G1 Omega Supreme - missing date/co stamp

[Deadend66]

Good day good people,
I recently picked up a decent G1 Omega Supreme tank from Ebay, in good working order just missing the tank barrel. The plan was to replace the broken part with my own I still had kicking around and resell but it's honestly in such great shape I may keep it!
The weird thing I noticed this morning though, before I started cleaning him up - was that the bottom is missing the Takara and Hasbro / Date stamp(s) that my original has.
Was this a legitimate variant? There are little things about the copy that tell me it's definitely old.
- overall dirty
- wear marks at the joints point to plenty of use
- imperfect battery leads
- one or two semi-rusted screws

I don't think I'm looking at a knock off but wanted to see what the community thought.

Thank you very much!

[Time Traveller]

Fascinating!
I just flipped through all the underside pics I could find in our price history here: https://www.transformerland.com/price/G ... %20Supreme and I couldn't find one that showed with no date stamp. There are versions with and without Hasbro Bradley added to the date stamp, but I couldn't spot one with no stamp, like yours. Granted, a huge majority of the ~250 or so we've sold are in boxes (due to survivorship bias of those that were stored this way), and we don't have photos of the underside of the tank for the boxed samples. The Encore is also stamped, though updated with 2007 Tomy instead of the usual ToyBox stamping.
I'm assuming you bought only the tank by the wording of your post, but there's one other place to check: on the inside of the battery door, near the hinge, most Omegas should be stamped "JAPAN". I'm wondering if yours has that.
I'm not aware of any knock-offs that use the Transformers color layout (versus the pre-TF Mechabot-1 dark gray deco), nor was he re-released in China by Hasbro Asia to my knowledge, although yours does look like it has rectangular fills where the stamps USED to be, along the edges of the lower tank hull, which is similar to what I'd expect from a 1990s Chinese or Europe reissue.
I'm stumped! I'm going to point you to Fred's Vari-Quest Facebook Group. Let us know what you find out! If you're not on FB, let me know here and I'll post it there, with your permission.

[Deadend66]

Thanks so much for the quick reply and analysis! I actually removed Facebook last year, if you have the time, I would be very grateful if you followed up that's generous of you.
I did indeed confirm that the 'JAPAN' mark is present under the battery compartment as you noted, in the same spot on both my original childhood model and this new one in-question.
Also to confirm, yes only the tank was sold through the auction.
If I can provide any additional photos, please let me know I'm more than happy to do so.

Thanks again!
- Ben

[Deadend66]

Good morning folks! I wanted to circle back to this for anyone curious about the answer. I did speak with the folks over at the referenced Variant group and was directed to the following:
https://soundwavesoblivion.blogspot.com ... atron.html

From my assessment we're looking at either the French GiG Megarobot or Italian Omega Orli Jouet Mecabot variant. Boiling it down from the pics - my copy is likely the French GiG.

So this is pretty darn cool! These fellas came out at the same time (or around) that the official OS did in the U.S. so I like the idea of having a sort of parallel universe OS lol

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!

- Benji

[Time Traveller]

Wow! I had no idea that there were those European variants of the Transformers Omega Supreme releases. I'm really glad you found that. The Orli Jouets Mecabot is a real head scratcher, but I'm guessing there was a lot of funky stuff happening with all the twisted licensing among the European distributors, since many of those markets had their hand in the Diaclone or pre-TF cookie jar, (like Grandstand Convertors in the UK licensing Omegatron), and there may have been some agreements in place that prevented his release through "more official" channels. Super cool piece, and I'm glad you were able to connect to the history of it! A+!