Rise & Fall Of Shogun Warriors

The Shogun Warriors remain ingrained in the minds of many fans.

It’s the run up to the holiday season of 1977. Star Wars is a massive hit in the theaters, but no Star Wars toys would be on the shelves to cash in on the movie’s success. This led Kenner to release the infamous “IOU” photo and certificate for future Star Wars figures, but that’s a topic best saved for another issue.

Mattel saw an opportunity and filled the void with a licensed toy line from Japan’s Bandai Corporation. Launched as the Shogun Warriors, this was a repackaged collection of action figures, model kits and jumbo figures from existing toy lines. Mattel was also wise enough to license Godzilla from Toho, exactly at the same time the Godzilla films were finding an American audience. The addition of Godzilla to the Shogun Warriors line, and giving him a bad-ass rocket launching claw, put this whole offering over-the-top. This was a brilliant marketing move by Mattel. The molds and tooling were done. All Mattel had to do was figure out the marketing campaign and packaging design to launch this new series. Add in the short window where no Star Wars toys are on the market and you’ve got yourself a smash hit for the holidays of the late 1970s. Throw in a new cross-promotional comic book by Marvel to support the toy line, and everything was up and to the right for the Shogun Warriors in 1970.

As a kid of the 1970s, your Editor was fully hooked on Shogun Warriors until a little movie titled, The Empire Strikes Back came along. When that movie launched, the entire toy market shifted into Kenner’s favor, resulting in sluggish sales for the Shogun Warriors and a cancelled comic at Marvel. The story wrapped with Shogun Warriors issue #20, and an unsatisfying epilogue in the pages of Fantastic Four #226. Despite an amazing start, the Shogun Warriors were discontinued and ultimately vanished by 1980. But was that really the end? In 1982, Bandai decided to enter the American toy market. The first set of toys included characters from the Shogun Warriors line, and contained a sneak peek at a pre-Voltron, Voltron. Unfortunately, the high price points and lack of a TV show hurt sales, and ultimately the Bandai toys were overshadowed by an huge Japanese import success, this time with Hasbro and not Mattel. The name of that new toy line? The Transformers.

The Shogun Warriors remain ingrained in the minds of many fans. Back in the year 2000, it was rumored that James Cameron had the film rights to Manzinger Z, and was mulling over a Shogun Warriors film franchise. In 2013, Toynami announced that they had purchased the rights to Shogun Warriors and debuted prototypes of brand-new Shogun Warriors at the San Diego Comic-Con in 2013. Things were looking up for fans, until everything went quiet. It seems that James Cameron is focused on his Avatar series, and while they have put out a handful of limited edition toys, it also seems like Toynami has had more success licensing out the Shogun Warriors name to other toy companies - like Super7 - rather than expanding the line on their own.