I thought about characters from toy companies. The key company is obviously going to be Hasbro which developed both the GI Joe and Transformers lines. Mattel has Hotwheels (for which it created characters for its own line of television shows), but that mostly focuses on the cars. Lego has Bionicle whose characters are pretty interesting. Bandai makes toys based on Japanese super sentai shows. Then again, apparently Square Enix is making its own toys. I'm far from reaching a decision.