The Mexican Constructicons by Plasticos Iga are among the least rare of these lovely variety of vintage G1 Transformers variants. They were released as individually carded figures and also as a giftset, the only Iga giftset we know of. Heck, Devastator is the only Iga combiner we know of. These toys were exported to many countries including the UK, Germany, Holland, countries in Scandinavia and also the Balkans. These toys are of a different shade of green to Hasbro Constructicons, have no rubsigns, slight moulding differences here and there (Long Haul's grill is one that comes to mind) and have "JAPAN" blocked on their copyrights. What's really interesting though, is that a handful of these Devastators/Constructicons come with a few chromed parts, and not the normal drill or double-barrel missiles, but parts that were never chromed for Hasbro or Takara release.
You can see in the old and crappy pics I have of one that I sold years ago, there are 6 individual tech specs meaning the chrome parts were probably packed in individual packages. That doesn't rule out giftsets from Mexico having this variation, but it at least confirms individually packed chrome weapons. You can see a couple of the handguns (specifically Devastator's head gun) are chromed.
Of further interest are the yellow eyes, meaning this either originated from Mexico or is pre-safety check era where around 1989 Mexican TFs were recalled, had lead paint stripped and red paint applied badly instead. Also we can see some of the plastic underneath the chrome is red. It's not uncommon for TFs to have odd coloured plastic under chrome, I guess at the time I wasn't expecting to see red plastic on TF Constructicons, so I kept the image.
So, within a reasonably common set of Mexican variant Transformers we have a rather rare intra-release variant that's well worth tracking down. I've seen two in all my years of collecting having never really gone after the set. Being assembled individually, I do wonder of at one time all six Constructicons from Iga were manufactured in limited numbers with chromed accessories, making it conceivable that an all chrome set of accessories are possible to assemble...then again, it may just have been those two extra parts, and for a very limited time.
Maz
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