I dunno, that's kind of a Tron moment. The toys and cartoon both supported each other, according to that article the toys were just released the christmas before the show began airing...
(Elaboration - There was a trivia question on a video games tv show a while back that asked what the first game based on a film was, which was apparently Batman, but I insisted it was Tron. Aparrently, Tron doesn't count because the movie & game were based on each other and released together, whereas Batman was literally based on the film.)
... whereas Takara were doing the TF toyline since 1980, and it was only in 1984 that Hasbro bought the rights to them and made a cartoon around them. So the toys definately came first, there.