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Don't Call It a Comeback The Top Five Reboots in Transformers History, by Scotty P
When something isn't working right in some way, a reboot can help set things back on to a better path. We do this with our gadgets all the time to set things straight, and more recently, large entertainment companies have been more willing than ever to restart classic franchises in order to cash in on new or lapsed opportunity for potential money. Soft, hard, full continuity reset, reboots until they were retconned out, non-reboots until they were retconned as such, that other Mainframe animation series - there have been many of these reboots and resets over the years.
Transformers is no stranger to this concept. Reboots, relaunches, and re-imaginings have allowed Transformers to persist over the years, and with each newly scanned concept or universe the world of Cybertron expands its IP empire further.
Usually.
Sometimes.
With IDW Publishing's long running Transformers comics continuity coming to an end this Fall, leading to a so-far nebulously defined reboot in 2019, inspiration struck to look back at the various times the heart of Vector Sigma has washed away the old and began anew. Take a short walk with me down memory lane as we look at the best reboots of all kinds throughout Transformers history - soft, hard, power cycled, and even some that are more "refresh" than reboot. Don't get too pedantic, I'm going to play pretty loose with the "reboot" concept's definition.
One more thing - This "top five" list is just for fun, just my opinion, and you should definitely comment by replying to this post to tell me why I'm wrong about all of it on our Energon Pub Forums!
#5 - Transformers Prime
Another way to put this first ranked entry could be "The Aligned Continuity and in particular, Transformers: Prime", but keeping the focus on Prime while acknowledging the wider Aligned Continuity feels appropriate, and somewhat similar to how Hasbro's various divisions handled things anyhow. Transformers: Prime was the focal point of a loosely-to-moderately-woven group of multimedia entries launched in 2010 with a goal of becoming a unified, overarching meta-continuity that would carry the brand for ten years if not longer. Along with Prime, several elements aimed to collectively achieve this goal: the War for Cybertron and Fall of Cybertron video games; Exodus, Exiles, and Retribution novels; Covenant of Primus and Transformers: Vault books, the Rescue Bots franchise, the follow-up Robots in Disguise animated series, and several tie-in comics. Despite these efforts, all these disparate pieces only really accomplish their goal if you're looking at their general ideas from orbit after your brain was launched into space from trying to actually patch it all together.
Despite the clear fictional problems at hand with the wider Aligned Continuity execution, Transformers: Prime itself brought a credibility to the television fiction and had a wider, more mass-market appeal than the beloved but niche Transformers: Animated and clearly kid-focused Unicron Trilogy. Using a main cast roughly the size of Beast Wars' main cast, the series was able to expand Transformers to an audience that had experienced the live action movies but was ready for something new that also remained grounded in at least some familiar, nostalgic territory. With hooks like Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as the voice of Cliffjumper (at least in the pilot, for a few minutes), Peter Cullen and Frank Welker reprising their respective Optimus Prime and Megatron roles for television, and the flash of a new cable network, "The Hub", Transformers: Prime felt like it had it all. This new multimedia onslaught looked to have the brand poised for another boom after the shocks of Revenge of the Fallen's awful experience, not to mention the late 00s economic near-collapse, had settled.
Presumably hoping to learn from the Transformers: Animated toyline's truncation due to the Revenge of the Fallen toyline (yes there were some late waves and exclusives, and yes there was more to it, just keeping things simple here), Prime's "First Edition" toys were plucked out of the pan-universal Generations lineup and released after Dark of the Moon's run in theaters. Kind of. Eventually, just ahead of the second season's premiere, a wider toyline hit the shelves and for a time, Prime was rolling with a quality TV show and a decent range of toys.
While not without its missteps, Transformers: Prime helped to bring in new fans after Revenge of the Fallen's deleterious impact on the franchise's credibility, and was an important first step towards making Transformers a franchise that had toys rather than a toy franchise that had fiction.
#4 - Transformers: Armada
In the 90s, there was Beast Wars, and it was good. Then there was Beast Machines, and it was good, mostly, but also a little weird and the toys were a mess. Then there was Transtech, and it was not.
With fans fatigued from running with the beasts, and Hasbro looking to set longer term plans in motion to really take Transformers back into the pop-culture A-list, time was of the essence. A new approach to get kids to like Transformers again was needed, and a new team was assembled from the ashes of the axed Kenner division (there's more to it, again, keeping things simple), ready to truly re-launch Transformers in earnest for the first time. They made some redecos of Takara's "Car Robots" Transformers line, called it "Robots in Disguise", and this filled some space on retail shelves for awhile while they got ready for a new battle.
With a new cartoon receiving a hyped-up release in Cartoon Network's popular "Toonami" block, a comic book from hip retro-cool licensed publisher Dreamwave, and a slew of new toys, Transformers: Armada had arrived to transform your summer of 2002. Mini-Cons were here - could you catch 'em all?
Disaffected young adults that had grown up with Generation 1 and Beast Wars were initially not pleased, for the most part. While some would come around (after some time coping with the fact that they were getting older), kids loved Armada and the toys were a runaway success, to the point where the line was padded out with Beast Wars repaints and multi-packs of previous releases with Mini-Cons strapped along to meet retailer and consumer demand. A Playstation 2 video game padded out the multimedia marketing, and Transformers was beginning to find some success again after another short flirtation with obscurity.
Armada's success not only spawned a sequel in Energon and a spiritual sequel to that in Cybertron, but it proved that classic ideas of the Autobots and Decepticons could be merged with new characters and myths to successfully market to both old and new fans. These lessons would be applied earnestly and soon into the future, leading to Transformers' second era of cultural phenomenon - but this is a ranked list, and sadly, this segue won't quite work unless you skip the next entry (don't!)
#3 - IDW Publishing's "Phase 2" Line art by Nick Roche, colors by Josh Burcham
The one true "soft reboot" on this list was kicked off by the one-shot comic book from IDW Publishing, "The Death of Optimus Prime", released in late December of 2011. Picking up after the pretty good ending to the pretty bad Transformers "Ongoing" run of 2010 and 2011, this proved to be one hell of a hook for a jumping on point. Its premise is simple: the Autobot vs Decepticon war is over - now what?
The "what" proved to be two ongoing series that would run from January 2012 to September 2016 in what is quickly becoming known as the "golden age" of Transformers comics. John Barber's Robots in Disguise (later just Transformers) and James Roberts' More Than Meets The Eye comprised the core of a stretch of fiction that would treat Transformers like people while treating its readers like adults. While lighter on action than other eras of comics, plenty is still to be had as our heroes face down Decepticon remnants, their own bad decisions, not-yet-dispelled evils from another dimension, ancient Cybertronian relics and their masters, corrupted Autobot leadership, galactic organizations, the hazards of romance, and especially in the case of Megatron, themselves. Contributions of other writers such as Mairghread Scott and Nick Roche helped flesh out the universe and tie up other loose ends while creating new questions, and the artistic talents of several veteran and newcomer pencilers, inkers, colorists, letterers, and editors shone through the cloud of "licensed toy property book" like the brightest Spark on Cybertron.
Line art by Andrew Griffith, colors by Priscilla Tramontano
The casts were composed of many key "Generation One" characters, of course, but many characters that never got a chance to truly be defined finally had their time to shine. Whirl, Needlenose, Chromia, Rewind, Swerve, Tailgate, and almost countless others went from G1 afterthoughts to memorable, well defined, actual characters that you can describe in more than one sentence if asked. New characters came in as well and made huge impacts, with the likes of Rung, the DJD, Windblade, and Aileron - also among a plethora of others - to take what had been an almost exclusively "G1" lineup and expand it in a significant way. Couple this with the introduction of characters from across the Transformers lore, enabled by a colony concept similar to the various planets in Transformers: Cybertron, and the universe feels like one in where any Transformers character from any point in history could show up and fit in without being awkwardly out of place.
Perhaps the biggest contribution of this era is how it expanded the representation of people expressed through the robot characters in ways that were long overdue. In addition to the intrinsic value of doing this, praise is in order for how the authors and artists approached this new strategy of inclusion in a way that never felt pandering, belittling, or disrespectful, but was instead natural, empathetic, and uplifting. The world and its people are diverse and express themselves and their experiences in infinite ways, and IDW's Phase 2 books will remind you that it's possible for Transformers to do the same. The brand can tell stories that matter to us humans on a level that isn't boiled down to robots punching, shooting, and kicking one another while sometimes turning into cars, trucks, planes, and guns. While that's not a new concept, Phase 2 uses that as a paradigm and does so effectively while still delivering plenty of action and sci-fi/mecha goodness to please its base of longtime Transformers fans.
Line art by Alex Milne, colors by Joana Lafuente
It was truly a special time in Transformers fiction, and as its follow-up "Hasbro Universe" phase winds down, I can say that it is and will be missed dearly.
#2 - Transformers (2007)
Some fans love Michael Bay's take on the Transformers, and the five movies that comprise a decade-spanning chapter of the brand's history. Others loathe them, while others can appreciate them from a distance while pointing out their positives and rightly pointing out their less savory, regrettable elements. This is not about that. This is about the summer of 2007, and how the Transformers ascended to successful heights not seen since the 80s.
We all remember our first car and our first fling. My first car was a hand-me-down [redacted because I think this is a bank security question] that I wrecked and you don't need to know about the other thing. The 2007 version of Spike "Shia LeBeouf" Witwicky had a first car that was a 1977 Camaro that was actually Bumblebee and became a 2007 Camaro after being insulted by his first fling, Megan Fox. One of these things is much more glamorous and fun than the other, and this is one of the reasons that movies are cooler than real life.
No one was really sure if Transformers could work on the big screen, and early pre-release hype was tepid at best - no thanks to your pals here at Seibertron.com and producer Don Murphy, but that's another story. Then the trailers hit and excitement built a little, but then the movie premiered at Botcon 2007, was widely released shortly thereafter, and while critically panned as expected the movie was actually really fun to watch and became a surprise mega-hit of a summer blockbuster. The toys started to fly off the shelves, and the little VW beetle from G1 was now a cool modern sports car that you couldn't find a toy of for about two months - and some say we're still paying for that now. That aside, it did make Bumblebee a true Transformers A-lister again after his lengthy absence from the franchise. Bumblebee's rediscovered appeal helped the movie, and the movie helped its related toy line find huge success, to the point where the line was padded out with Cybertron repaints and reissues of previous mold releases with new paint decos strapped along to meet retailer and consumer demand. Sound familiar? Probably so, but Armada had nothing on this, for as good as that was.
Love it or hate it, there's no denying that 2007's Transformers movie took our favorite Cybertronians and again made them a phenomenon the likes of which they hadn't been for 20+ years. It's hard to imagine this success being repeated, but then again, there was a point where it was hard to imagine Transformers even being around to get to this point. If only something had been around to maximize its potential...
#1 - Beast Wars
As the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arrived in the late 1980s to nunchuck G1 into a shallow grave filled with pizza cheese, Hasbro had to re-think how to continue with Transformers. They released the Action Masters, and it is generally agreed that this was a very bad idea. After hiding away in Europe for a couple years with their totally-radical-awesome toys like Overlord and the Motorvators, Generation 2 arrived to herald a renaissance and revival of the great Transformers brand!
Generation 2 also arrived just in time to be almost completely ignored by its target demographic because of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers smashing any momentum it could have hoped to have, like a Putty Patrol dude in season 2 when they just had to hit the big obvious "P" on their chests, or G2 Slingshot anytime after the year 2000 when you just had to move it in any way whatsoever or breathe on it funny. Don't tell me I'm wrong, I was in the third grade when G2 was released. No one cared about G2 in grades 1-5 except me. Transformers would have to again go live on a farm in the Midwest for awhile, which is probably where all the G2 Technobots were buried by your uncle as he made his way to Washington to go work for Nintendo.
Then in 1996, like a vast, predatory bird, nature did something unnatural. Nature lied...
They were robots in disguise! Gone were the Autobots and Decepticons, now there were the Maximals and Predacons. Not those Predacons, new ones with all sorts of crazy new forms and kid-appeal characters that changed into cuddly critters like pillbugs and octopuses and half-lionfish-half-bee-half-mans. It was awesome.
With extremely articulate (for the time) figures even at the most basic price point thanks to ball jointed hips, knees, elbows, shoulders, and more, and with a wide range of transformation difficulty scaling from one step up to "I'm still not done with Tripredacus mom, just another minute!", Beast Wars was the first truly successful "reboot" for the Transformers. Without it, this list probably wouldn't exist - both literally and figuratively. These remarkable toys had staying power, and were truly doing things both new and timely. Extreme reimaginings of classic ideas? Check. Scribbly packaging font? Check. A subline with vacuum metal chrome? Check. Beast Wars' toys were a microcosm of the 90s and what it took to reinvent an old property for a new era, while still holding up in many ways to "modern" standards.
Also incredibly timely was the accompanying television show. An entire kids' show, made with computer graphics, released on a weekly schedule was proof positive that the future had arrived. The small cast led to character driven stories, and while the first season can drag in places, go ask a kid catching just the loose episode here or there in 1997 if they cared. You can't so I'll answer: they didn't, I was there. The show was a hit and more than a few of my peers at the middle school held it as a guilty pleasure. While it looks worse every year thanks to advances in technology, and even in its time couldn't hold a candle to big-budget movies like Toy Story or A Bug's Life, it still blew away anything on a Playstation, Saturn, or N64 on the polygonal 3D playing field. The show may also lead some younger fans to believe Beast Wars isn't a reboot at all, with it technically falling into the Generation 1 fictional continuity! However, this wrinkle is the only facet of Beast Wars that wasn't a completely fresh start, and one has to wonder if such a wild departure would ever work today considering the constant flashpoints of toxic, social media driven, hot-take and hate-click fueled attention seeking behaviors that sometimes arise when anything dares to flip an established fictional property on its head. Regardless, quality can overcome even the most apprehensive of fanbases, and in the case of Beast Wars' show the fact that it truly was good helped immensely, leading to two additional seasons after the initial run and the Beast Machines follow-up, plus a lengthy syndication run in early mornings that lasted into the early 2000s.
The other thing that lasted into the early 2000s? The toyline, with a Walmart exclusive being released in 2001 - though 2014's Strafe themed repaint of Terrorsaur marks the last use of any of the original toolings, for now.
With Beast Wars nostalgia starting to crest, and Masterpiece toys of icons like Dinobot and Megatron just released or on the horizon, it can't be denied that Beast Wars truly saved the brand from its early 90s ultimate doom countdown to extinction (foil gatefold variant cover, 1:700 copy retailer incentive available with the order of 4,000 copies of The Death of Superman.) While there are still a few "Trukk not Munky" holdouts, even most of them have at least softened to the point of being able to recognize Beast Wars' contributions to Transformers. The rest... is silence.
Honorable Mentions
All Hail Megatron Line art by Guido Guidi, colors by Josh Burcham
You may be thinking to yourself, "wait, was it a reboot!?" No, but it sure felt like it for a small stretch of time in mid-late 2008! This was a shot in the arm that kept the franchise going in comic form, and while the immediate aftermath wasn't great, eventually this led IDW's Transfomers story out of the meandering woods of the Dead Universe and into the great heights of Phase 2.
Machine Wars: Termination Line art by Hidetsugu Yoshioka, colors by Evan Gauntt
Technically this isn't a reboot, but instead a story within the G1-derivative Wings Universe from Fun Publications. Let's be honest though, it's a Machine Wars reboot. And it's very fun! If you didn't read the comic that came with your Botcon 2013 set, what are you waiting for?
This concludes our look at "reboots" of all kinds in Transformers, and the superlatives of the bunch. Do you think I missed anything? Transformers: Animated fans probably do, but they're wrong and it's ok - and they can tell me why I'm wrong by replying to this post!
The Other Truly Thrilling 30 Sunbow's Transformers Cartoon Series Turns 30
The day is Monday, September 17th, 1984. The 18th Prime Minister of Canada, Brian Mulroney was sworn in, and Reggie Jackson of the California Angels hit his 500th major league home run, becoming only the 13th person at that time to have done so. Not a very exciting day for most, but for some, this would be a day forever remembered.
You're going to see and be able to read a lot of articles today on the internet, specifically in the Transformers Fans' corner of it, and these will be about a certain birthday happening today. This is one of those articles. You're going to read about perspectives from people that were, with a fairly good chance of likelihood, about 5 to 7 years old on that date, who were captured by the premiere of a new cartoon series for the fall season called "The Transformers" on a Monday morning or afternoon. They'll talk very factually and sequentially about the history of the show and where it came from. They'll write well and give good reference for history down the road. This is not entirely one of those articles.
First, some of that base history but not too much, just to give some background. Marvel Comics' run of Transformers books had started in May, 1984, and had seen two published issues with a third to be shortly on the way in October. This was, of course, one channel through which to support the newly imported, rebranded toyline of the same name. The other was a joint production between Marvel Productions and Griffin Bacal's Sunbow Productions, a cartoon series designed to capture the attention of the children in Reagan's America with lots of action, little plot or continuity, and over the top, fun characterizations of the toys they could go have their parents buy on the local store shelves.
It was a simpler, peaceful time, when children ran through quiet streets with gumdrop smiles and wealth trickled down to the middle class and, and, um, wait a minute. I wasn't born yet. What the hell am I writing about?
This is not your typical retrospective, because it can't be. I wasn't born until almost a year after this cartoon premiered. I can't pretend to know what it was like when it came out. Suffice it to say, by the time I was aware of what a Transformer was and could follow along with any sort of cartoon or comic, the show was meandering the random scheduling of syndication and the toyline's only fictional support was in the form of the latter quarter of the Marvel comic run. So how on earth would someone that only hit the rough target age for "The Transformers" in 1990 fall in love with the franchise on a level so deep that close to his own 30th birthday, he still spends countless hours collecting toys, absorbing fiction, and writing long form articles about the brand? How could this happen when things like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were new, hip, and vying for attention? The answer's quite simple: home video.
Through the magic of FHE's home video releases, over and over again even children like me born well in the middle of the heyday of The Transformers' success could relive the spectacle of 24 minute long toy advertisements. Given the rushed production schedule, the efforts of now legendary (within our hobby, at least) names such as Flint Dille, David Wise, Wally Burr, George Bloom, Floro Dery, Peter Cullen, Frank Welker, and countless other voice actors and production crew will never be forgotten by, well, probably anyone reading this site and almost definitely anyone bothering to read this article!
That picture perfect low-res reproduction, right in your own home.
The first season enjoyed by so many through either broadcast or VHS gave us some of the most memorable and joyful characterizations of fan favorites such as Optimus Prime, Megatron, Starscream, Ironhide, Bumblebee, Soundwave, Grimlock, the Constructicons, and so many others. For a very young child like what I was at the time, with undeveloped reading skills, these characterizations from the original animated cartoon will always stand out as the original and archetypical examples of those characters within my memory and subconscious.
Right, wrong, or both, my brain instantly says "Rumble" because of the cartoon.
Of course, the show went on for a good while and eventually would come the event that changed everything, at least at the time. This event is also a fond VHS memory, and yes, it's the first Transformers Movie released in 1986.
Having a copy of this amazing work only brought my interest in Transformers to a fever pitch, as between it, VHS copies of nearly all of season one, the continuing toy line, and the comic I had just begun to be able to understand, a fan for life was born. Regardless of your path, or what kind of fan you may be today, some significance can be found by tracing back to 30 years ago today.
Transformers, of course, has continued on persistently in some new animated form ever since, barring the time from 1988 through the start of Beast Wars in 1996 where only repackaged episodes of the original show were still used for various purposes. Even these new evolutions of the brand borrow heavily in spirit from the original show, with characters reusing lines, traits, and sometimes even actual voice actors.
Treacherous, has a crown, flies, yep. It's Starscream.
Even now if we look ahead, 2015 will bring us yet another cartoon series and the second one to be titled "Robots in Disguise", and this will surely be the crux of the franchise's focus next year. Transformers has taken many branching paths and become a multimedia force in Hasbro's brand stable, with never ending toy releases, ongoing comics, frequent video game releases, and of course live action movies. Despite all that, the brand persists on as big and as well as it does because of the cartoons and their influence. Television is a powerful medium, and it's unlikely that The Transformers will ever divorce itself from that medium for very long every again.
I'd be remiss to not also remember some of the fantastic voice contributors to the original cartoon that we've lost over the years, here on a day where we learned the sad news that Buster Jones, the iconic voice of Blaster, is no longer with us. Here's to also remembering the good times brought to us all by such amazing artists as Chris Latta, Scatman Crothers, Casey Kasem, Orson Welles, and others that I may have forgotten.
The legacy of the first Transformers cartoon is undeniable. Hopefully in another 30 years, I'll be back to write another one of these as a crotchety old man, still surrounded by rotting 60 year old plastic toys.
Tell your story in the comment thread below. Why did you, and why do you still, enjoy the original cartoon? Maybe you hate it, that's ok too. Either way, there's no denying the impact it has had, which must have been so unimaginable 30 years ago to the day.
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