Kenner and the original line

The company behind the box

Kenner Products started in 1946, and Wikipedia's company entry gives the chain of owners that surrounds the line: General Mills bought it in 1967, spun it off as Kenner Parker Toys in 1985, and sold it to Tonka in 1987, after which Hasbro bought Tonka in 1991. The line therefore launched in the year of the spin-off and finished its run under Tonka, and Hasbro is the rights holder today; the 2025 revival by The Loyal Subjects was made in collaboration with it. We have this ownership history from a single source so far, and we have not checked it against a second.

How the line was built

The catalogue follows the way Kenner sold the toys. The two vehicle series, Series 1 in 1985 and Series 2 in 1986, pair a vehicle that converts into something else with a driver and one or more masks, and the Thunderhawk, a sports car whose doors fold up into a jet's wings, is the toy most people picture when the line comes up. In 1986 Kenner also sold Adventure Packs, smaller sets that put a figure and a themed kit of accessories on a card, such as the mountain gear of Rescue Mission, and Action Figure Two-Packs, which is where figures like Alex Sector, Buddie Hawks and Nash Gorey turn up. Series 3 in 1987 took a racing theme, which follows the racing episodes that closed the cartoon, and Series 4, called Split Seconds, finished the line with vehicles built to separate into two, so that Stiletto, for instance, is a Lamborghini-style car that comes apart into a helicopter and a raid plane.

Several characters exist as Kenner figures in only one box: Gloria Baker's figure and her Collider mask come with Stiletto and nowhere else in the line. The per-character pages show this directly: start at toys by character and follow any agent or V.E.N.O.M. member back through the packs they were sold in.

Where the record disagrees or runs out

The final series is filed under 1987 in this catalogue; Wikipedia dates it 1987 to 1988, so treat the year as the point where the assortment first appears rather than as a precise ship date. The Laser Command year comes from a single guide. The European releases renamed some vehicles (Bulldog as Bulldoze, Bullet as Bandit, Barracuda as Jackal), and that comes from one source only. Two vehicles that appear in the 1988 guide, Thunderball and Ramp-Up, were reported as never released and are not catalogued here, and the same goes for show-only vehicles with no toy.

We have deliberately not printed a designer credit for the line. One comic-book reference names people, but the claim rests on a single page and does not fit the company's own history, so it stays unknown here until a primary source turns up.