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Bandai Reissues of Macross Valkyries to be Imported to USA

North America's Toynami announced that it will distribute Valkyrie robot toys that the Japanese company Bandai had based on Takatoku's classic Macross toy line. The defunct Takatoku company developed the first transformable toys for Studio Nue's Super Dimension Fortress Macross space war series (1982-1983). Takatoku's 1/55-scale VF-1 Valkyrie fighter toy were eventually remolded and recolored as the Jetfire toy for The Transformers line.

Toynami will start its Valkyrie toy release with the VF-1S (pictured above) and VF-1J (pictured below) variants this summer, and continue with the VF-1A variant with detachable Super packs this fall. These first releases will be sold under The Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Do You Remember Love? name. Macross: Do You Remember Love? was the 1984 theatrical film adaptation of the first Macross series.

Toynami plans to release more toys from the first Macross series under the Robotech brand in 2009. The North American distributor Harmony Gold USA partially released the first Macross series on home video in 1984, before rewriting and editing the series with two other series to compile the Robotech project in 1985.

Toynami was founded in 2000 after Harmony Gold USA asked for compensation on the toy imports for the animated Macross Plus sequel by Toynami's predecessor, Toycom. The issue grew into a larger dispute with two lawsuits and led to the recent impasse in Macross releases outside Japan. Before importing the upcoming Valkyrie toy line, Toynami produced its own line of 1/55-scale toys as well as lower-priced 1/100-scale toys. Both of these in-house Toynami designs had less die-cast metal than the Takatoku Toys.

Yamato Toys, the former Japanese partner of Toycom, produced a recent 1/48-scale line of VF-1 Valkyrie toys. This June, it will start a 1/60-scale line (pictured at right) that matches the scale of the toys from the other Macross projects in Japan. Both Yamato toy lines use less die-cast metal than Takatoku's toys of the 1980s, but are more faithful to the original mechanical designs.

Bandai is reissuing the Macross toys in Japan to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the first Macross series and the 2008 launch of the Macross Frontier television series.