Sixshot toy's "gun" mode is incredibly hard to mistake for a realistic firearm, the updated Titans Return Sixshot doesn't have a "gun" mode, but it does have a "submarine" mode that totally isn't the exact same configuration just turned upside-down how could you even think that. This has also happened to most modern Shockwave toys, turning his ray-pistol mode into a "spaceship". On the more extreme end, most modern "Generation 1"-based Megatron toys, like Siege Megatron, tend to be robots that look like they should maybe turn into a gun like the old toy, but instead turn into a tank. Modern Galvatron toys keep the artillery cannon mode, but omit the "pistol" mode altogether, even significantly altering the cannon back-end to further distance him from turning into a "role play" gun.

Also note that there's no size limitation anywhere in the legal regulations. As a consequence, even the 2010 Transformers Legends Class Megatron, which turned into a tiny "realistic" pseudo-Walther P-38, had to sport an orange barrel, despite his tiny size.

Fire!

Underwear, beware!

The sparking gimmick found in the Firecons/Sparkabots and Monsterbots would spit "cold" sparks out, simulating fire-breathing or fire-exhaust. In 1991, a "Rollerblade Barbie" doll with a similar action feature reportedly set a child's underwear on fire. No, seriously. The Barbie doll was quickly recalled due to the potential for lighting flammable things on fire, even though the incident in question also involved hair spray (highly flammable!), but, well, yeah, dolls, hair spray... yeah. Thanks to this instance, sparking toys more or less just stopped happening in the US. Curiously, the European Generation 2 series included recolors of the spark-throwing Firecons and Sparkabots conspicuously absent in the U.S. version of the line.

While sparking eventually returned to America in the form of the Age of Extinction "Dino Sparkers", those toys kept the sparks contained within the clear-plastic toys rather than spewed out, preventing possible pyrotechnics.

Safety standards in other countries

The USA isn't the only country with rigid toy safety standards that affect Transformers. In fact, some countries have safety standards that are even more rigid than anything the USA has. Examples:

Awww come on, Italy.

• In Italy's Trasformer [sic] line by GiG, many toys' missile launchers didn't have their springs removed, but the missiles did have comically-huge giant rubber balls attached to the tips. Some of the subsequent, officially-licensed-by-Hasbro Transformers re-releases of those toys still featured the same kind of missiles. Makes those elongated Commemorative Series missiles seem not so bad after all, huh?
• Whereas European toy gun laws are more relaxed, hence making the import of Generation 1 Megatron reissues and Masterpiece Megatron less of a legal hassle, Australia actually has harsher regulations than the US, officially classifying MP Megatron as a "firearm replica". Some Australian states even consider the possession of the toy illegal, even if it was painted in bright orange or sported a permanently glued on orange plug. In the state of Queensland the only way to circumvent this problem requires joining some kind of registered firearms Collectors' Club.^[2]
• Members of the European Union don't consider American safety regulations sufficient, but require their own safety tests, with the toys having to adhere to the European standard EN 71. As a consequence, toys that are perfectly fine to be released in the USA might occasionally not be considered suitable for the European market. And since Hasbro has long since abandoned producing international "variants" of toys beyond mere packaging differences, that would mean those toys simply won't come out in Europe at all. (However, while specific examples are unconfirmed, it's highly doubtful that this affects a large number of toys.)
• Conversely, Japan has comparatively lax toy safety regulations. The Japanese toy safety standard is called "ST", which can be applied to toys aimed at children under the age of 14; however, that doesn't mean that a toy can't be sold if it doesn't sport the "ST" seal. The only difference is that parents will receive a compensation if their child gets injured by playing with an "ST"-approved toy, therefore parents are more likely to buy toys that are "ST"-approved than toys that are not.

Notes

Yeah, if only..

• At one point Hasbro apparently considered selling the Commemorative Series reissues as "adult collectables" to avoid having to adhere to US toy safety standards. Stock photos for the Series III figures Thundercracker, Silverstreak and Autobot Jazz depict sample packaging labeled as "adult collectable", as does a Toys"R"Us print ad published in issue 6 of Dreamwave's first The War Within mini-series,^[3] while the final packaging has those labels covered with stickers containing choking hazard safety warnings, in addition to stickers containing "Ages 5+" recommendations. Ultimately, the toys would end up with either functional launchers with extended missiles (looking ridiculous), or original-length missiles with non-functional launchers. (Also noteworthy: many missiles and weapons that were chromed in their original releases ended up made from matte, slightly-softer plastic in this series, potentially due to safety/breakage concerns.)
• You know how the original Megatron turns into a realistic-looking handgun? And how there are various laws prohibiting the sale of realistic-looking toy handguns? Yeah. C'mon, you knew it was bound to happen sooner or later.
• Translucent plastic is particularly noted for shattering into sharp pieces. This is something Hasbro has to consider when designing blast effects or flight stands for Western markets.^[4]

External links

• Page featuring articles on the genesis of the choke-gate test, due to a missile-firing Battlestar Galactica toy.
• CFR Title 15, Part 1150, the official federal law on "realistic" toy guns and the markings thereof.
• Overview on toy safety standards in the UK
• Pages five and six of this article give a brief summary of the federal safety guidelines regarding breakability testing. (PDF format.)
• The Onion's slightly snarkier take on the subject, for those who like their snarky snark snarkiness.
• Canadian ruling that Masterpiece Megatron does not constitute a "replica firearm" for importing purposes.

References