Famosa

Famosa Logo from Box
Famosa was a company that existed, at least for our purposes, in the early 80's in Venezuela and manufactured a handful of Shogun Warrior Knock-offs. It's unclear if it's related to the FAMOSA group that still exists in Spain (the logos are different and I wasn't able to establish a firm connection through casual research).

In 1957, Fábricas Agrupadas de Muñecas de Onil, S.A. (FAMOSA) was born from the alliance of a number of toymakers in Toy Valley (Alicante, Spain). The group formed in order to remain competitive in the market due to difficulty finding funding, changing technologies, and the emergence of plastic toys.

Four Identical Famosa Boxes

I'm fairly certain that Famosa and Nacoral (who surfaced around the same time but distributed to Spanish speaking countries in Europe) are the same manufacturers only marketed under different regional names. Famosa seems to have been active in South America (Venezuela) while Nacoral marketed Spain and maybe Portugal. The figures, images and "checklist" on the end of the box are too similar to be coincidental - of course this may be a company knocking off another knockoff company - it's hard to confirm and unfortunately I don't own any Nacoral examples to compare to Famosa. I've also heard that Famosa and Nacoral both had licenses for their Jumbos but I'm not sure they would have changed the names if that were true.

Famosa Box Contents
To date (2022.07.15) I haven't been able to source any other Shogun Warrior Knock-offs from Famosa so this is the list (also reflected on the same box used for the entire line, with checkboxes on one end so you can determine what's in stock).

I've heard from more than one source that some of these still exist in warehouses located in Venezuela - all of mine are mint-unused (with the exception of Great Mazinga - that box ended up being destroyed in shipping so I've replaced it with a box I got in a previous transaction). Part of the story that I've gotten anecdotally is that these were produced in conjunction with a TV promotion for the cartoons on some local network. As they were somewhat expensive for toys in Venezuela most were unsold and that's why they still exist in a somewhat unused state.

The toys themselves appear to be molded from Mattel Shogun warriors (as it cast directly from the Mattel versions) so they've suffered some shrinkage - these figures are a bit over a centimeter shorter and many of the mold details have been simplified. There's also a lot of thick release gel molded into the plastic as not much care was made to get the most crisp casting quality. The plastic itself is very thin - the harder PVC used for missile-shooting fists and the star shooter is super brittle - one for GM is cracked from trying to get it on the arm.

Besides sharing the same box, the boxes themselves often have loose missiles and such (the exception being the single axe and stars that coming in a small baggie with Dragon). I don't believe the figure boxes had any inserts - all of mine appear to have been from a warehouse so I'm fairly sure they were issued without inserts (of course I could be mistaken).

All Mattel images and captions are copyright Mattel, all Popy, Banpresto, Unifive or Yutaka images and captions are copyright Popy/Bandai and used without permission. Same goes for Marmit, Mandarake, Famosa and anyone else I missed.  All other content, including images and editorial, is Copyright © 1997-2022 John Eaton and/or contributors unless otherwise stated. If there are any comments or objections, please contact John Eaton, by clicking here.

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