| Private | |
| Founded | 2000 |
| Headquarters | Van Nuys, California , United States |
Key people | George Sohn |
| Products | Action figures |
| Website | Toynami.com |
Toynami is an American toy company based in Van Nuys, California. Founded in 2000 by George Sohn, Toynami is primarily focused on anime licenses for specialty retailers and collectors in the North American market. The company's name is a portmanteau of the words "toy" and "tsunami".
The United States of America (USA), commonly known as the United States or America, is a country composed of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, and various possessions. At 3.8 million square miles, the United States is the world's third or fourth largest country by total area and is slightly smaller than the entire continent of Europe's 3.9 million square miles. With a population of over 327 million people, the U.S. is the third most populous country. The capital is Washington, D.C., and the largest city by population is New York City. Forty-eight states and the capital's federal district are contiguous in North America between Canada and Mexico. The State of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east and across the Bering Strait from Russia to the west. The State of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean. The U.S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, stretching across nine official time zones. The extremely diverse geography, climate, and wildlife of the United States make it one of the world's 17 megadiverse countries.
North America is a continent entirely within the Northern Hemisphere and almost all within the Western Hemisphere; it is also considered by some to be a northern subcontinent of the Americas. It is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the west and south by the Pacific Ocean, and to the southeast by South America and the Caribbean Sea.
A portmanteau or portmanteau word is a linguistic blend of words, in which parts of multiple words or their phones (sounds) are combined into a new word, as in smog, coined by blending smoke and fog, or motel, from motor and hotel. In linguistics, a portmanteau is defined as a single morph that represents two or more morphemes.
Contents
- Criticism
- Present licenses
- Anime
- Non-anime
- Past licenses
- Anime 2
- Non-anime 2
- References
- External links
Part of the early driving force that led to the creation of the company was Sohn's interest in producing and releasing modern Macross Valkyrie toys, something he spearheaded with Japanese company Yamato Toys while being vice president of Toycom, Yamato's U.S. division at the time. When legal issues arose blocking the non-grey market release of Yamato's Macross toys in North America, Sohn left Toycom and started Toynami, first acquiring the Robotech license, which was the catalyst that roadblocked Yamato and Toycom's Macross toys.
Macross is a Japanese science fiction mecha anime media franchise, created by Shōji Kawamori of Studio Nue in 1982. The franchise features a fictional history of Earth and the human race after the year 1999. It consists of four TV series, four movies, six OVAs, one light novel, and five manga series, all sponsored by Big West Advertising, in addition to 40 video games set in the Macross universe, 2 crossover games, and a wide variety of physical merchandise.
In the fictional Macross Japanese anime series and its English adaptation Robotech, the first mass-produced transforming aerospace fighter mecha is called the VF-1 Valkyrie. The VF-1 Valkyrie is referred to as a variable fighter in the series Macross, but this is changed to the term veritech fighter in the Robotech series.
Using Robotech as a starting point, Toynami has since expanded, seeking other primarily anime-based licenses and aiming more towards collectors instead of the mass-market.
