Follow The Leader / Toys

• Once Webkinz thought of virtual pets, it became hard to find a stuffed animal without a virtual code for many years. Technically Neopets did it first, though the plush toys were based on the pets already on their site you can get without buying anything and the codes only give items. Jewelpet is probably the most popular example.
• Once Beanie Babies took off in the late 1990s, many other collectible pellet-filled plush toy lines came into being as well.
• The popularity of the Tamagotchi flooded the market with Virtual Pets in the late 90s, one of the most prominent being Tiger Electronics' Giga Pets.
• The popularity of Monster High and sister-series Ever After High have spawned several series that take heavy inspiration from them:
  • MGA expanded their Bratz doll line with Bratzillaz. Everything about the line — from the appearance of a few of the dolls, the catchphrase, and even the Youtube channel — is doing its best to copy the success and image of Monster High while staying with the legal bounds. That's not counting the obvious influences taken from Harry Potter as well.
  • A smaller company named Playhut has come out with Mystixx, an even more obvious attempt to cash in on Monster High.
  • Hasbro, meanwhile, has its My Little Pony: Equestria Girls line. For the first time since G1 humans are a part of the franchise, though this time they're humanized versions of the ponies that have been de-aged (or in cases like the CMC, age lifted) into teenagers. In turn, Mattel is taking a cue from My Little Pony with its Monster High Fright Mares.
  • Disney seems to have jumped on the bandwagon with its Descendants series. It's about the teenaged children of various Disney Animated Canon characters. Unlike the other series it debuted with a live action made-for-TV film. Ironic enough, the dolls, like with Equestria Girls, are made by Hasbro.
  • DC Comics has DC Super Hero Girls, a High School AU starring Wonder Woman, Batgirl, Harley Quinn, and many other DC superheros (and villains). It has a web-series and a television cartoon.
  • Lalaloopsy Girls is a Lalaloopsy spinoff featuring older, high school aged versions of the characters.
  • Project MC² is a toy line meant to subvert Clarke's Law for Girls' Toys by having an emphasis on science and technology. The doll line invokes Monster High but in a more normal, science club setting.
• The Filly line of pony toys takes heavy inspiration from My Little Pony, though despite what people think it has been around since My Little Pony (G3). It has more on an emphasis on royalty, to the point where there is an official tree chart about it. It has an Animated Adaptation named Filly Funtasia.
• Pillow Pets are getting a simply unfathomable number of knock offs, the most popular of which seems to be the Happy Nappers, and the most ridiculous being the Pillow Racer.
• It was hard to try to find a pony toy that wasn't trying to emulate the style of and ride on the success of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic during its run. One company infamously went far enough to trace an image of Rainbow Dash from a how-to-draw tutorial made by a fan on DeviantArt to slap on their advertising.
• The Marvel Legends line, initially produced by ToyBiz and later by Hasbro, both kicked off trends and followed them in the action figure world:
  • The line basically launched the entire trend of 6-inch collector oriented action figures. The "Build-a-Figure" concept (where an exclusive bonus figure could be constructed after purchasing each character in a wave) introduced in Series 9 would later be copied by Mattel for their DC Universe (later DC Multiverse) line, and by Bandai for their Dragon Stars line.
  • Hasbro launched a line of prop replicas and 12-inch Marvel Legends figures to compete with the more high end, collector-oriented Marvel products from brands like Hot Toys and S.H.Figuarts, the latter having No Export for You status with western collectors.
  • The Marvel Legends figures eventually started including alternate heads/hands with their various figures. Now, pretty much every collector figure has at least one alternate head or pair of hands included as part of it.
• Oddly enough, Bandai's Tamashii Nations sub brand also has SH Figuarts versions of Star Wars characters, as a high-quality alternative to Hasbro's The Black Series line of Star Wars figures.
• The increased focus on sculpt and paint work in the late 90s and early 2000s was heavily influenced by McFarlane Toys' revolutionary Spawn line.
• The success of the American Girl franchise led to myriad themed 18-inch (or near to it) dolls with a similar premise, sometimes with character dolls. Some of them, like Target's Our Generation dolls by Battat or My Life As from WalMart, are intentionally compatible with their American Girl counterparts, making their accessories and clothes a suitable low-cost alternative to items sold by AG. A number of companies, such as the Canada-based Maplelea Girls, Australian Based Australian Girl, or British "A Girl for All Time", apply the AG formula of characters and/or history to suit their national tastes. Meanwhile others market their AG-like dolls as The Moral Substitute especially for devoutly religious or conservative parents, as in the case of Dolls from Heaven or the now-defunct "Life of Faith." Even Dear America briefly sold dolls designed by Madame Alexander.
• The success of G.I. Joe A Real American Hero lead to a large number of short-lived military-themed action figure lines produced in 3/4 scale. Imitators include European Force, M P.A.C.T. by Toy Max, Remco's American Defense, and Lanard's The Corps!. Out of these, The Corps! is by far the longest-lived and actually developed its own identity midway through the 2000's.
• Bratz dolls were very popular in the early 2000s. This caused other similar tweenage aimed dolls dressed in "urban" fashion to come out. Mattel alone had My Scene, Diva Starz, and Flava. My Scene eventually became even more like Bratz as time went on, including their eyes becoming half-closed like Bratz dolls.
• The British doll line Sindy has existed since 1963. Sindy is a blonde girl but doesn't look like the America's Barbie. She was a bigger hit in Britain due to looking like a "girl next door" compared to Barbie. In the 70s she was given a Hotter and Sexier redesign to be more similar to dolls like Barbie, but that bombed. In the 80s she was given a redesign that looked a touch bit too much like Barbie, to the point where Mattel outright sued Hasbro. Sindy has since been redesigned back into being a 12-to-14 year old.
• Licca-chan was created in 1967 and is the Japanese equivalent of Barbie there, focused on a 11 year old girl.
• Mattel saw Jem and decided to reinvent Barbie as a pop-star as well. The result? Barbie And The Rockers.
• Alpacasso is a Japanese line of super-kawaii, pastel and rainbow-colored alpaca plushies, made by a company called Amuse. And while they've never been officially licensed in other countries, they're so popular in Japan that many overseas companies have already begun making their own variations. Their influences are obvious given that alpacas are a rarely used as toys, and they often have similar rainbow-colored looks. Notably, the American company Sugar Loaf, which makes toys for crane games, made a line of tie-dyed lookalikes which were popular in crane games in 2016-2017.
• Moose Toys' lines like The Trash Pack and The Grossery Gang helped revive gross out toys via blind bags for the 2010s, which other companies started to follow, such as Spin Master's Flush Force.
  • An interesting variation would be MGA Entertainment's Poopsie, which takes a whole dump of Toilet Humour and becomes probably the first one to market a brand of the gross out blind bag toy genre towards girls. Granted, it doesn't overemphasize on how "gross" it is, but it's still unicorn poop.
• Though not as well known, Nendoroid gained a competitor in the form of Cu-Poche, a similar but more poseable group of figures that came about in 2014. This also occurs in reverse with the introduction of the Nendoroid Dolls in 2018.
• Mecha Musume action figures and kits have a long history and back-and-forth competition between franchises and manufacturers, resulting in ever-evolving articulation that surpasses the quality of "normal" Ball-Jointed Dolls:
  • When Konami broke into the mecha musume market with Sky Girls, Otomedius, and Busou Shinki, Strike Witches quickly entered the market to compete with the Sky Girls.
  • When Konami stopped production of Shinki in the 2010s, Kotobukiya quickly snapped up the now-downsized toy engineers from the Busou Shinki division and let them run wild with their concepts and proposed technological improvements, resulting in the Frame Arms Girls and Megami Device that helped them carve a large slice of the plamo market share in mecha musume. Both lines continued to be modernized with new body structures and improved engineering as competitors began to surface.
  • By the later 2010s, Bandai and Sunrise decided to try and get a slice of the mecha musume pie themselves, by creating MS Girl gunpla and Figurise kits for the female cast of Gundam Build Divers and Build Fighters, in addition to acquiring more licenses to make figures for their Armor Girls Project figure series. This in turn led to Max Factory and Goodsmile acquiring licensing to make Figma and Nendoroids for other mecha musume franchises. By the early 2020s, Bandai ended up consulting Fumikane 'Humida' Shimada himself to help them develop and produce the 30 Minute Sisters, a mecha musume adaptation of their own 30 Minute Missions mecha plamo, following in the footsteps of the Frame Arms Girls by paying their creator to make something similar for them.
  • Other manufacturers quickly made their own mecha musume figures, like Genei with their MG-sized GFP figures (Phina and Mary), and Aoshima with their Macross Delta license making the Variable Fighter Girls.
  • On a related scale, Kotobukiya and Goodsmile have an escalating franchise rivalry for their Nendoroid and Cu-Poche chibi figures, with Koto picking up more Fate and Azur Lane figures in response to the Kantai Collection figures, and the Nendoroids gaining an articulated doll body in response to the increasing popularity of the 'poches.
  • Some time after Mega House introduced the tiny 1:18 chibi-proportioned Desktop Army figures, Bandai released the similarly shaped and scaled Aqua Shooters, while Kotobukiya took the already "realistic" proportioned Hexagear Governators and converted them into Frame Arms Girls Hand-Sized Class, in addition to teaming up with Mega House to not only create Frame Arms Girls-scaled Desktop Army figures, but to also make Desktop Army variants of their Frame Arms Girls.
  • Hot on the heels of the Megami Device girls, two other manufacturers quickly got licensing for the Machineca bodytype and hired Masaki Apsy to make more such girls for them: Skytube launched their mature-oriented Dark Advent series with the rugged Dragon-girl Sophia, while Goodsmile went for a more elaborately-delicate Chitocerium lineup. Third-party garage kit toy designer MUSCUTO diverted his own attentions from his personal lineup of resin mecha girl figures to create Machineca-compatible parts for customizing these girls.
  • The sudden increase in popularity of mecha musume model kits led to several other manufacturers joining the fray with various franchises of their own, like the ATK Girls, Nuke Matrix, and Aoshima with their VF Girls made under the Macross license. The doll manufacturer VOLKS (more famous for their Dollfies) also joined the competition with their Fiore series kits.
• Since it's a famous toy series, LEGO gets a lot of companies wanting its success:
  • A certain rival to LEGO known as Mega Bloks (later Mega Construx, and then Mega for the whole band; owned by Mattel) doesn't actively pretend to be LEGO as much as you'd expect, producing more distinct sets based on licensed brands that LEGO themselves never touched for some reason. In 2005, Mega Bloks did try their hand at an Alternate Company Equivalent to LEGO's BIONICLE series, called Neo Shifters. Much like BIONICLE, the Neo Shifters toys are humanoid characters that are build with unique pieces and not normal blocks, and they had a story with separate factions fighting each other. The Neo Shifters characters do have one unique gimmick going for them, though: they can roll into a ball.^note ...oh, wait, the Bohrok from BIONICLE can do that too. Then again, the ball gimmick applies to everyone, not just the villains, in Neo Shifters.
  • Hasbro tried their hand at competing with LEGO three times - once in the 2000's with a series called Built to Rule that had buildable versions of their different franchises, then with U-Build which turned games they happen to own, like Monopoly and Mouse Trap (1963), into their answer to LEGO Games, and finally, Kre-O, which has sets that can be articulated in different ways.
• Sylvanian Families has been plagued by this from the get-go. According to the Japanese Wikipedia page, Bandai Namco instigated Toei Animation to create Maple Town purely due to seeing how well the Sylvanian Families toys were selling in Japan at the time and wanting a slice of the pie. Unfortunately, because the anime was Merchandise-Driven and dictacted the direction the toys will take, mismanagement of the anime's direction caused the toyline to seize up and eventually die.
  • Sylvanian Families also had to contend with a Hong Kong clone called Baerenwald which gained popularity in certain parts of Western Europe (particularly Germany, where Mapletown did not make as much of a dent) in the late 80s due to being aggressively distributed by a certain Simba Toys.
  • Li'l Woodiez s a similar toyline that was probably launched to compete with or as an answer to Sylvanian Families in the US. They're seen as a lower costing form of this line.
  • Meanwhile, in Asia, a Korean company introduced Konggi Rabbit just after The New '10s rolled about as a thinly veiled attempt at the plush figurine market served by Sylvanian Families.
• When Teddy Ruxpin proved to be a success, some companies provided competition by making their own talking animal toys, some of which utilized cassettes. Three examples of this were Gabby Bear, a talking Mickey Mouse, and Ideal's Talking Big Bird.
• Squishmallows's explosion in popularity in The New '20s has lead to a variety of squishy pillow animal imitators cropping up. The two most notable are Ty's Squish-A-Boos line^note which is somewhat ironic given how Ty's previous line, Beanie Babies, were subject to this as mentioned above and Build-A-Bear's Skoosherz line, due to the fact that Kellytoy sued their manufacturers over copyright infringement. The lawsuit against the former company failed (though it may have contributed to Ty renaming the line to "Squishy Beanies"), while the one against the latter is still ongoing as of this writing.