e-HOBBY
From Transformers Wiki
e-HOBBY is a TakaraTomy-affiliated online store owned by Part One Co., Ltd. Even though the e-HOBBY Shop sells all sorts of toys manufactured by Takara and other Japanese companies, it's best known for offering exclusive redecos of Transformers toys.
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History
Part One Co., Ltd. was officially founded in Shinjuku, a district of Tokyo, on April 25, 1977, originally set up as a project design production company. By December 1979, the company was already expanding, now also including a professional photo studio. Part One has been providing various kinds of services to Takara ever since the days of the Diaclone line, among them products planning, packaging design, character design and promotional planning. Among other things, Part One is responsible for designing the packaging for the Binaltech toyline. Today, Part One's official company description is "Digital Design Office".
The e-HOBBY Shop was officially launched in March 2000. In August of the same year, a delivery center was set up in the city of Sango, which was later moved to Yashio in November 2002. Even though the address e-HOBBY.co.jp was used from the get-go, the site was temporarily also available under the (now defunct) URL http://e-hobby.sputniknext.com/, but eventually permanently moved to its current location in May 2003.
In March 2001, Takara would release the first exclusive toy through the e-HOBBY Shop, a black redeco of the original Megatron toy that was reissued by Takara at the same time. "Black" Megatron had originally been offered for pre-order at BotCon Japan 2000, since the e-HOBBY Shop hadn't been widely established yet by that time.
Since then, the range of exclusive product got bigger. Reissues of the original Generation 1 Ironhide and Ratchet toys that were part of Takara's store/convention exclusive The Transformers: Collector's Edition series came in 2001, followed by more same-character redecoes in new colors. With the launch of Takara's The Transformers Collection line of "bookbox" reissues, e-HOBBY would start to regularly offer an exclusive redeco of almost every toy released as part of the line. Many of those redecos were based on old Diaclone or Micro Change variants of the toys in question, but were given new names and identities, with extensive bio profiles for the characters written by Hirofumi Ichikawa. In cases where no Diaclone or Micro Change variant of the toy existed, e-HOBBY would take obscure "extra" characters or weird errors from the cartoon series as inspirations for a redeco, or even come up with an entirely new deco.
In addition, e-HOBBY would also continue to release exclusive redecos of non-TFC reissues and even of toys that were not reissues at all, including product from Robotmasters, Hybrid Style, Kiss Players, Binaltech, and even Masterpiece. These releases even sporadically included entirely original fiction in Generation 1 continuity, usually penned by long time TakaraTomy contributor Hidetsugu Yoshioka.
Furthermore, e-HOBBY also offered exclusive "USA Edition" versions of toys that were originally released by Hasbro, complete with the Hasbro packaging. In all these instances, the only difference to the Hasbro versions of those toys was an additional e-HOBBY sticker on the packaging. Toys from Universe, Hasbro's 20th Anniversary Optimus Prime version of Takara's Masterpiece Convoy and Cybertron toys not part of the Galaxy Force series were all made available this way.
Beginning in 2007, e-HOBBY also started offering limited quantities of toys that would originally be exclusively available at Japanese conventions, starting with the Wonder Festival 2007 Winter exclusive exclusive Binaltech Black Convoy. However, in all instances only Japanese residents were allowed to purchase the toys, unlike the other exclusives which could usually be ordered by foreigners as well.
In December 2007, e-HOBBY announced that they had stopped accepting orders from international private customers altogether as of September of the same year.[1][2] As a consequence, only Japanese residents are able to order toys directly from e-HOBBY now, whereas international fans have to resort to third-party sellers.
In addition to Takara toys, e-HOBBY also offers toys from other Japanese manufacturers such as Tomy (who are now merged with Takara into TakaraTomy) or Bandai. This included the Star Wars Transformers toys, who were distributed through Tomy Direct in Japan in a similar fashion as Takara's "USA Editions".
e-HOBBY's next big project came in 2014 when they partnered with TakaraTomy's other Transformers exclusive distributor, the in-house TakaraTomy Mall, to produce a small franchise for the 30th anniversary of the brand, titled Transformers Cloud. The line was made up of eight toys, with the four Autobots going to TakaraTomy Mall and the four Decepticons going to e-HOBBY, while the fiction, masterminded by Makoto Wakabayashi, was made up of a series of pack-in comics as well as an elaborate narrative blog hosted on the websites of both shops. The content of this blog was where things got really ambitious, casting the toys as a tribe of dimension hoppers from a new continuity entirely in a cross-universe battle that doubled as a greatest hits reel of the history of the brand.
Cloud proved something of a finale to e-HOBBY's Transformers tenure, as the following year e-HOBBY's exclusive output began being explicitly folded into the branding of TakaraTomy's retail lines in a move not dissimilar to what was happening with Hasbro and Fun Publications' output around the same time as the two companies began moving to centralize their releases. The only real continuity between these releases was a series of pack-in comics, all united under the imprint "Spin Off." These comics are primarily notable for the team of Shin Sasaki and Kazumasa Yasukuni kicking off e-HOBBY's second all-original setting after Cloud in a storyline that later authors dubbed the "Precursor World."
Spin Off and indeed e-HOBBY's exclusives as a whole went dormant in 2017, when TakaraTomy and Hasbro's efforts at brand unification expanded, leading them to bring both of their exclusive outputs in-house in the global branding "Generations Selects". Now it bears noting that while e-HOBBY's Transformers exclusives ran dry, their overall relationship with TakaraTomy continued to thrive, continuing to offer TakaraTomy products and even producing exclusives for other toylines such as TakaraTomy's 2016 Diaclone reboot.
e-HOBBY quietly returned to the Transformers brand in 2022 with a small line of exclusive merchandise, including bio cards for several Generation 1 characters never before seen in Japanese markets, as well as a few original to the earlier Spin Off stories.
e-HOBBY exclusive fiction
From 2002 through 2017, e-HOBBY were the primary purveyor of Timelines-style esoteric licensed pack-in fiction in Japan. In addition to a litany of new-character bios, these include:
The Transformers
e-HOBBY exclusive comics for a wide variety of lines was distributed with no identifiers save for the original The Transformers logo from 2007 to 2013.
Japanese Generation 1 cartoon continuity
As with most collector-oriented product in TakaraTomy markets, the bulk of e-HOBBY's fiction is set in the behemoth Japanese Generation 1 cartoon continuity that circumscribes nearly all Generation 1 and Beast Wars-flavored product produced in Japan.
Hybrid Style
Collector's Edition
Masterpiece
United
Generations
- "Badlands"
Alternity
Shattered Glass
Cloud
Prose
- The Spacetime World: Guardians of Time text stories, hosted on the e-HOBBY website
Comics
Spin Off imprint
- The Profile+ feature on the e-HOBBY Twitter account
Comics
Legends EX
e-HOBBY exclusive toys
Collector's Edition
| 2001 | 2002
|
2003 | 2004 |   | ||||
| 2005
(Howlback & Garboil) (w/ Dion) |
2006 | 2008 | 2009 |
USA Edition
| Universe |  |
||||||||
| Masterpiece/20th Anniversary
|
Cybertron
(w/ Unicron head[5]) |
(w/ Stripmine) |
(w/ Heavy Load) |
Cloud
Wave 1 (05-29-2014)
|
Wave 2 (08-28-2014)
|
Wave 3 (11-27-2014)
|
Wave 4 (03-21-2015)
|
 |
Spin Off
| Unite Warriors | Legends |  |
Miscellaneous exclusives
| Fight! Super Robot Lifeform Transformers | Robotmasters | G-2 | Hybrid Style |    | ||||
| Binaltech | Kiss Players | Transformers (2007)
|
Encore | |||||
Henkei! Henkei!
|
Masterpiece | Alternity | Revenge of the Fallen | |||||
United
|
Shattered Glass
|
Generations |
e-HOBBY exclusive merchandise
| Miscellaneous exclusive merchandise |  |
Transformers Character Card
Logo acrylic stand series
Wave 1 (January 2022)
|
Wave 2 (April 2022)
|
Wave 3 (June 2022) | Wave 4 (September 2022) |  | ||||
Wave 5 (May 2023)
|
Wave 6 (June 2023)
|
Wave 7 (January 2024) | Wave 7 (March 2024)
|
Acrylic keychain series
Wave 1 (October 2022)
|
 |
Rubber strap series
Wave 1 (January 2023)
|
Wave 2 (June 2023)
|
 |
Notes
- e-HOBBY is not directly owned by TakaraTomy, but merely an affiliated store. TakaraTomy's own online store is TakaraTomy Mall.
- Because e-HOBBY is mostly known for exclusive toys and many Western fans aren't aware that e-HOBBY also offers regular mass retail toys like most online stores, pre-orders for new mass retail toys listed at the e-HOBBY website are occasionally mistaken as a confirmation that a toy is either exclusive to e-HOBBY, or that an e-HOBBY exclusive redeco is planned.
- Another common misconception among fans is that e-HOBBY "makes" the exclusive toys. While e-HOBBY is presumably responsible for creating the color scheme and decos, the toys are still produced by Takara. After all, Toys"R"Us doesn't manufacture its own exclusive Transformers toys either.
- Occasionally, fans also mistakenly believe other store, convention, or magazine exclusive redecoes of toys reissued by Takara to be e-HOBBY exclusives, such as the Generation 1 Ultra Magnus redecos, Crystal Rodimus and Black Rodimus, Nucleon Quest Super Convoy, Tigertrack, or Ratchet Emergency Green.
- "USA Edition" is not a term limited to imported Hasbro toys sold through e-HOBBY either. In the past, Takara have released exclusive "USA Editions" through stores such as JUSCO, Laox, Toy's Dream Project/Toycard, or even selected stores participating in the "TF Station" program. A few "USA Editions" weren't even exclusive to any specific store at all. The most frequently used store to carry "USA Editions" other than e-HOBBY, however, was the Japanese branch of Toys"R"Us.
- The Spin Off imprint would persist for a single release beyond e-HOBBY's exclusives: namely Legends Blue Big Convoy and the Blue Big Convoy comic.
References
- ↑ e-HOBBY stop international orders The Allspark
- ↑ e-HOBBY stop international orders Transformers @ The Moon
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 Sold as a set, but packaged separately
- ↑ 4.00 4.01 4.02 4.03 4.04 4.05 4.06 4.07 4.08 4.09 4.10 4.11 Second run
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 These toys were also available as regular mass retail releases in Japan. The e-HOBBY exclusive "USA Edition" versions were of specific Hasbro variants of those toys.
- ↑ Originally available for pre-order at BotCon Japan 2000, finally released through e-HOBBY in 2001
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7 These toys were originally exclusive to various Japanese conventions until additional stock was made available through e-HOBBY.
- ↑ The Cybertron & Destron Emblem product listing specifically calls out the stand as based on the "eyecatch" of the Generation 1 cartoon.
