Never-before-seen Transformers and GI Joe Concept Material

Monday, January 1st, 2024 11:17PM CST

Category: Cartoon News
Posted by: Sabrblade Views: 98,356

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A few days ago, the Facebook pages for both BotCon and their soon-to-be-former merchandise partner Night Shining, Inc. posted never-before-seen concept material from years past.

The first is a pitch that was made by Fun Publications back in 2010 for a sort of Rescue Bots type spinoff of G.I. Joe, called "Adventure Team", with art provided by Evan Gauntt.

An internal pitch that was made to Hasbro back in the mid 2010’s. With the brand having direction issues, the current team at Night Shining (who use to work for the official G.I.Joe licensee) made this pitch. It brought together 1970’s Adventure Team G.I. Joe with the concept of the 1980’s ARAH. This concept was pitched as a mix of appeal to the Rescue Bots and Transformers Prime audience. Basically, what cartoons use to be in the 80’s!

Obviously it was not used by Hasbro, but what do you think? Would something like this have been a hit? A young Cobra Commander, Destro, and Baroness? Future G.I. Joe’s making weekly guest appearances? Guess we’ll never know. (And never knowing is… the other half of the battle?)

The amazing art for the pitch was done by Evan ZeroMayhem

Transformers News: Rare, never-before-seen concept material from years past

The second is the earliest concept PDF for what would ultimately become Transformers: Prime, laying out the earliest intentions and goals for what fans would term the "Aligned Continuity", unifying video games, novels, comics, cartoons, packaging blurbs, and web content into one conglomerated universe.

At this point, the movies and G1 were still the biggest influences. Animated's influence had not yet been added to the mix, while Revenge of the Fallen was the most recent source of influence.

Much of the artwork in this pitch was made for the "Binder of Revelation", the production bible that served as the creative backbone of the Aligned Continuity. While none of these designs actually made it into the final version of Transformers: Prime, several of these pieces made it into the books Transformers: The Ultimate Pop-Up Universe and Transformers: The Covenant of Primus.

NEVER BEFORE SEEN concepts for the series Transformers: Prime! (August 2009 WIP - Not Final)

It’s been 13 years since Transformers Prime debuted. For better or worse, this franchise was the series intent on transitioning the characters from the big screen to the small.

Like many media projects, the initial idea is often somewhat to quite different than what is finally seen on the screen.

So, with that seems now is the perfect time to show off a little something we have been holding on to for the last 14 years - The original official working pdf pitch for what would eventually be known as Transformers: Prime. The series had a working title of ‘Robots in Disguise’ and as you will see, the design and character selection was initially much more aligned with the live action movies.

So take a look! We are showing off around 20 pages of the pdf here. Some amazing never before seen looks at the Prime series!

Credit(s): See article for all sources

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Re: Never-before-seen Transformers and GI Joe Concept Material (2174852)
Posted by Chriphord on January 2nd, 2024 @ 12:23am CST

That version of Megatron was featured in the Covenant of Primus. I don’t think I’ve seen that design used elsewhere, but I could be wrong.

Re: Never-before-seen Transformers and GI Joe Concept Material (2174853)
Posted by Sabrblade on January 2nd, 2024 @ 12:26am CST

Chriphord wrote:That version of Megatron was featured in the Covenant of Primus. I don’t think I’ve seen that design used elsewhere, but I could be wrong.

Sabrblade wrote:Much of the artwork in this pitch was made for the "Binder of Revelation", the production bible that served as the creative backbone of the Aligned Continuity. While none of these designs actually made it into the final version of Transformers: Prime, several of these pieces made it into the books Transformers: The Ultimate Pop-Up Universe and Transformers: The Covenant of Primus.

Re: Never-before-seen Transformers and GI Joe Concept Material (2174854)
Posted by Chriphord on January 2nd, 2024 @ 12:42am CST

Sabrblade wrote:
Chriphord wrote:That version of Megatron was featured in the Covenant of Primus. I don’t think I’ve seen that design used elsewhere, but I could be wrong.
Sabrblade wrote:Much of the artwork in this pitch was made for the "Binder of Revelation", the production bible that served as the creative backbone of the Aligned Continuity. While none of these designs actually made it into the final version of Transformers: Prime, several of these pieces made it into the books Transformers: The Ultimate Pop-Up Universe and Transformers: The Covenant of Primus.

Welp. That's what I get for being illiterate.

Re: Never-before-seen Transformers and GI Joe Concept Material (2174858)
Posted by ScottyP on January 2nd, 2024 @ 7:43am CST

The orange drill thing gives some Functionist universe fake-alt-mode Rung vibes. Almost definitely coincidental - orange drill/drilltank things aren't exactly uncommon - but still neat.

Love stuff like this. Aligned was a mess but it clearly started from a good place.

Re: Never-before-seen Transformers and GI Joe Concept Material (2174861)
Posted by Emerje on January 2nd, 2024 @ 9:41am CST

I wonder how far these designs got in toy form? Normally I would guess this was too early for that, but considering we ended up getting that exact Ironhide design in the Prime toy line there may be others. Heck, maybe all of the figures that were made without appearing in the cartoon came from this early draft.

Also I didn't know War for Cybertron was originally simply going to be called "Transformers Cybertron". Probably for the best that they changed that to avoid confusion, especially after the naming we got in the Armada game for PS2 simply being called "Transformers".

Emerje

Re: Never-before-seen Transformers and GI Joe Concept Material (2174862)
Posted by TulioDude on January 2nd, 2024 @ 10:46am CST

This looks sick! :michaelbay:

Day 1462 of waiting for Transformers Armada Masterpiece news.

Re: Never-before-seen Transformers and GI Joe Concept Material (2174866)
Posted by Sabrblade on January 2nd, 2024 @ 11:48am CST

Emerje wrote:I wonder how far these designs got in toy form? Normally I would guess this was too early for that, but considering we ended up getting that exact Ironhide design in the Prime toy line there may be others. Heck, maybe all of the figures that were made without appearing in the cartoon came from this early draft.

Ironhide was the only one of these that made it that far because he was one of four molds released in the Prime toyline that were originally meant to be part of a toyline for the Chinese MMO game that never/barely ever got released. The other three were Deluxe Rumble, Voyager Thundertron, and Voyager Ultra Magnus (the unique mold one, not the Prime retool we later got in Beast Hunters). Though, we ended up getting Deluxe Ironhide as Kup instead.

Per these Tweets:

Crazy ass moments in Transformers History wrote:the designers of the Prime toyline, not knowing Ultra Magnus would appear in the 3rd season of the show, gave him an original design and made two toys of it.

Magnus ended up appearing in the show with a modified Optimus CGI model instead to save costs. (2012-2013)

wadapan wrote:this is an even crazier ass moment in TF history than presented here! The Magnus design and the three other non-show molds were, iirc, designed for that Chinese MMO...? The intended Ironhide and Red Rumble decos for the Deluxe molds never saw US release

wadapan wrote:(trivia time) if you look at the Prime toyline (pre-Beast Hunters), you'll notice there's only four molds not based on show characters: Ironhide, Rumble, Ultra Magnus (the weird one), and Thundertron. These were intended for a subline tying into (iirc) https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Transformers_Online_(2012_video_game)

Crazy ass moments in Transformers History wrote:you gotta get me a source on this, cos this is the first i'm ever hearing of this

wadapan wrote:I heard about it on Discord from @Jalaguy, who cited this now-defunct Allspark thread by Monzo: https://web.archive.org/web/20131105080940/https://www.allspark.com/forums/topic/96540-monzos-mega-hasbro-customer-service-listing-breakdown/
(fun fact, that appears to be how we learned the identity of the cancelled Bot Shots ROM too!)

Joe Kyde wrote:It’s more or less accurate.

Re: Never-before-seen Transformers and GI Joe Concept Material (2174867)
Posted by truegrit on January 2nd, 2024 @ 11:50am CST

I don't love the green, but I'm still super impressed at how that Ratchet manages to merge the G1 cartoon/Bayverse/actual G1 toy into one figure. Big props to whoever decided to have the windshield cover the face, and also makes sense for his role as a medic, kind of like a mask/sneeze guard

Re: Never-before-seen Transformers and GI Joe Concept Material (2174868)
Posted by Brokebot on January 2nd, 2024 @ 12:11pm CST

That "Adventure Team" logo needs more workshopping. It's pretty much identical to the AT Trail logo used by the National Park Service.

Re: Never-before-seen Transformers and GI Joe Concept Material (2174877)
Posted by Dino-Snarl on January 2nd, 2024 @ 5:04pm CST

Quite interesting to see.

Re: Never-before-seen Transformers and GI Joe Concept Material (2174879)
Posted by Sabrblade on January 2nd, 2024 @ 5:29pm CST

A point of clarification regarding the Aligned material. Aaron Archer has clarified that these date back more to 2007, around the time of the first live-action movie, rather than August 2009 as the original Facebook post states. This matches up with previous statements that initial work on the Aligned continuity first began in 2007 after the initial success of that first movie.

Re: Never-before-seen Transformers and GI Joe Concept Material (2174881)
Posted by Hero Alpha on January 2nd, 2024 @ 8:02pm CST

I have always loved that Optimus from the Binder or Covenant Primus. One of the best looks he has had, wish they would use it.

Re: Never-before-seen Transformers and GI Joe Concept Material (2174891)
Posted by ScottyP on January 3rd, 2024 @ 10:34am CST

Brokebot wrote:That "Adventure Team" logo needs more workshopping. It's pretty much identical to the AT Trail logo used by the National Park Service.

Would that make Skullgrin their rival?

That logo also makes me think of the A-Team because of the colors. It looks like the van, somehow.

Re: Never-before-seen Transformers and GI Joe Concept Material (2175151)
Posted by #1 Signal Lancer fan on January 9th, 2024 @ 2:47pm CST

I really like the early designs for Megatron and Starscream, I love the idea of Prime having different trailers for different power-ups.

Interesting that Bulkhead was initially Ironhide before Animated introduced the character.

I like that they changed the designs for Bumblebee, Soundwave, and Ratchet.