My stance on KO's

KO - pronounced: Kay-Oh. Also known as Knock Off - pronounced: cheap alternative to official toys.

I hate KO's, nasty little pieces of shit that parents who don't love their children buy from £1 shops, which over the last few years seem to have been replaced by 99p shops.  I have a great idea for a business, it's revolutionary actually...98p shops!  Just think, by under-cutting all my competition I'll make a fortune, especially seeing as most people wouldn't wait for their change from the transaction, I could use that extra 2 pence to pay my staff 2p extra per hour!  Brilliance.  I would patent the idea for a 97p shop while I'm at it, but I've been told that's going too far and I don't want to irk my peers too much, after all when I tried to patent an eleven blade razor I got death-threats from Gillette.

Crappy KO's...hang on, these don't look too bad?!?

...I digress.

A funny thing has happened to KOs in the last few years.  Rather than having a badly painted orange gorilla that look a bit like Optimus Primals retarded cousin in packaging* labeled "Beast Beasties!", who shares a case assortment* with a bunch of other miscreants who all share the same card art showing a toy that isn't even available in the range*, we've started to get high end KO's aimed at the "collectors market".  These are useful for multiple reasons of varying importance, which I will document here. 
*I use the asterisked terms loosely.



1 - They're cheaper.
This is two-fold.  Cheap toys appeal to the same "parents" who want to pretend they love / feel obliged to give presents to the bastard(s) from a previous relationship(s).  In all honesty though, this is a false economy.  Most KO's are of a poorer quality than a HasTak toy, even one of the newer high quality KO's.  You might be stuck with floppy limbs or easily breakable toys.  You might be thinking that's not a problem as the toys are cheap, but think of the look on poor Jimmy's (contemporary name replacement in progress) Brooklyn's / Seven's / Cage's / Cadence's face when that beloved half fish / half Ford GT40 KO breaks on Christmas morning?  I am, Haha.
TakBro toys are tested, and they have to pass vigorous tests including a Fortress Maximus reissue foiling "drop" test before they can be released in the UK / US, so you know they will be made of sterner stuff.
Worst case scenario?  These toys may contain toxic materials.  It was not unknown for G1 KO's to contain lead paint.  So if you want to release the burden of a disassociated offspring these might well be the toys for you.  I recommend finding an actual radioactive Toxitron.  Thankfully I don't work for the BBC so I say such flippant, obvious jokey comments without fear of reprisal.

That's better.  Floppy POS. 

From an adult collectors POV, the cheaper KOs can be a way of getting hold of that exclusive or expensive figure.  Can't afford the Botcon Shattered Glass Hot-Rod?  Don't fancy dropping upwards of $300 for a Henkei Wildrider? You can find these bad boys online for $30.  Personally I don't want to spend upwards of $1,000 for the original four Dino-cassettes, but now some very reasonable reissues are available.  I'll give details on these another time.

I myself have puchased a Blue Mirage and a Sunstreaker G1 KO for this very reason.  I have the originals, but they go back to when I was a little kid, all sunshine and innocence and buying other kids Transformers off them for pence, because I didn't stop collecting when they all got bored and moved on to Turtles or Robocop, or whatever the next inappropriate adult property adapted into a toyline and cartoon for kids was.  Because they are the toys I had as a kid - second-hand ones at that - they've seen better days.  A lot of my old toys have been replaced with Has/ara reissues because THEY LOOK BETTER, but Sunstreaker and Mirage fit into the "they really broke the mold when they released Wheeljack" category, because Hasbro actually did break the molds in the early '90's when they re-issued these guys in gold boxes. I also have a Red Mirage from the same line, more on that in a second.

We'll come back to him.

I don't feel bad for purchasing these illegal items because:  I bought the originals in the day (and still have them, just not on display); I support HB/TK to the tune of lots of money every year so they're not losing out because of me; they do it themselves anyway;  and finally because I have a cold, dead soul.

Of course, they're not all cheap...

2 - Hasbro / Takara don't make it.

Want a Classics Sunstorm?  Tough shit.  Want a Blue Classics Optimus Prime to go with your (equally grey territory) DIA Fans Project Armour?  Fuck you buddy!

Not official, but pretty darn good.

High end KO's have really come into there own in the last few years providing us with all the toys mentioned previously like Red Mirage who has never been released as a Transformer, and exclusive repaint characters like Deep Cover, the friendly named Black Death Starscream, Power Rat GI Joe and Bad Boy Powerglide.  These toys are of a good quality, you might get the odd loose joint or overly tight joint, but these can be remedied fairly easily.
A step up from this are the I-Gear conehead seekers, people like these because they can't get them anywhere else and they just plain need them to fill that pathetic void in their lonely lives.  I have all the conehead seekers, I couldn't just stop at the original three, right?  These lovely toys are without a doubt a massive violation of IP (intellectual property), and as Evan Davis' book talks about in detail, IP management is the biggest business in the world, ahead of Primary, Secondary and Tertiary Industries.  Charging the same money ($130), if not more than Hasbro and Takara for a retooled product - whom not only own the IP, but the copyright for the names and no doubt the patent for the Transformation - is dodgy ground, one which is sure to incur the wrath of a toy industry giant who are obviously quite keen to protect their BILLION dollar property.  I-Gear walk the line between KO and third party company, and nothing wobbles on the tightrope over the abyss quite like the Conehead Seekers and their Optimus Prime clone Faith Leader, but I will cover these more in depth in a future article about third party toys. 

The future of such KO's is looking shaky at the moment, as one of the main distributors of such items, KO Toys, has announced they will no longer be selling, well, anything.  The rumours around the internet are rife, and I'm not going to go into all the gory detail, name calling and petty recrimination surrounding the cult of personality-non-grata that is the guy who runs KO Toys.  Maybe Hasbro or someone gave him a cease-and-desist order, maybe he's sick of all the negative shit when all he's trying to do is sell some toys to a fandom he used to feel a part of, maybe he's finally got enough money selling fake toys to finally set up his religion in the name of Optimus Prime.  I don't know, I don't care.  All I know is I used to buy toys from there, and now I can't.  So now where am I going to get the parts I need for...


3 - Customising
In my opinion the best reason for buying a KO.  I love customising, when I can find the time.  It takes lots of prep work, patience and way more money than you think by the time you buy paints, spray, base coat, materials, and usually a minimum of two toys going in (one as a base model, and one to strip-mine for parts).

Custom Rotorstorm by board-member Rotorstorm.

So much time and money that when I had the option to buy a custom Rotorstorm recently for £25 I jumped at the chance.  The way I saw it, if it wasn't great I could strip it down and start again cheaper than if I'd started from scratch (it turned out said custom was okay, not great, and certainly not what I am used to with the quality of Calloway Customs which I aspire to emulate).

This is why KO's are great, Sunstorm (pictured earlier) would have taken me maybe 2-3 hours work stripping down, sanding, as well as a lot of waiting time for the paint to dry and cure before detailing.  The KO was less than a tenner, and opens the door for my to attempt different repaints and characters without breaking the bank.

Sigh.  I'm going to miss KO toys, I'm not sure if this means the end of the high-end KO's as I think they were funding CHMS who were responsible for a lot of the quality output.  KO's however are not going anywhere, the really cheap ones have been, and always will be available widely throughout China, because they have no laws surrounding copyright protection.  Don't tell them how much IP management makes the US and the UK, if they start kicking our arses in that area too the West is fucked.  I think G1 reissues will continue because they've been about for a while, and for all your other KO needs I heartily recommend Chimungmung, who I used to buy from on eBay before he opened an online store.  He also carries a lot of third party toys, which is useful for combined shipping.  Shipping is to me, the most hateful part of the fandom, except maybe for all the posts about personal hygiene surrounding any convention, and all the illnesses the week after a show.  Lot's of smelly, typhoid Magnuses at TF conventions.  I don't mean you of course, you are clean and smell of flowers.

Coming full circle, you can use KO toys to make repaints of toys that never existed without having to destroy an expensive mold.  This is one of mine.

Okay, I've waffled on enough here and I'm still in the middle of moving and organising my new toy room, this was only supposed to be a five minute break.  Expect more blogging by the end of the week, I might start chronicling my collection, I'm just not sure whether to do this character by character, line by line, or original order of release?  I may even discuss my full stance on third parties like I have KO's here.  Any thoughts or comments to the normal address.  I just want to clarify a few points before signing off.

How much £ is a $?
This varies month to month,and if we can ever stabilise the economy it might be easier to convert off the cuff.  I can tell you that the very first time I went to the US we were getting $2 to the £.  This has never happened to me when I have gone to a Botcon, where I've been lucky to get $1.60 per £, but the exchange rate was also close to 2:1in late 2001 and it was a good chance to buy a lot of rare G1 toys.
You might notice / get fucking annoyed / get mildly confused by my increasing Americanisations.  Even though I am a UK born and based toy collector, my soul has always had one foot in America (or should that be sole?  hahahahacunt), so I tend to use UK spellings but US terms and even US currencies when discussing Transformers.  12 years working in a comic-book store will do that to you, I'm even a left-hooker!


Abbreviating Hasbro / Takara
This is just getting annoying,I think throughout this column I used about twelve different terms for the collective companies.  I think we need a sensible portmanteau that everyone in the fandom agrees on, of course, we can't even decide on the colour of cassettes so this will never happen, which is why I dub it the fan-dumb.  I propose TakBro or HasTak.  I tried experimenting more, but Hasara doesn't work, neither does Bra.


If you just read this, and you don't really know much about Transformers, then I'm sure it read as absolute gibberish.  Good job I'm a funny fucker!  Once again, TF wiki is a good place to learn what some of the terms I've used mean and I'm linking you to a list of such terms, 'cause I'm fucking great like that.